Confusion and unverified claims swirled after a shooting in the lobby of the hotel hosting the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner on Saturday.

Shots rang out as a gunman stormed the Washington Hilton, prompting Secret Service to rush Donald Trump and JD Vance from the ballroom. The dramatic evacuation was swiftly followed by a flood of conspiracy theories.

Footage showing Vance being escorted out before Trump spread widely online, with some users claiming – without evidence – that officials had prioritized the vice president over the president. 

Trump and the Secret Service have both denied this claim. The president has also branded speculation that the shooting was staged as ‘sick.’

Rumors have swirled too about the background of accused gunman Cole Tomas Allen, 31, who has been charged with attempting to assassinate the president.

Fake AI-generated photographs of Allen with an ‘Indian wife’ were surfaced by foreign-based X accounts, despite there being no evidence that the alleged shooter was married. 

Users even tried to link Allen to Usha Vance through a 2017 news report that featured an unidentified woman who some felt bore a vague resemblance to the second lady.

The bizarre and offensive posts bear the hallmarks of coordinated inauthentic activity and appear to have foreign origins. 

Vice President JD Vance was rushed off the stage before President Donald Trump after shots rang out at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner on Saturday night

Trump, speaking in the White House press briefing room Saturday night after the shooting, has branded the conspiracy theories surrounding the incident as ‘sick’

Cole Thomas Allen, the 31-year-old man has been charged with attempting to assassinate Trump at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in Washington DC

Allen, a teacher from Torrance, California, was a guest at the Hilton hotel, where the event was taking place. He allegedly tried to storm the dinner with guns and knives. 

Prosecutors have not revealed a motive, but Allen called himself the ‘Friendly Federal Assassin’ in a chilling manifesto and made repeated references to the Republican president and his administration, without naming him directly. 

As soon as Allen was named as the gunman, social media sleuths began digging into his background.

But a wave of false information rapidly proliferated on X, particularly from accounts in Pakistan and elsewhere in South Asia, falsely claiming he was married to an Indian woman named Priyanka Rao. 

Accounts shared AI-generated images of Allen and his supposed wife, along with a doctored Indian passport.

Public records show no evidence Allen is married. 

Internet users also tried to claim that Allen and Usha Vance previously crossed paths, citing a 2017 news report by California TV station ABC 7.

But the woman in the video, which does genuinely feature Allen from nearly a decade ago, is not the second lady. 

Footage from the dinner shows that Secret Service agents grabbed Vance by his shoulders and pulled him away from the stage just second after shots rang out.

An agent was seen blocking Trump’s body with his own, but critics noted that he wasn’t escorted until roughly 20 seconds after the initial gunfire. 

Trump, when asked why he wasn’t removed from the venue first, told 60 Minutes host Norah O’Donnell that he is partially to blame for the evacuation order.

‘Well, what happened is, it was a little bit me,’ Trump explained. ‘I wanted to see what was happening, and I wasn’t making it that easy for them. I wanted to see what was going on. And by that time, we started to realize maybe it was a bad problem, a different kind of problem, a bad one.’

He said he was ‘surrounded by great people’ and said ‘I probably made them act a little bit more slowly.’

‘I said, “Wait a minute, wait a minute. Let me see, wait a minute”,’ Trump recalled.

‘Then, I started walking with them. I turned, I started walking. And they said, “Please go down. Please go down on the floor.” So I went down, and the first lady went down, also. But we were asked to go down by the agents as I was walking.’

A Secret Service official issued similar claims, telling MS Now that Trump’s agents believed the ballroom, with agents manning every door, was safe at that moment.

Trump’s detail then took a few additional moments to ensure that all entrances were guarded along the designated ‘presidential walk’ route before he was taken to a special holding room.

This AI-generated photo, which went viral on X, showed the alleged shooter with a ‘wife’ who does not exist 

Fake images of Allen with an alleged ‘Indian wife’ circulated online following the White House Correspondents’ Dinner shooting 

Internet users also tried to claim that Allen and Usha Vance previously crossed paths, citing a 2017 news report by California station ABC 7. But the woman in the video is not the second lady

Allen, then a student at Cal-Tech, did actually appear in the ABC 7 news report

Trump is escorted out after a gunman stormed the Washington Hilton

The president, during his interview with O’Donnell, also dismissed claims that the shooting had been ‘staged’.

Some users alleged the shooting orchestrated to be a distraction from the Epstein files and the Iran war, or to gain support for Trump’s White House ballroom.

But the president dismissed the claims, citing how many major events are surrounded by conspiracies. 

‘Yeah, no, I hear it,’ he said of the conspiracy theories. ‘I don’t know, I think they’re more sick than they are con people, but there’s a lot of con in it, too.’

He also pointed to how theorists often claim that tragedies were staged.

‘Oct. 7 didn’t happen, and World War II didn’t happen and the Holocaust didn’t happen and many things didn’t happen,’ Trump said.