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A chaotic White House Correspondents’ Dinner, as told by NPR reporters in the room
Attendees hid in and then fled from the Washington Hilton after shots were fired at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner on Saturday night.
Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images
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Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images
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The White House Correspondents’ Dinner, an annual event that brings together top government officials and the journalists who cover them, descended into chaos on Saturday after shots rang out at the Washington Hilton.
Just minutes into the dinner, guests heard muffled popping sounds as a gunman attempted to charge past a security checkpoint.
President Trump — who was attending the event for the first time since taking office — was rushed out of the building by Secret Service agents, as were First Lady Melania Trump, Vice President JD Vance and a slew of cabinet officials.

The night ended with a suspect apprehended, a law enforcement officer injured and a press conference at the White House, where Trump promised the dinner would be rescheduled.
Hundreds of attendees, many of them reporters and lawmakers, took shelter beneath their tables amidst the chaos, before evacuating the hotel and — in many cases — shifting back into work more. Several NPR journalists were among them, and quickly jumped on the air to share their experiences and observations.
Here’s how the night unfolded, according to NPR journalists in attendance.
Shots rang out toward the end of the first course
Less than an hour into dinner, around 8:30 p.m. ET, attendees heard what sounded like gunshots coming from the back of the room.
“People were just finishing up their … salads, and plates were being cleared, when we heard this ‘bang, bang, bang,’” said White House Correspondent Franco Ordoñez. “And then, just, crash.”
Everything went crashing to the floor, Ordoñez said: plates, trays and people taking shelter.
While people didn’t know exactly what had just happened, attendees and staff alike knew to get down immediately.
“There were several members of the waitstaff who hit the ground next to our table, with one woman in particular just crying that she didn’t want to die — just terrified in that moment, in a way that I think I will always remember,” said Courtney Dorning, a senior editor for All Things Considered.
White House Correspondent Deepa Shivaram had a different vantage point.
Shivaram was one of the roughly dozen journalists traveling in the rotating presidential pool on Saturday night. During the dinner portion of the event, pool reporters were charging their laptops at tables in a hallway — closer to the security checkpoint where the shooting occurred — when they distinctly heard the sound of gunshots.
“We didn’t have eyes on what was going on, but it was very clear that something had happened,” Shivaram said.
Security agents hustled officials out of the room
Secret Service agents rush into the ballroom at the Washington Hilton as attendees shelter on the floor.
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Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
Videos from the scene show Secret Service rushing to the stage, where Trump was sitting with the first lady and vice president, mentalist Oz Pearlman — the night’s headliner — as well as White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt and White House Correspondents’ Association President Weijia Jiang of CBS News. All of them were hustled out of sight.
At that point “dozens and dozens” of security agents rushed into the ballroom, Ordoñez says, headed straight for the Cabinet members.

“You had Secret Service, you had officers in FBI jackets and DEA jackets,” he said. “I’m talking full tactical gear, literally jumping over people, jumping over tables, jumping over chairs.”
Within minutes they escorted out high-ranking officials, including House Speaker Mike Johnson, FBI Director Kash Patel, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin.
From the hallway, Shivaram saw armed Secret Service agents rushing those same Cabinet members into two small office rooms, “basically just trying to keep as many people safe as they could.”
“And then about four minutes after those shots rang out, I saw a Secret Service agent walk by and [they] said that the shooter was in custody,” she added.
Back in the ballroom, Ordoñez described an “eerie silence” and “a lot of confusion” among the attendees watching from the floor.
“As they were evacuated from the room, watching the security officers’ shoulders drop a little bit, I feel like our shoulders started to drop a little bit and our heads started to pop up,” Ordoñez says.
Attendees eventually made their way out
Guests depart the Washington Hilton amid a heavy police presence on Saturday night.
Ulysse Bellier/AFP via Getty Images
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Ulysse Bellier/AFP via Getty Images
Dorning estimates people in the room felt safe enough to emerge from underneath the tables after about four or five minutes.
“Everyone pretty much went into reporting mode as soon as they were up from the floor,” she said.
Many in the room whipped out their cameras to start filming, and made the rounds to glean and share details.
Ordoñez said initial reports from the other journalists and attendees he spoke with varied: Some heard three bangs, some heard five, and some said they could smell gunpowder.
It was still unclear at that moment whether gunshots had been fired in the room or outside the room. There were also questions as to whether the night’s programming would continue. Ordoñez said White House staffers told him they were unsure whether Trump was still in the building or planning to come back.

“First, we heard that President Trump was going to return and speak and the program was going to continue as scheduled,” Dorning said. “And then by the time we left the building, the event had been canceled.”
At 9:17 p.m., Trump wrote on Truth Social: “I have recommended that we ‘LET THE SHOW GO ON’ but, will entirely be guided by Law Enforcement.” About twenty minutes later, he posted they were leaving the premises at the recommendation of law enforcement and promised a press conference at the White House in half an hour.
Immigration Correspondent Ximena Bustillo said once it became clear the dinner was over, “it was a giant funnel out” of a relatively tight basement.
“Even just going up the escalators, they are like one-person escalators,” Bustillo said. “And [women] are all in long dresses down to our feet. So it’s not like there can be a very quick exit out.”
Politicians and reporters reconvene at the White House
President Trump address journalists, still in their black-tie attire, in the Brady Briefing Room after the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner on Saturday night.
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Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images
Shivaram, traveling in the pool, said Trump’s motorcade made the few-minute drive from the hotel to the White House with sirens blaring.
They arrived at the North Lawn about shortly before 10 p.m. ET, though reporters didn’t get a good view of him exiting the car.
A short while later, Trump spoke to reporters — many of them still wearing black-tie attire — in the White House press briefing room. It is named after James Brady, the former press secretary who was shot during the 1981 attempted assasination of then-President Ronald Reagan outside the very same hotel where the correspondents’ dinner is held each year.
Trump, flanked by Vance, Patel, the first lady and other high-ranking officials, said he initially thought the distant disturbance was the sound of a tray being dropped. The president praised the Secret Service and law enforcement for their quick response. He also thanked the press for their “responsible coverage.”
“This was an event dedicated to the freedom of speech that was supposed to bring together members of both parties with members of the press and in a certain way it did,” he said.
News
Crew members safely eject after Navy jets collide during Idaho air show
BOISE, Idaho (AP) — Four crew members ejected safely after two Navy jets collided Sunday at an air show in Idaho, a show organizer said.
Emergency crews responded after the two planes collided during the show at the Mountain Home Air Force Base in western Idaho.
All four of the crew members from the planes ejected safely, said Kim Sykes, marketing director with Silver Wings of Idaho, which helped to plan the air show. Sykes said the crash occurred off base and she did not see the crash but saw the smoke afterward.
The base said in a social media post that it was locked down following the incident during the Gunfighter Skies Air Show. Responders were on the scene and an investigation was underway.
READ MORE: Navy loses two aircraft from USS Nimitz aircraft carrier within 30 minutes
Multiple witnesses reported two planes collided and crashed, and videos posted online showed four parachutes opening in the sky as the aircraft plummet to the ground near the base about 50 miles (80 kilometers) south of Boise.
No other information was immediately available, said a person who answered the phone at the 366th Fighter Wing public affairs office.
Organizers said the popular air show that includes flying demonstrations and parachute jumps is a celebration of aviation history and a look at modern military capabilities. The U.S. Air Force Thunderbirds headlined the show both days.
The National Weather Service reported good visibility and winds gusting up to 29 mph (47 kph) around the time of the crash.
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Bus riders to Montgomery retrace old steps while fighting a new fight
A man sings a spirtual song during a voting rally, Saturday, May 16, 2026, in Montgomery, Ala.
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Mike Stewart/AP
MONTGOMERY, Ala.— In 1965, Black Americans peacefully demonstrated for voting rights and were beaten by Alabama state troopers before returning two weeks later to complete their march under federal protection. Keith Odom was a toddler then.
Now 62 years old, the union man and grandfather of three retraced some of their final steps. On Saturday, he came from Aiken, South Carolina, to Atlanta, where he joined several dozen other activists on two buses to Montgomery, Alabama. A few hours later, he stepped off his bus and onto Dexter Avenue, where the original march concluded.
“The history here — being a part of it, seeing it, feeling it,” said Odom, who is Black.

His voice trailed off as he saw the Alabama Capitol and a stage that sat roughly where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. concluded the original march.
Odom lamented that he and his fellow bus riders were not simply commemorating that seminal day in the Civil Rights Movement. Instead they came to renew the fight. The 1965 effort helped push Congress to send the Voting Rights Act to Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson to sign, securing and expanding political power for Black and other nonwhite voters for more than a half-century.
Saturday’s “All Roads Lead to the South” rally was the first mass organizing response after a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that severely diminished that landmark law. Striking down a majority Black congressional district in Louisiana, the justices concluded in a 6-3 ruling that considering race when drawing political lines is in itself discriminatory. That spurred multiple states, including Alabama, to redraw U.S. House districts in ways that make it harder for Black voters, who lean overwhelmingly Democratic, to elect lawmakers of their choice.
“I’m not trying to live a life that’s going backwards,” Odom said. “I want to go forward, for my grandchildren to be able to go forward.”
Keith Odom, a forklift driver from Aiken, S.C., looks out from his bus seat as he arrives in Montgomery, Ala., for a voting rights rally Saturday, May 16, 2026.
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Bill Barrow/AP
An old political battle is new again
The passenger rosters and the scene when riders arrived in Montgomery sounded the echoes and rhymes of past and present.
“I talked to my grandmother before I came, and she was so excited,” said Justice Washington, a Kennesaw State University student named because her mother and grandmother had faith in the American system. “My grandmother told me she did her part, and now it’s time for me to do mine.”
No one on the Atlanta buses had reached voting age when the Voting Rights Act became law. The youngest attendee was born as Democrat Barack Obama was elected the first Black president in 2008.
Kobe Chernushin is 18, white and just graduated high school in Atlanta’s northern suburbs. He is an organizer with the Georgia Youth Justice Coalition and spent the day filming Khayla Doby, a 29-year-old executive for the organization, doing standups for the group’s followers on social media.
“I believe in the power of showing up,” he said.

The buses launched from the congressional district in Georgia once represented by John Lewis, bloodied on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, when he was 25. Lewis died in 2020, but some on the buses Saturday celebrated that a proposed federal election overhaul is named for him. If some Democrats get their way, the bill would override the U.S. Supreme Court, reinvigorate the Voting Rights Act and outlaw the kind of gerrymandering competition that Republican President Donald Trump has instigated.
“I’m here because of the same forces that pulled on John Lewis when he was a student,” said Darrin Owens, 27. He has worked for former Vice President Kamala Harris and now trains Democratic candidates.
“Political activism is personal,” Owens said, explaining that he attended Saturday as a citizen, not a political professional. “Sometimes those lines are blurred, and as a Black person in America, a Black person living in a Southern state, I’m committed to action that stops what I consider to be un-American, this possibility that the person who represents me is someone who is not from my community and does not understand me or my community.”
When he arrived, Owens saw no federal authorities on Montgomery’s streets. A wounded, recovering Lewis did during the second march in 1965.
This time many of the Alabama troopers and local officers who walked the area were Black.
The buses and sandwich lunches had been arranged by Fair Fight Action, a legacy of the political network built by Georgia Democrat Stacey Abrams, who became a national figure in her unsuccessful runs in 2018 and 2022 to become the first Black woman elected governor in U.S. history. No Black woman has yet achieved that feat.
Bee Nguyen, left, talks to Carole Burton, center, and Tondalaire Ashford at a voting rights rally Saturday, May 16, 2026, in Montgomery, Ala.
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Bill Barrow/AP
Different generations share their stories
At different points, Montgomery has branded itself as the cradle of the Confederacy and the cradle of the modern Civil Rights Movement.
“It feels like our country is stuck in this pattern of making progress, then there’s a huge backlash, and then people have to go through the same battle again just to get to where we were,” said Phi Nguyen, the 41-year-old daughter of Vietnamese refugees. She is now a civil rights lawyer in Atlanta.
She stood across from the church where a young King led the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955 and not far from where Jefferson Davis took the oath of office in 1861 as the slavery-defending Confederate president.
Nguyen and her sister Bee, a 44-year-old who served in the Georgia General Assembly and ran for statewide office, met two other women as they walked. Carole Burton and Tondalaire Ashford are 72-year-old Montgomery residents who have been friends since they were in a segregated junior high school and then newly desegregated Sidney Lanier High School.
“I don’t call it ‘integration,’” Ashford said, pointing at her dark skin. “It was never real integration, and it’s not like we can ever just blend in.”
Burton described them as being “in the second wave” of Black students. “It wasn’t easy,” she said. “And we had to support each other.”
They remember their parents not being able to vote in the era of poll taxes, literacy tests and other racist restrictions that the Voting Rights Act eventually outlawed. But they smiled as they swapped family histories with the Nguyens.
Burton said immigrants, descendants of enslaved persons and Native Americans have different but overlapping paths. “We just want to be treated like people with the same rights and opportunities the country has promised us,” she said. “They’ve never fully lived up to it.”
Aaron McGuire sings a spirtual song during a voting rally, Saturday, May 16, 2026, in Montgomery, Ala.
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Mike Stewart/AP
Conflicting legacies are at stake
To Odom, who had begun his journey Saturday in South Carolina, the current U.S. Supreme Court reinforced that history by refusing to see some race-conscious election policy as a way to ensure fair representation, not simply the “technical right to vote.”
He recalls decades of his life being represented by Strom Thurmond, a segregationist Democratic governor who became a “Dixiecrat” presidential candidate and U.S. senator — by now as a Republican — into the 21st century. Odom said he fears his state losing U.S. Rep. Jim Clyburn, a senior member of the Congressional Black Caucus, through redistricting.
“They want to take away that legacy when we’re still living with Strom’s?” Odom said.
Odom said he is also worried that the young people who participated Saturday are not a vanguard but outliers.
“I was talking to a 20-year-old co-worker about this trip,” he said. “She told me she supported me but didn’t want to do it or work for anybody” running for office. “She wondered what any of them are going to do for her.”
Nonetheless, he said on the way home, “I’m still going to tell her what I saw and what I heard.”
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Louisiana Sen. Bill Cassidy loses in Republican primary, does not advance to runoff
One observer of the current Senate race in Louisiana noted that Sen. Bill Cassidy could lose his reelection bid.
Annie Flanagan for NPR
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Annie Flanagan for NPR
Sen. Bill Cassidy lost Saturday’s Louisiana Republican primary according to a race call by the Associated Press.
Cassidy, who served two terms in the Senate, was one of seven Republican senators who voted to convict President Trump after the January 6th insurrection at the Capitol. That vote put him at odds with Trump and his MAGA coalition, ultimately leading Trump to push Rep. Julia Letlow to run against Cassidy.
Cassidy’s bid for a third term was viewed as a test of Trump’s grip on the party–and of what voters want from their representatives in Washington. The primary pitted Cassidy, a veteran lawmaker, former physician and chair of the powerful Senate health committee, against Letlow, a political newcomer and a millennial MAGA loyalist.
A detailed view of a hat that reads, Run Julia Run, is seen at a campaign event for Rep. Julia Letlow (R-LA) on May 6, 2026 in Franklinton, Louisiana.
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Tyler Kaufman/Getty Images
A former college administrator, Letlow won a special election in 2021 for the House seat her late husband, Luke, was set to assume before he died from COVID in 2020.
In Congress, Letlow sponsored a bill to collect oral histories from the pandemic and has focused on education and children. She introduced the “Parents Bill of Rights Act,” which would allow parents to review classroom materials like library books and require schools to notify parents if their child requests different pronouns, locker rooms or sports teams.
She also serves on the powerful appropriations committee and has embraced Trump’s agenda.
Letlow, who came first in Saturday’s primary, will face Louisiana state Treasurer John Fleming in the runoff on June 27. Cassidy came in third.
The election result is a victory for President Trump who has put Republican loyalty to the test on the ballot so far this year in Indiana state senate primaries and in Cassidy’s race.
Another major test of Trump’s influence comes in Kentucky’s primary on Tuesday when Republican Rep. Thomas Massie, who has found himself at odds with the president, faces a challenger endorsed by Trump.
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