Security at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner has been criticized by an attendee who says more could have been done to prevent the shooting.
A gunman stormed a security checkpoint outside the White House Correspondents’ Dinner at the Washington Hilton on April 26, 2026, forcing President Trump and his party to evacuate the head table in a chaotic attack that left the shooter dead at the scene.
CNN journalist Wolf Blitzer witnessed the violence firsthand. “All of a sudden, I start hearing gunshots in the hall right near me,” Blitzer said. “The next thing I knew, a police officer threw me to the ground and was on top of me.” Blitzer described hearing approximately six shots and characterized the scene as “very scary” and “so worrisome,” noting the gunman “had a major weapon.”
Trump, in a press conference given just hours after the shooting, claimed the attack proved the necessity of his White House ballroom project, stating: “It’s drone-proof. It’s bulletproof. We need the ballroom. That’s why the Secret Service, why the military, they’re demanding it.”
The Daily Beast executive editor Hugh Dougherty criticized the handling of security at the Hilton Hotel and suggested that more could have been done to vet those who were entering and exiting the building on the day of the shooting.
Dougherty wrote, “It does not take a security expert to unravel the layers of failure that happened at a Washington, D.C. hotel on Saturday night.
“How on earth could someone with a disassembled long gun check into a room at a hotel where the president was going to speak? I can answer that: Nobody even looked at my luggage on Friday afternoon. Worse, my colleague arrived on Saturday at 5 p.m. Nobody looked at his luggage either: No magnetometers, no hand checks, no I.D. checks. Nothing.
“How on earth could that person get downstairs and assemble a long gun? I can answer that too. I moved up and down from Floor 10 all day. Nobody ever stopped me and asked me anything.
“I have never shown my I.D., except to the clerk who checked me in; I have never been searched or frisked when I checked in, or moved in and out of the hotel. To get down from my room to the dinner, I simply flashed my ticket. It could have been a photocopy.
“The only time I went past a checkpoint was at the same magnetometers that Cole Allen, 31, sprinted past with his gun. Another colleague was outside; I texted them a copy of their ticket. That allowed them to get into the hotel as far as those same magnetometers, entirely unchecked. How on earth could that be considered safe?”
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