Shots rang out at the Washington Hilton on Saturday night as President Donald Trump sat in the ballroom for the White House Correspondents' Association Dinner.
Del Wilbur, who has spoken publicly about the hotel's layout, told reporters, "Well, you make sure he has his own entrance." He added, "So that's where they took Trump right after, to that holding room," and pointed to a corridor he described as a secure route: "There's a safe hallway that goes from the bunker, that holding room, all the way to the top."
The history of presidential security at the Washington Hilton is what makes the shots at Saturday's dinner land so heavily. On March 30, 1981, John Hinckley Jr. pulled out a.22 caliber revolver and unleashed six shots in 1.7 seconds from a distance of 15 feet as President Ronald Reagan was leaving the hotel. The attack wounded press secretary James Brady, who was hit in the head and left paralyzed, D.C. police officer Thomas Delehanty, who was hit in the back, and U.S. Secret Service agent Tim McCarthy, who was hit in the chest. Hinckley's sixth shot struck the side of the presidential limousine, slipped through a gap between the door and the frame and hit Reagan. Lead Secret Service agent Jerry Parr threw Reagan into the limousine after the shooting attempt, a move credited with saving the president.
Tevi Troy, recalling the 1981 shooting, said, "It's important to remember how close he came to dying," and, "He rallied so the nation wouldn't panic and think he was dying." Reagan himself had used the ballroom microphone shortly before the attempt to say, "Together we'll make America great again." Those lines and that night turned the hotel into a landmark in the history of presidential security.
The Washington Hilton was built and advertised with presidents in mind. It opened in 1963—16 months after President John F. Kennedy was assassinated—and a few years later began hosting the White House Correspondents' Association Dinner, a relationship that has endured. The building was designed to attract presidents: it includes a separate presidential entrance on T Street with a spiral staircase, a personal elevator and a holding room wired to communicate with the White House. Presidents have spoken in the hotel's ballroom several times a year since Lyndon Johnson, and the venue has hosted the National Prayer Breakfast, the First Lady's Luncheon and inaugural balls. Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama are among those who attended inaugural balls there. As recently as April 2024, President Joe Biden appeared for three speeches in eight days at the Hilton.
That long record of presidential use is the reason the hotel's physical features keep coming up in coverage and conversation after Saturday's shots. Wilbur’s description of a "safe hallway" and the holding room ties directly to the building's stated purpose: to shelter and move presidents away from danger. The shorthand "Caa Agent" surfaced repeatedly in coverage and online discussion as journalists and viewers tried to parse who escorts a president through those routes and how the hotel's corridors are used in a crisis.
But the hotel's history also complicates any tidy picture of safety. The Reagan shooting happened despite the hotel's presidential accommodations and became the measuring stick for every later threat. The most vivid details from that night—the speed of the six shots, the distance of 15 feet, the 1.7 seconds in which they were fired—still frame arguments about vulnerability. The wounds to Brady, Delehanty and McCarthy and Jerry Parr's emergency reaction remain central to how the hotel is remembered.
Del Wilbur returned, in his remarks, to the physicality of the building that presidents have used for decades. "It's like his own hallway that leads from that to the speech," he said, describing the route that, he said, was taken after the incident. The Washington Hilton was built to host presidents. For guests and staff gathered there on Saturday, those designs were more than architectural notes; they were the immediate geography of a night that echoed an episode from 1981.
