For a brief moment, after the shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner sent the room into chaos, President Donald Trump and the evening’s featured entertainer, mentalist Oz Pearlman, crouched down feet away from each other and shared a glance.
“I’ll never forget the image for my whole life,” Pearlman told CNN.
“We just look at each other for about two seconds, and my mind, obviously, this is like a huge adrenaline [rush], is just like, ‘Oh no, are we about to die?’” he remembers thinking.
When commotion first rippled through the room at the Washington Hilton, Pearlman was in the middle of performing a pre-show trick onstage for Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, First Lady Melania Trump and the president. Right as he worked towards the final flourish, writing what name Leavitt was thinking on a paper card, Secret Service agents began rushing through the ballroom towards the president, whom they tackled to the ground.
Security ultimately detained a suspect, Cole Tomas Allen, 31, who never breached the ballroom itself. But inside the event, journalists and politicians remained unsure of what was happening for anxious minutes as heavily armed Secret Service agents swarmed the room.
Pearlman didn’t initially hear any gunshots, so he thought the agents might be trying to protect the president from a bomb, he said. The performer, who makes a living reading people, told CNN he couldn’t parse what was on the president’s mind as they huddled on the floor.
“The expression on his face didn’t show whether there was pain or what was going on,” Pearlman said.
“It was near-impossible to read his face,” he added, though the mentalist was worried agents tackling the president to the ground might have harmed him. “I couldn’t tell if he had been injured or hurt.”
The president was soon whisked out of sight, but the confusion continued, Pearlman said. He and other guests army-crawled away from the stage, in the fear that they might be targeted.
Rumors rippled through the room that shots had been fired and someone had been killed.
“It was pure fear in everybody’s eyes,” Pearlman told The New York Times. “I thought, standing up I might get shot.”
Things remained chaotic backstage, though within about five or 10 minutes, Pearlman said he began to feel he was not in immediate danger.
He encountered Vice President JD Vance, who was “very calm” and “very assuring,” Pearlman told CNN.
Security was able to apprehend Allen alive. The suspect allegedly shot and injured a security agent on the scene, but the individual was protected by a bulletproof vest, the president said.
Investigators continue to hunt for a motive in the shooting.
The suspect allegedly sent a manifesto critical of President Donald Trump to his family before the shooting, referring to himself as “Cole ‘coldForce’ ‘Friendly Federal Assassin’ Allen,”The New York Post reports.
Allen, a teacher from Torrance, California, will be arraigned on Monday in federal court, according to officials.
President Trump has called on organizers to hold another Correspondents’ Dinner sometime soon.
