At 8.34 p.m. on Saturday night, just seconds after the pop-pop-pop-pop-pop of shots that seemed to come from directly behind me, I pressed record on my iPhone. The video is shaky because I was down on the floor, pointing my phone up. But the crash of plates and glasses as people dived to the ground, and the repeated shouts of “get down” are unmistakeable.
Then I can hear my own voice. “It’s a stunt,” I say more than once to my colleague Nico Hines, who was on the floor beside me. “It’s a stunt.”
It’s now more than 36 hours since a man armed with a shotgun ran past a security barrier, towards the Washington Hilton ballroom where President Donald Trump, much of the entire line of succession, many more of his senior aides, and 2,500 journalists, senators, congressmen, MAGA influencers, media executives, husbands, wives, dates, students whose work was to be honored, and scores of hotel staff, were gathered.
Cole Tomas Allen, the alleged shooter, did not get into the room, but he was perilously close before he was brought down.
In its immediate aftermath, I wrote about the jaw-dropping security blunder I had literally walked into: Allen had slept in the room next to mine the night before. He had allegedly brought his shotgun, handgun, and knives into the hotel unchecked. He wrote his manifesto on the other side of the wall from me in his room, 10237.
The responses from the rest of America have been very similar to my initial reaction: This did not seem real.
After I began to report on the events, one disturbed poster on X suggested I was an accomplice. Another man emailed to challenge a detail that I had written, that I saw agents with “fingers on triggers.” Even when I sent a photo I had taken, which made clear where their fingers were, he refused to believe me.
I’ve been accused of being in the pay of Trump, or being part of a Democratic hoax, called a “dupe,” and told I’m part of a “psy-op.”
A passenger on the train from D.C. to New York on Sunday approached Nico, the colleague who had been crouched beside me in the ballroom, and whispered that she thought the whole thing was a hoax.
One word dominates the responses: “Staged.”
It is now impossible to ignore the fact that tens of millions of people—perhaps even more—do not believe what happened in the Washington Hilton was either real, or true. Even Trump himself has been forced to address it, angrily, on 60 Minutes.
That is why I want to say: I get it. I said it myself, just seconds after the shots were fired. And there are lots of ways in which—at first glance—what happened at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner seems impossible to believe could be real.
To believe that the WHCA shooting was real, you have to believe that:
A man can waltz into a hotel with a shotgun and ammunition, and other weapons, a day before the president and two-thirds of the line of succession are known to be coming to dinner;
The man can sprint past Secret Service-controlled magnetometers before he is stopped;
Multiple shots are fired but nobody, including the shotgun-wielding shooter, is wounded;
The president continues to take part in a routine with Oz the Mentalist while people shout “get down,” and plates crash to the ground;
JD Vance—not Trump—is taken first from the stage, and the president apparently either falls, or stops to inspect what is going on;
Law enforcement have so little clue about what is going on that about an hour after Trump and his cabinet have fled, an announcement is made, “Could any members of Congress come to the stage?” while officers wander the tables, asking if anyone has seen representatives or senators;
The president musters a press conference, laughs and jokes at what has happened, and his base—in apparently perfect lockstep—amplifies his demand for a ballroom, all within two and a half hours of the shooting;
The Secret Service is revealed to have given the event a lower security classification than similar events where a president and much of the line of succession are in one place, even though it is taking place in a hotel where a president was previously almost assassinated.
That is not even an exhaustive list of what it takes to believe that the WHCA shooting was real. It does not cover the outlandish facts that Karoline Leavitt claimed “shots will be fired,” just before they literally were; that some guests kept eating while others sheltered on the floor; that cabinet members slowly trailed out in the same direction as the shooting had been; that Oz the Mentalist went to the microphone and said the program would resume; and how members of the media elite appeared to keep chatting and drinking in the ballroom after the shooting for well over an hour?
And to those asking me after the article was first published why I thought it was a stunt in the moment, rather than after, because it seemed emotionally true: This is the sort of thing Trump does. Maybe some fake gunfire to troll the mainstream media.
That all seems like a compelling case that something is not right—and it comes after the attempted assassination in Butler, Pennsylvania, in July 2024, which people in MAGA now feel they need to ask questions about, and whisper the word “staged.” Any discussion on Butler now centers around the strange lack of scarring on Trump’s allegedly wounded ear, and not the dead father in the crowd behind Trump.
It will be impossible to prove to some people that what happened was true, and not staged.
And yet, the more I thought about what I’d seen and heard, and more importantly, the more that I and my colleagues reported on what happened, spoke to multiple sources, researched the scene, and learned more facts, the more this “staged” narrative ceased to make sense.
No stunt would be so sloppy, amateurish, and chaotic. No stunt would leave Trump and those around him looking weak, old, and—some of them—terrified. No stunt orchestrated by Trump insiders would end in backbiting and recrimination inside his inner circle.
The Secret Service has for decades dealt with threats and attempts to assassinate current and former presidents. John F. Kennedy was assassinated; Ronald Reagan came very close at the same hotel; Gerald Ford was targeted twice inside 17 days; a MAGA pipe-bomber is serving decades in prison for sending devices to Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. Nobody suggests they were “staged;” they argue over the truth about Kennedy’s death, not that it was entirely faked.
When the pop-pop-pop-pop-pop was heard, the slow realization rippled from the back of the room to the front that gunshots had been fired. I was on the ground before people at the sides.
On the stage, television footage shows the awkward removal of Trump, a 79-year-old man. If this was a stunt he masterminded, why would he want to look old, stumbling and weak?
In the well of the ballroom, it seemed like an eternity as security details rushed towards their protectees.
No staged event would see agents wildly jump from table to table to grab men in their 60s and 70s.
No stunt would be so weird. If this was a stunt, would Karoline Leavitt be posting crass red carpet photos from before it?
And as those cabinet officials and others were rushed up the center of the ballroom, towards where the shots had come from, I could see their faces. They were not game faces. Some of them looked horrified, and terrified.
It was hardly to Trump’s advantage to see his strongman cabinet from central casting looking confused, and rushed out of a ballroom in blurry pictures.
Some the things which have fueled conspiracy thinking are easily explained, thanks to our, and other people’s reporting. Allen was naked and wrapped in tin foil because it is protocol to strip someone naked in case he is armed with a suicide device. The foil is because he was naked and needed covered; we saw multiple law enforcement medics who carry tin foil blankets in their packs. Why was he not shot and killed? We don’t know the answer yet, but the video does not show him being brought down, so it seems entirely possible he was tackled from behind, brought to the ground and subdued.
JD Vance was moved first because—and this is not good for Trump—he is younger, and fitter, than the president. He can move; the president needs to be moved.
The ballroom was not evacuated, not because it was staged, but because it was the only place that had actually been checked for explosives before the event. Why do we know so much about the alleged shooter and so little about Thomas Crookes, the Pennsylvania assassin? Quite simple: Allen had his life—a pretty normal life of college, career, posting on social media—on the internet like most of us do. Crookes had been isolated from his early teenage years, grew up in a reclusive family, and his life on the internet was one he had made sure was untraceable.
Yes, Trump has benefitted before from an assassination attempt. It essentially put him in the White House. Yes, Trump has relentlessly merchandised that picture from Butler at the same time as showing zero self-reflection on being shot at. But that proves one thing alone: That Trump is a world-class opportunist. His brazen reaction to events has no peer—and that is not a compliment. But he is also not a planner. Nothing is more prevalent in this administration than chaos, because planning is not the point. Just look at Iran, for starters.
Here is what I am sure is the truth: This was not staged. It was the act of a man with a gun. It was the result of an appalling series of blunders in the protection not just of the president, but as many as 3,000 citizens, in a confined place which is essentially below ground. It was the sort of gun terror which children in schools are—heartbreakingly—drilled to be prepared to experience. It was an act of political violence.
The truth of what happened at the WHCA dinner is that this country is living in a toxic present of guns, gunmen, political division and violence, set in a chaotic and often failing governing class, topped off with years of good reason to be cynical about everything the current president says.
Nobody needs to “stage” this. It is not—to use my own words—a stunt. It was simply one moment when that toxic combination could be seen in all its ugly colors.
That’s not a conspiracy. It’s a condemnation.
Editor’s note: I updated this story two hours after publication to try to answer some of the initial questions in the comments.
