Extract from ABC News
Analysis
Washington DC lives and thrives off power and access. And this room at the Washington Hilton was power and access.
The White House correspondents' dinner is a marquee event, about 2,500 or so guests, perhaps the event of the year in this town.
It was not just US President Donald Trump and the first lady on stage, but press secretary Karoline Leavitt, Vice-President JD Vance, various Cabinet secretaries, ministers throughout the place. I walked out into one corridor, and there was Treasury secretary Scott Bessent on my side.
The national anthem had been sung, the president had been introduced, and people were told to begin eating your meals and we'll come back to the formal part of the evening shortly.
Fifteen minutes after that, suddenly there was this shouting going on.
I looked around and there were people sort of scrambling. I couldn't work out what it was. People were shouting, down, down. We got under our tables and in front of me, people all almost lying on top of each other. No one in that situation really knows exactly what was going on.
I pulled out my phone to sort of hold it up to try to film. And I looked up at the stage, and it was quite eerie, because it was completely empty. It had had the president, the vice president, the first lady, and then, suddenly, there was no one there at all.
Through the next few minutes, there was different shouting. Suddenly the Secret Service were running in trying to get various cabinet secretaries out of the room. They were evacuating all these VIPs. There was a Secret Serviceman at the door just behind me who had his gun drawn and so it was pretty dramatic inside that room.
In the few minutes after it, when people didn't know what was going on, I saw two FBI officers were arguing about what would happen where. And they were trying to run various important people upstairs. I think they were putting them in lockdown.
What really struck me, from what President Trump and the police said to the media after, is that this man was in the hotel, just outside the ballroom, so close to the President of the United States and a lot of his government.
Donald Trump is shielded by a security detail during the incident.
Room full of VIPs
This was one of the most vulnerable moments ever for an American government
All I needed to get into this event was a ticket to the White House Correspondents Association dinner. No name on it, no passport. I took my passport thinking it's going to be high security. I arrived at the Washington Hilton, and I got into the gate just by showing a ticket.
And then I got into the hotel itself, no security. Then I went through the reception, no security. Then I went down downstairs to the terrace area, no security.
Essentially, this man, armed with at least two guns and several knives, was one door away from being able to get into a room full of some of the most powerful, important, influential people in the United States.
If he'd got through those doors, it's dreadful to think what he could have done.
As Trump himself said in his briefing, it's not a terribly secure building. This is also the same building where an assassination attempt was made on Ronald Regan in 1981.
Yet again the Secret Service in America will be called upon to ask why a simple yellow ticket was enough to get anybody within a door of the president of the United States.
Fortunately, that single checkpoint that this man tried to storm was the only difference between him getting stopped and him getting into the room with the president.
Trump reveals details of shooting outside White House Correspondents’ Dinner
Less security than an airport
The security at the Washington Hilton was less than the security you would face at Sydney or Melbourne or Brisbane airports. It was less than the security at the Victorian or New South Wales parliaments.
There was Secret Service everywhere, but they were very much focused on the president himself. All the other cabinet secretaries were quite exposed.
Trump sounded sort of fatigued and a bit shaken. He wasn't his normal ebullient self.
He apparently did want this to go ahead, even after all of that. It's in his DNA. Famously after the assassination attempt at Butler, Pennsylvania during the campaign, we saw that iconic moment where when he was grazed in the ear and his reflexive response to that.
His view is we're not going to let these sort of would-be shooters or assassins derail an event.
But it appears that the Secret Service and the whole security apparatus of this country overruled him. The logic behind that is that if security is broken down to the extent that someone has got a gun into an event, then others may have got guns into the event.
Part of the fear of tonight was that, of course, nobody really knows what's happening, including the president. And people don't know whether there could be another shooter.
This fear just rippled across this room of 2,500 people, including some of the most powerful people in this country, owners of media, chief executives of television networks, editors, the major news organisations, as people ducked under their tables.
Everybody was shaken by it.
This is an edited extract of John Lyons' appearance on News Channel on Sunday
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