A quick analysis of last night's shooting

I had intended to write today about what a travesty the White House Correspondents Association dinner was — and how embarrassed every single journalist who attended should be — but for obvious reasons, after the events of last night, I wanted to share instead some quick thoughts on presidential security that might be useful to understanding what happened.

First, a couple of points on my particularly relevant background to this subject: During a different era, when the event was merely laughable, I attended the White House Correspondents Association dinner itself multiple times and covered the event and the parties around it for more than a decade. Plus, during my Washington career, I’ve been to probably just shy of a hundred dinners and galas inside that same ballroom at the Washington Hilton, which is known universally in Washington as the “Hinckley Hilton,” in reference to the 1981 shooting of President Reagan there. Also, I’ve spent a lot of time reporting on presidential security over the years, including writing a book on “continuity of government” and presidential evacuation protocols.

• Two very-much-related factoids: Anne Schroeder, then at the Washington Post, and I, then the blogger at FishbowlDC, were largely responsible for the nicknaming the correspondents’ dinner “prom” in 2005, which later evolved into “nerd prom.” Anne coined it in her gossip column that year, and I picked it up to use in my blog coverage of that year’s event. Later, when I was editor at Washingtonian, I as a history buff repeatedly badgered the Hilton team into finally putting up a historic plaque marking the entrance where Reagan was shot.

Which brings us to last night’s startling events at an event that already felt particularly high-stakes as the famously anti-press president attended for the first time the main dinner meant to honor the working relationship of the president and White House press corps.

What we know so far is that gunfire could be heard inside the dinner around 8:30 p.m., and that Secret Service and protective details swarmed the stage and room about 15-20 seconds later. Vice President JD Vance and President Trump were rushed from the stage and in the audience Cabinet members and congressional leadership similarly evacuated. Outside the ballroom, a 31-year-old named Cole Tomas Allen from Torrance, California, had tried to rush the ballroom armed with both guns — perhaps a shotgun and handguns — as well as knives. Trump finally headed back to the White House around 9:30 and, alongside other officials, addressed the events from the White House briefing room. Across Washington, the after-parties mostly continued as planned, albeit depleted by the reporters and anchors who rushed to cover the unfolding events.

We normally don’t get to see the massive hidden security footprint that surrounds the president like we did last night, when members of the Secret Service Counter-Assault Team (CAT) actually stormed the stage and we saw countless security details rush their protectees from the room:

In the hours since, I’ve seen a lot of arm-chair-quarterbacking about how the whole hotel should have been behind the security cordon or how shocked shocked shocked guests were that security seemed so lax at the entrances, etc., etc., but most of those critiques misunderstand two major things:

(1) You always have to have an outer security perimeter; and

(2) The goal of the Secret Service isn’t to prevent any incident at a high-profile event — it’s to prevent an incident that could harm the president.

Yes, you can always push the security checkpoints out further, but there will always have to be a first moment where the unvetted and unsecured public approaches a security check. You’ll hear similar complaints/quarterbacking when there are shootings at airports: “How did someone get inside the airport with a gun?” Because anyone can walk through the first door. Security in a free society is always a trade-off. Push the security checkpoints back to the curb, and the attack will just happen at the curb instead.

As far as I can tell — I didn’t attend last night’s dinner and maintain every single journalist or editor who made the decision to do so made a bad professional and life choice — security at the Hilton was basically the same as it has been in past years.

Some background: The Washington Hilton has some 1,100 guest rooms spread across ten floors and several main public levels — including the main lobby level and then, an escalator flight down, the level of the ballroom, which is accessible too from a lower street entrance on the side of the building, which is where the red carpet for the correspondents dinner is located. Its giant “pillar-less” ballroom is the main venue for large events in Washington — including not just the correspondents dinner but other large conventions and gatherings like the National Prayer Breakfast — because it can seat around 2,600 people at banquet tables.

The size and scale of the hotel — or any major hotel in Washington, really, where presidential events occur — is such that there are hundreds of people in the hotel who have no connection to the dinner and are going about entirely unrelated activities.

Moreover, the “Hinckley Hilton” is, tragically, now uniquely situated for handling a presidential visit — following the shooting of President Reagan, the hotel installed a secure entrance facility for VIPs and there’s a special secure green room and secure path to and from the stage for a president. Securing a presidential speech at the Washington Hilton is like table-stakes for the Secret Service — about as easy as a presidential movement can be.

The evening events at the Hilton involve both the dinner itself but also a whole host of cocktail receptions and parties, big and small, at the hotel by various news organizations, and there are many hundreds of people who attend only those parties and then go elsewhere for the dinner itself and then rejoin the glitzy after-parties, and thus never come anywhere close to being in the presence of the president. (That’s actually what I usually preferred to do when I lived in DC.)

There’s usually — as there apparently was last night — a very rough outer security check at the edge of the property to try to determine whether someone has business in the Hilton that night. You have to be a registered guest in the hotel, or have an invitation to the party inside, or some such, but the goal with that security check is less about weapons and more about crowd control — trying to minimize the number of people who crowd into the hotel’s public spaces to gawk. It’s not the goal of this checkpoint to definitively ID and cross-check every person attending — it’s to manage the crowd flow inside.

The Secret Service at some fundamental level doesn’t really care who is merely inside the hotel. Instead, the Secret Service only cares about securing the area where the president will be and where people will be able to see the president. Similarly, it’s not the job of the Secret Service to protect all the partygoers or even all the non-presidential VIPs at the event.

It would be an impossible, disruptive, costly, and unnecessary project to secure the entire hotel and property — particularly for an event where the president is only on-site for 2-3 hours maximum. (I’ve seen, for instance, some “criticism” of how when Barack Obama was staying at the Hay-Adams as president-elect, everyone entering the hotel was subject to security screening, but securing a place where a president is staying is a very different protocol than just where a president is visiting, and the Hay-Adams is a much smaller hotel than the Hilton.)

Thus, the Secret Service sets up magnetometers — usually staffed by some combination of uniformed Secret Service officers and TSA officers — that screen guests before they file into the ballroom itself. At that point, there’s (usually) a much tighter circle of security — double-checking names and invite lists as well as screening for weapons.

According to video and photos that Trump posted on Truth Social afterward, this is evidently the security checkpoint that the suspect charged and where he was stopped — and, because of the geography of the hotel, he was stopped before he even made it to the floor where the ballroom was:

(One question I do have: The TV audio of the incident appears to show far more gunshots than have been explained so far — we know one Secret Service agent or officer was hit in his bulletproof vest, but it’s unclear who fired what shots at whom.)

The shooting at Butler was clearly a major security failure and exposed all sorts of problems with the Secret Service’s protocols and planning — and emphasized how overlooked and exhausted the long-underfunded and under-staffed agency has become, particularly in the complex years of providing security to the ever-growing list of the sprawling Trump family and ever-more administration officials.

It’s not clear — so far — that this event should be viewed the same. (Another question I have: I was surprised that apparently Trump remained in his motorcade on-site for the better part of an hour before organizers and the Secret Service finally decided to cancel the remainder of the evening and he departed for the White House. I would have imagined that the goal of the Secret Service would have been to get him out of the site as fast as possible once the shooting occurred, particularly since it wasn’t or wouldn’t have been initially clear whether the attacker was acting alone.)

Overall, knowing only the scattered reports we still know about 12 hours later, this mostly appears like presidential security working as it is intended. It’s not — and shouldn’t be — the job of the Secret Service to secure the whole building. There was a threat to the president and it was stopped well before it could pose a threat to the president. Screening everyone who enters the outer perimeter of even a high-profile event like the correspondents dinner for weapons and then re-screening everyone who attends the actual dinner would be a massive operation and require more than a multiple of the security resources already committed to an event like this.

We’ll surely learn more in the coming days and months — and I would bet the dinner security will change in future years and that security at the Hilton will change, as it did after 1981 and as it is now the first place in the US to have the dubious distinction of being the site of not one but two presidential assassination attempts — but so far as we know right now, this seems like the system basically working as designed amid the always necessary trade-offs of security in a free society.

I’m glad everyone is okay. Political violence is never the answer.

GMG