Shots Fired at Correspondents' Dinner. Trump Is Safe. One Man in Custody.
April 26, 2026
Around 8:30 Saturday night, someone opened fire in the lobby of the Washington Hilton, and the White House Correspondents' Dinner stopped being a dinner.
Secret Service agents pulled Trump and Melania off the stage within seconds. Vance went out too, along with Pete Hegseth, Marco Rubio, Kash Patel, RFK Jr., and a string of other Cabinet officials. Guests dropped under their tables. You could smell gunpowder near the back of the room.
The suspect is Cole Tomas Allen, 31, from Torrance, California. The Washington Post
He came armed with a shotgun, a handgun, and knives, and charged a Secret Service checkpoint in the hotel lobby. CBS News
He exchanged gunfire with agents, got tackled, and is believed to have acted alone. NBC News
He wasn't shot — he was taken to a hospital for evaluation. CBS News
One Secret Service agent took a round to his bulletproof vest and is in good spirits. NBC News
Trump called him personally afterward. "The vest did the job," Trump said later at a White House press conference, where he called Allen a "lone wolf" and praised the agents who took him down. The Washington Post
CNN's Wolf Blitzer had a more direct view of what happened than most. "All of a sudden a guy with a weapon, it was a very, very serious weapon, starts shooting, and I happened to have been a few feet away from him," Blitzer said on air. CNN
This dinner was Trump's first time attending as president PBS
— notable on its own, given how his relationship with the press corps has gone. He never got to give his remarks. Staff broke down the table settings and the presidential lectern shortly after Weijia Jiang, president of the Correspondents' Association, said "We will do this again." PBS
The Hilton has history here. In 1981, John Hinckley Jr. shot Ronald Reagan just outside the same building, which is why the hotel was redesigned to include a secure presidential suite near the entrance. Trump was taken there briefly before heading back to the White House. PBS
Allen had received a "Teacher of the Month" award in Torrance, California in 2024, CBS News
according to CBS News. No motive has been publicly confirmed.
Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser said there is "no reason" to believe anyone else was involved and that there is no ongoing threat to the public. PBS