'Get down!': Panic and chaos at glitzy White House media gala

It was meant to be a glitzy night with United States President Donald Trump addressing journalists at a Washington ballroom.

But the glamour was shattered by gunshots that left guests diving to the floor, and the US leader was bundled out by security personnel.

Trump was seated on the stage at the White House Correspondents’ Association’s annual dinner — the first time he attended as president — when loud bangs disrupted the revelry and caused him and others to look up in alarm.

AFP journalists attending the event saw chaotic scenes unfolding.

Moments after what sounded like gunshots, cries of “Stay down!” and “Get down!” were heard while guests in black tie and gowns — including correspondents, officials in the Trump administration and some members of his cabinet — took cover.

Amid the chaos, the president and First Lady Melania Trump were quickly surrounded by US Secret Service agents, their weapons drawn. They quickly rushed Trump off the stage and through a back curtain as the crowd crouched in shock.

Trump said later he “thought it was a tray going down” before later realising it was a gun. “It was either a tray or a bullet. I thought I was hoping it was a tray, but it wasn’t.”

‘Ducked under the table’

The big band music stopped, and for a few seconds a hush fell over the guests. Agents swarmed around tables as plates crashed to the floor of the massive ballroom of the Washington Hilton, the very hotel where President Ronald Reagan survived an assassination attempt 45 years earlier.

“Shots fired upstairs,” Mehmet Oz, Trump’s administrator of the Centres for Medicare and Medicaid Services, told journalists, including AFP, as he was evacuated by security.

Also seen being rushed out of the ballroom was Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr — whose father, Robert F Kennedy and uncle, President John F Kennedy, were felled by assassins’ bullets in the 1960s.

Alexandra Ingersoll, a correspondent for One America News, told AFP she was inside when the commotion began and saw Secret Service spring into action to protect the president.

“I just ducked under the table, and I was like ‘I’m not going to risk this,’” she told AFP.

“I didn’t know if the shooter was neutralised or what was going on.”

Trump later told reporters that a gunman he described as a “lone wolf” and a “whack job” had charged through security screening just outside the ballroom.

‘Fought like hell’

The entire room was ordered evacuated, and several hundred guests made their way into the Hilton lobby and out into the chilly air.

Guests were seen hugging, making calls, texting friends and loved ones, and their news bureaux.

Trump’s motorcade zoomed out of the Hilton a few minutes after 8:40 pm and headed for the White House. Correspondents then raced to the mansion for a hastily arranged presidential press conference.

Trump, still in a black tie, appeared at the podium in the White House briefing room with Melania Trump, Vice President JD Vance, FBI chief Kash Patel and other top officials.

“I fought like hell to stay” at the dinner, but Secret Service agents said he had to leave, said Trump, who narrowly escaped an assassination attempt at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, in 2024. Trump added, however, that the gala would be rescheduled.

“We’re going to do it again,” said Trump. “We’re not gonna let anyone take over our society.”