CBS News senior White House correspondent and White House Correspondents’ Association president Weijia Jiang described the moments she spent beside President Trump when shots rang out at the association’s dinner.
Jiang said the night started normally but became surreal when she first heard noise she thought might be protesters. Then she saw SWAT officers moving toward the head table and heard the command, “down, down, down,” which made clear there was an active threat. She got on her knees and crawled directly behind the president to get off the stage. Backstage she saw more than a dozen SWAT officers, members of the president’s advance team and the Secret Service, and said it was “really scary” because there was no confirmation about what had happened.
Throughout the evening Jiang stayed in touch with the president through his team. She said his initial message was, “I’m not going anywhere” — he wanted to try to resume the show. At one point she was about to announce the head table’s return, but they held off while agents continued their work.
Later the president called Jiang into a secure hold room — a room designated for the president in the hotel — and told her, despite his desire to continue, that protocol required postponing the dinner. He asked her to wait for him to post about the decision and said he wanted to reschedule the event, insisting, “we can’t let people silence us,” because he did not want an attack to deter the dinner. Jiang said the president also remarked that the experience fostered a sense of unity that surprised him and that it changed the relationship between the press and the presidency in a way consistent with what the dinner is supposed to do.
Jiang described seeing the president pulled from the stage, crawling off behind him, and then joining other journalists in a tense, uncertain backstage environment until officials secured the situation.