We have a president who is notorious for openly despising journalists. For years, he has been shunning the White House Correspondents Dinner, where, in the past, some speakers have mocked him, and where he would be surrounded by people who write rude things about him. He finally plans to attend. Gunshots ring out, secret service agents rush in, quickly bundle the politicians out, and the whole event was cancelled.
Dog help me, I’m suspicious that the police-led shutdown of the event was the whole point. I don’t want to be a conspiracy theorist, but it was all too pat — the establishment was looking for a pretext, and they found one. No one was hurt, they had a fun kerfuffle, and this year’s WHCD was silenced while the administration gets to claim persecution.
Afterwards, the president said nothing about how there are too many guns too freely available — instead, he spoke to the press about how this justifies his ballroom, which would be more secure and safe.
I hate thinking this way, but this country feels like it’s built on money, lies, and cheap stagecraft right now.
I saw this meme: Too bad this incident didn’t occur near reporters, because it happened in Washington DC we’ll never know what happened.
One SS agent was hospitalized
Even in good years, the WHCD was bad form for our country. You have politicians and celebrities rubbing shoulders with celebrity journalists who need to maintain access to keep making lots of money. This is a recipe for small ‘c’ corruption.
“the White House Correspondents Dinner, where, in the past, some speakers have mocked him, and where he would be surrounded by people who write rude things about him”
Also:
“it’s a room full of sycophants who have, with rare exceptions, enabled him.”
It’s hard not to read these two extracts from two separate posts, one before the event and one after, as anything but contradictory. Unless you want to argue that writing rude things about him is also enabling him. Which I think you could but you would need to explain why sycophants would choose to be rude to their target of admiration. But if you put the most forgiving spin on these statements and pretend they are not contradictory you are then left with a big question: what is it these journalists weren’t doing that you think they should have been doing? Are we criticising the pressure for failure to report strongly enough on the administration’s failings, or criticising him for not liking it when they do that kind of thing?
Or was it all slightly dishonest framing in the first place?
The BBC correspondent was puzzled that despite his having triggered the metal detector he wasn’t searched and he was allowed through having merely waved his invitation at someone six feet away, moreover he was surprised that the hotel hadn’t been cleared of other guests.
Total non sequitur. The White House Correspondents Dinner is not a White House sponsored event, and is not help on government property.
He’s our non sequiturs and nonsense president.
#3: The quote from Michelle Wolf in that post was taken from her remarks at a WHCD, so it was a journalist event in which journalists were criticized. It is not contradictory at all to criticize an event held by status quo journalists to reinforce a chummy relationship with the people in power they’re supposed to criticize, and to recognize that there also some people there who recognize and call out the hypocrisy.
You do know that journalism isn’t monolithic, right? Although it’s getting that way as billionaires buy up all the voices.
There was an arrest: Cole Tomas Allen, a grad student and part-time teacher from Torrence, CA. Difficult to imagine at this point Allen being part of a Dumpster team plan to interrupt the dinner but there will be a trial and testimony. We’ll learn more.
…well, I don’t know if it’s cheap stagecraft.
The Secret Service agent who stopped the gun man was shot multiple times in the chest.
Fortunately, he was wearing a bullet proof vest that stopped all the bullets.
He was taken to the hospital and has now been released.
This assassination attempt was not very well planned or carried out.
If you are going to throw your life away, the least you could do is think things through first.
The attempted murder(s) are another appalling incident in a continual parade of appalling incidents.
More chaos.
The current timeline is not one I would choose to live in.
If they can get Micky-Ds delivered from Arkansas, then they can hire a fall guy from California.
This strikes me as a conspiracy theory that fails the test that lots of people had to be in on it and nobody leaked.
I heard it reported this morning that the shooter took Amtrak trains from Los Angeles to Washington, most likely the Southwest Chief to Chicago, then the Floridian to D.C. That’s a minimum of three nights on the train, so this would have had to have been planned well in advance.
I think it’s way too early to make wild speculations like this. So far, it looks like the shooter was a “lone wolf”. We’ll see.
“You do know that journalism isn’t monolithic, right?”
And yet the wording I took issue with framed exactly like it was*. It’s exactly because journalism isn’t monolithic and this event isn’t an event attended by this non existent monolith that I made the point I did.
* With perhaps the lightest of suggestions that the synopahancy wasn’t universal.
Whether staged or not, Trump immediately used it to justify his bunker-ballroom. https://www.reddit.com/r/democrats/comments/1svwexd/trump_claims_the_ballroom_is_needed_after_the/
The two things I took from this are:
Lots of people are become conspiratorially minded
Even more people don’t care
What’s the Polymarket odds that the “shooter” had MAGA connections?
OR, did someone have a Polymarket bet on the WHCD being interrupted by gunfire?
Worst. Timeline. Ever.
Gordon Smith #3
I’m not seeing the contradiction. The WHCD definitely mocked him in the past. This is why he avoided it, as President, right up until last night. Last year a comedienne, Amber Ruffin, was let go because she is critical of Trump.
If he decided to attend this year, it’s very likely because the attendees were carefully selected to be largely sycophantic “journalists” and celebrities.
The headlines on this say (paraphrasing): “President evacuated…” They don’t say what he evacuated, presumably his bowels, but that’s not news–maybe funny, but not news.
The main reason I’m not assuming that this was staged is because if they’d staged it I’d assume that the shooter would have been identified as a transgender communist Iranian from Mexico.
Microraptor @ 20
The senior officials are all MAGA, so he would have been identified as at least an atheist muslim black Chinese.
Cole Tomas Allen was just applying for the new firing squad positions opening up this week…
BTW Amber Ruffin was invited to a recent episode of the British version of “Have I Got News For You”.
I have been watching this comedy program at Youtube ever since the 2016 election to extract the humor of these rather dark times.
Which, since 28th September, 1990, has been known as ““Have I Got News For You”. You know, like Cambridge. Or Birmingham…
^ ^ ^
Yes! I am aware it started in Britain. I am merely assuming most readers are American and are mainly familiar with the new ‘Merican version. 🙂
It’s Trump’s usual performance art.
One iteration of the script surely called for the “assassin” to be killed in a hail of Secret Service bullets. But there were probably too many noteworthy people around.
It’s tough to kill the ghost of Jeffrey Epstein.
Trump’s poor health exposed during shooting as he has difficulty getting on his feet and would have fallen if he hadn’t been caught by the agents
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=zb6zS9QMa8Q
He is nearly 80 years old and no spring chicken, whatever his PR flunkies are saying.
He is able to talk for sustained periods, but the risk of malapropisms and gaffes increases with length.
He did not make any major error at the press conference but chose to go on about the goddamn ballroom instead of the secret service agent who took several bullets to his bulletproof vest to protect the people.
Trump’s never had any empathy, though. He did the same thing after the shooting at his campaign rally two years ago.
Interesting—neither of today’s online StarTribune issues had screaming headlines of the assassination attempt. They were on the front page, but under a Timberwolves story about Anthony Edwards.
Karoline Leavitt’s ‘shots will be fired’ remark ahead of White House dinner shooting surfaces
@29
The biggest story of the day should have been that someone ran a sub two-hour marathon.
Trump was quick to characterize the shooter as a non-Christian who hated religion. It turns out that the shooter was indeed a Christian. From the LATimes.
“While at Caltech, he was a teaching assistant and a member of the school’s Christian fellowship and the Nerf club, according to his LinkedIn profile.”
LOL.
You are right.
This is an amazing accomplishment.
The sub 2 hour marathon is or rather was, the same idea as the sub 4:00 minute mile was in the mid 20th century.
Sebastian Sawe is also pretty old for an elite runner. He is 31.
@33 Marathon runners tend to be older than sprinters.
@26 Can you please explain to me what would be this man’s motivation to take part in a hoax assassination? He could easily have been killed; as it is, he’ll certainly spend years incarcerated. Why would anyone volunteer to do this, and how could the people arranging the hoax be certain he’d never spill the beans?
I don’t intend to argue with you; I’m just curious
There is a joke from the 1980s to the effect that George Bush was looking through some CIA files and found one on John Hinckley Jr., thought about it for a moment and said to an aide to “Let’s send Hinckley some tickets to “Taxi Driver” and see what happens”. [John Hinckley attempted to assassinate Ronald Reagan and asserted he did it to impress Jodi Foster, whom he had seen in “Taxi Driver”.]
I expect the attacker at the Correspondents dinner was ‘not thinking clearly’….but that doesn’t preclude someone facilitating a person who is ‘not thinking clearly’ to attempt to act and/or have the means to act. I’m sure that such things have been done at one or another time and place somewhere in history, but at the moment I doubt it applies here.
@ sinuousrills, #35
I’m not flange, obviously, and I’m also not saying any of these are what happened, or that the attack was definitely a put-on by the regime, but some possibilities:
1.) The regime could threaten to harm people the alleged shooter cares about.
2.) The regime could offer something that would help people the alleged shooter cares about.
3.) All of it is an act. Perhaps the alleged shooter will “die” in custody, then go on living under a new identity, or perhaps they’ll go through a whole sham trial and get the same result.
If this is all a fake, then why assume that the shooter was either a volunteer or at actual risk?
What makes it seem fake is that Cole Tomas Allen was not gunned down by the heavily armed security people and that he shot all his shots into a bullet-proof vest.
I doubt that it was staged, but I’m perversely happy for people to think that way, rather than give Trump any undeserved sympathy. (As with the nicked-ear shooting, which has gone from “a sign from God” to “a false flag”, in the minds of some of his former fans.)
@37
Do any of these possibilities strike you as plausible?
Now Trump has a reason for his big, beautiful ballroom to continue to be built. Security. He said the shooting wouldn’t have happened if the ballroom was ready. This will be in the next challenge to in court.
I don’t really get the “it was staged” people.
Given the level of competence that is constantly being demonstrated by the regime, how the heck do you think they’d be able to pull off this conspiracy?
It feels far more parsimonious to believe that in a society that glorifies murdering tyrants and that is awash with guns, that there would be frequent attempts to use guns to assassinate a tyrant.
It’s hard to tell which is the predominant characteristic of this tRUMP admin: incompetence OR careful manipulation of events.
As @10 raven commented with ‘The current timeline is not one I would choose to live in.’
This is consistent with my saying for years: this society is in a Death Spiral and one of the most alarming aspects is the ever-increasing pervasive violence. I am fearful that this Death Spiral will only accelerate financed, powered and manipulated by misanthrope plutocrats.
“Slow Civil War” Author Jeff Sharlet on the Growing Normalization of Violence at Home & Abroad
https://www.democracynow.org/2026/4/27/us_political_violence
This has, unsurprisingly, been a topic of conversation at Lawyers Guns & Money too: The White House Correspondents Dinner is Decadent and Depraved.
The main points there are simple:
– It probably wasn’t staged (staging something like this without it being obvious isn’t easy)
– The fact that even people not normally conspiratorially minded are immediately wondering if it was staged is in itself a massive problem, as fascism loves itself nihilism where nobody trusts anything
– The Correspondants’ Dinner is absolutely full of all the people who helped normalize and sanewash Trump for years (Trump was actually willing to go this time, so he was sure they’d already kicked out anybody who might be willing to ask awkward questions) and thus are essentially all collaborationists.
@ sinuousrills, #40
1.) Do I believe the regime would threaten to harm someone’s family for what amounts to a photo op? I dunno; why don’t you ask the dozens of people who were shipped off to a notorious Salvadoran torture prison so that Kristi Noem could cosplay law enforcement in front of their cells to make the administration look tough on brown people? Why don’t you ask the family of Renee Good, who continue to receive death threats for the crime of having been related to a woman the regime murdered in operation “Look Tough on Black and Brown People in a State Run by a Vocal Trump Opponent?” Why don’t you ask any of the people that Trump has sicced his cult on for offending His Grottiness in some way?
Yes, I’d rate it highly plausible that the regime would do the same despicable things it does every single day, just to get something members of the regime want.
2.) No, I don’t believe it’s likely that the administration would help anyone in this, or any, way, when it’d be more in character to threaten them into doing their bidding. If he was a relative of a Russian oligarch or the Saudi royal family, or perhaps one of the grotesque little techbros that infest this regime, then yes, they’d help him out. But not some POC schoolteacher from the left coast.
No, this one isn’t especially plausible.
3.) Do I believe the regime would make the whole thing up, complete with crisis actors? Yes. Just last week they had an actress pretend to be a Doordash delivery person come to the White House for a photo op, to promote one of their scammy tax breaks.
Yes, I’d rate this one as extremely plausible that the regime would do something that, again, it does all the time.
Two out of three of the scenarios are very easy to believe, for the simple reason that it looks a hell of a lot like all the other underhanded, despicable things the regime fakes in whole or in part. That doesn’t mean that this was a staged event; it could just be a result of the culture of colossal incompetence the regime brings with them everywhere they go. The fact that the Secret Service apparently couldn’t be bothered to secure a bloody stairwell could be seen as either suggestive, or merely appalling.
The truth is, I don’t know what happened, nor do I particularly care. If there had been even a modicum of competence on display here by the SS or anyone else, then this particular mess could have been averted. There wasn’t, so now we’ll have to sit through gods-know how many days of the regime and their media pets milking this for all its worth.
I’m tempted to simply turn off the news for good, but that’s exactly what the regime wants, and I’ll never willingly give them that.
shermanj:
Uh…. incompetence, by a mile. I’ve never, ever seen them carefully manipulate events. I’ve seen them ham-handedly try to manipulate events over and over. They suck at their jobs. Insiders leak information like a sieve.
For example, one key reason to believe it wasn’t an inside job: there was no spike in assassination attempt on Trump bets on poly market and kalshi. Every time the US government does something nutty, there’s bets that leak out on prediction markets. But this time there weren’t.
@ vucodlak, #45
About how much news content do you consume in a given day?
@ sinuousrills, #47
I have no idea. I read articles throughout the day; I don’t keep a running count. The Guardian and Al Jazeera tend to be my primary go-to sources. I like ProPublica’s investigative reporting, and I usually check out their big stories. Wonkette usually gets a couple of visits a day from me, as does Digby’s Hullabaloo. Beyond that, I generally catch the local and national TV news in the evening while I’m cleaning up the kitchen or doing dinner, and I check out the occasional article that the annoying aggregator app on my computer spits out.
What does that have to do with this discussion?
@ vucodlak, #48
I’m really just curious.
In the news: https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/legal-filing-raises-questions-about-who-shot-secret-service-officer-press-dinner-2026-04-29/
↓
Legal filing raises questions about who shot Secret Service officer at press dinner
By Julia Harte April 30, 2026
April 29 (Reuters) – A U.S. government court filing on Wednesday raised questions about officials’ initial assertions that a gunman shot a Secret Service officer while allegedly attempting to assassinate President Donald Trump at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner.
The suspect, Cole Tomas Allen, 31, fired a shotgun “in the direction of the stairs leading down to the ballroom” where Trump, other administration officials and members of the press were gathered on Saturday night, according to the pretrial detention motion, which offered the government’s most extensive account yet of the incident.
In the motion, prosecutors referred to an officer firing five times, but the document does not mention that officer or any other being shot. A spent cartridge was found in the suspect’s shotgun, according to Wednesday’s motion.
The document did not accuse Allen of aiming at or striking the Secret Service officer who authorities say was shot in the chest but protected by his body armor.
That contrasts with statements made earlier by acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia. It also raises the question of who fired the round that struck the Secret Service officer.
Hours after the incident, Pirro told reporters that the suspect would be charged with “assault on a federal officer using a dangerous weapon,” though that is not among the charges brought so far. Pirro has said Allen could face additional charges. Prosecutors did charge Allen with attempting to assassinate the president.
[etc]