Weijia Jiang: I was on stage last night with the president. This is what I saw.

Politics Weijia Jiang: I was on stage last night with the president. This is what I saw. By Weijia Jiang Weijia Jiang Senior White House Correspondent Weijia Jiang is the senior White House correspondent for CBS News based in Washington, D.C. Jiang has covered the White House beat since 2018, including the transitions between presidential administrations. In 2023, Jiang won an Emmy Award for her contributions to "CBS Mornings." Read Full Bio Weijia Jiang Updated on: April 26, 2026 / 12:54 PM EDT / CBS News Add CBS News on Google President Trump and CBS News' Weijia Jiang react as sounds of gunfire were heard at the White House Correspondents' Dinner, April 25, 2026. Reuters The night was going exactly as planned. For eight months, as president of the White House Correspondents Association, I'd been working on this dinner party. Above all, I had hoped it would restore some normalcy between the Trump administration and the press. Maybe I was naïve, but I wanted it to be a room we don't see enough of in Washington: a bipartisan one. And it was. There were more than 2,500 journalists and guests dressed to the nines. CEOs, celebrities, ambassadors and members of the cabinet including Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Todd Blanche, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin — many just feet from the president in the ballroom.Most important was Donald Trump himself: after 15 years of boycotting the dinner, he finally decided to come. It was the first time he had attended as president.Trump was in a great mood. The Marine Corps Band had just played The Star-Spangled Banner, and the president was on the dais. We were chatting about the last time he attended, when Barack Obama was president. "You know, everyone thinks I was upset by all those jokes Obama made. But I really wasn't," I remember him telling me as Oz Pearlman — the mentalist I had booked for the night — aske...