After the chaos of Saturday's White House Correspondents' Dinner shooting, this week's state dinner with King Charles and Queen Camilla went off without a hitch.

First Lady Melania Trump stunned in pink Dior, Rory McIlroy got a presidential shout-out, and the King delighted Trump with a gold bell salvaged from a ship that bore his name. 

It was the first state dinner of Trump's second term - and, by the end, White House planners were no doubt breathing easier.

Because nearly 17 years ago, two uninvited guests brazenly 'crashed' President Barack Obama's first state dinner, triggering a security scare that reverberated all the way to Capitol Hill.

Their names were Tareq and Michaele Salahi, a Virginia couple chasing reality TV fame. 

At the time, Michaele had been cast in the forthcoming Real Housewives of Washington, DC, on Bravo, while Tareq, a polo-playing winery heir and charity organizer, was cultivating a profile on the local social scene.

On November 24, 2009, Obama was hosting Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on the White House's South Lawn when the Salahis - Michaele dressed to impress in a red sari - breezed past reporters in the East Wing's Booksellers Hall. 

A Washington Post gossip columnist recognized them and noticed that their names were not on the official guest list.

Photos soon surfaced of the couple posing with Obama and Singh at a pre-dinner reception in the Blue Room. 

A White House official confirmed that they had never been invited - and had not been seated at the dinner itself.

Yet the fact that two aspiring reality stars had slipped past Secret Service and sidled up to the then president for a photo-op was damaging enough. 

Congressional investigators hauled the Salahis before the House Homeland Security Committee, where both pleaded the Fifth Amendment.

Now remarried and living in Florida, not far from Trump's Mar-a-Lago, Tareq Salahi, 56, insists that the official account misses the point.

'There really was no crashing,' he told the Daily Mail. 'You can't sneak into the White House.'

After Bravo axed DC Housewives and replaced it with the nearby Potomac franchise, the Salahis divorced. Tareq spent time in Los Angeles before returning to northern Virginia, where he met his current wife, Lisa Spoden, 'on a buddy's yacht.'

The couple settled in Wellington, Palm Beach County's so-called 'horse country', where he works as a cruise industry consultant, weaving his passions for wine, polo and sailing into a single enterprise.

'Even when I host a cruise, I'll sometimes give wine seminars or play polo for guests at different ports,' he said. 'It's my favorite things all merged into one big, lovely circle.'

He has also kept one eye on the reality TV world he left behind, catching some of Members Only: Palm Beach, the Netflix show following women connected to Mar-a-Lago - because a friend of his, Gale Brophy, appears in it.

'It makes the Real Housewives of DC look conservative,' he said.

When asked about a potential cameo, Salahi hinted at something far larger in the works.

'I am in the middle of something right now that's being developed,' he said. 'It goes back to the Real Housewives and the original White House, and it sheds more light on things that were previously not disclosed. There was some documentation we always held onto secretly, and we're sharing it.'

The project, he said, leans more toward documentary than reality TV, and is in development now.

'It's really going to put the wrap on it,' he said. 'Because I still get asked everywhere I go: "How'd you do it?"'

His answer, as ever: it was television.

'People always forget it was a TV show,' he said. 'It was more exciting that there was a crashing scene and that's what everybody remembers.'

He insists he has no regrets. 'All those things happened for a reason, and they put me where I am now.'

As for Michaele, the two have not spoken in a decade. After their split, she rekindled a relationship with Neal Schon, co-founder and lead guitarist of Journey. The pair married and remain together, with Michaele still making regular appearances on the rock band's social media.

'I wish her the best,' Salahi said. 'We both have our own separate lives.'