One guest at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on Saturday night was spotted calmly enjoying his meal as others fled and ducked for cover following an explosion of gunfire.
Senior Hollywood agent Michael Glantz went viral after footage of him sitting at his table eating salad amid the panic began circulating online.
Glantz, of Creative Artists Agency, can be seen in the foreground of a livestream of the event, a lone figure at a large table, enjoying his food.
The shooting interrupted the event just after guests were served their appetizers, a spring-appropriate salad of fresh peas and burrata.
As Secret Service agents confronted the alleged gunman, 31-year-old Cole Tomas Allen, at a security checkpoint outside the Washington Hilton’s ballroom, panic began to spread inside.
Guests began diving for cover and, according to UFC CEO and Trump ally Dana White, security forces rushed into the room, telling everyone to get down.
“It started getting noisy, tables getting flipped over, you’ve got guys running in with guns, and they were screaming, ‘Get down,’” he said.
Glantz was unmoved. The footage shows an officer decked out with a huge gun standing guard from behind the top table, as he takes his time eating, seemingly unperturbed.
Glantz told TMZ he felt safe and it was “not every day you see something like that go down,” and he wanted to watch everything unfold.
A clip of Glantz’s carefree eating was posted on X, where it quickly gathered steam and piqued users’ curiosity, with one asking Grok, “Who is this man?”
Glantz was forced to correct the record after Grok identified him as President Trump’s tough-talking defense secretary.
“I promise you, I am not Pete Hegseth,” he responded.
“A very Chill man, I didn’t see him flinch for a sec, didn’t duck, didn’t even put his fork down and while the Secret Service scrambled and everyone else hit the floor, he just kept eating like the moment was someone else’s problem and he was vindicated in the end. Absolute legend,” one user replied.
“I guarantee you that if the chef were to see this video, he or she would consider it the greatest compliment ever,” another added.
Other users began chiming in with their own contributions, finding dinner-goers whose priority remained, well, dinner.
And perhaps some liquid courage.
One reply was a video of a man who appears to be Daily Mail political reporter Charlie Spiering helping himself to a fresh glass of red wine after the initial danger of the moment had passed.
X users didn’t fault him, or the group they spied gathering up whole bottles to take with them.
