It was staged. Or maybe it wasn't.
The security should have been better. Then again, maybe Donald Trump wanted it that way to let it happen.
All any of us know for certain is that Cole Tomas Allen, a tutor in southern California, made his way into the Washington, D.C. Hilton lobby with a gun in the hopes of entering the ballroom where the White House Correspondents' Association dinner and assassinating someone. Shots were fired . . . just like Trump press secretary Karoline Leavitt said there would be before the dinner started. Trump actually accepted the invitation from a subservient, sane-washing press to be there in the first place, as if he were putting himself and others in harm deliberately.
Is Cole Allen an actor? Yes, he is. But that's a different Cole Allen. Is Cole Tomas Allen an actor? Did he get hired to pretend to shoot Trump? He may or may not have been trying to shoot Trump for real, though the bullets were likely real, not blanks - makes sense, Trump probably hired the kid who shot at him back in Butler, Pennsylvania to make it look real, and it a few people - including the gunman himself - died as a result, so what? As long as Trump came out with his popularity on the rise. And Allen is invoking his right to remain silent.
Except that this Allen kid is serious about going after Trump, having compared him to Hitler and having made references to Trump's alleged pedophilia. But even if he the real deal, even if he was out to assassinate someone, how do we know he was out to kill Trump?
Maybe he was out to shoot members of the press out of anger for kowtowing to them.
And once the assassination attempt came and went, assuming it was for real, what did Trump use it for? To declare martial law and suspend the Bill of Rights? To issue an executive order declaring the Democratic Party a terrorist organization and blaming the assassination attempt on them to make an excuse for banning them?
No . . . he used it to make an argument for a White House ballroom.
I kid you not.
Trump later opined that the assassination attempt would not have happened if the White House Correspondent's Association dinner had been held in a White House ballroom that should have already existed, and several of his MAGA toadies went on Fox News to endorse the idea of a White House ballroom, which they said would have far greater security than a hotel ballroom. I have just two questions in response:
1) Why would the White House Correspondents' Association, a private cooperative of reporters covering the executive branch of the federal government, have its annual dinner in a taxpayer-funded edifice that serves as the home for the very U.S. President they cover for better or for usually worse?
2) If the President of the United States is appearing at your private dinner in a hotel ballroom, why would the security at the hotel not be increased to the point where MS Now's Symone Sanders-Townsend could not, as she did, arrive at the White House Correspondents' Association dinner in a dress by motor scooter and go right up the front drive to the entrance?
Oh, man, I'm getting a really ridiculous image in my head right now.
But what is really ridiculous is that Trump is using this incident as a reason to get his damn ballroom built when the incident should be used to prompt a discussion of how to make schools, offices, and other pubic spaces safe from lone gunmen. As for the so-called journalists who invited Trump - who had planned to make a speech attacking the very press that was toasting him - to their annual soirée in yet their latest effort to suck up to Der Donald, what happened this past weekend, which caused the dinner to be canceled, was nothing short of karma.
The White House Correspondents' Association is supposed to be fair and balanced toward the President of the United States and the association insists that they have covered Trump without bias for him despite the pressure against them, and if you believe that, I have a 1973 Studebaker to sell you.
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