The irony of the White House dinner 'shooting'

Journalists threw a party to sane-wash a president. What happened there is being used to further erode free speech.

Members of law enforcement respond during the White House Correspondents Dinner, Saturday, April 25, 2026, in Washington. (AP Photo/Tom Brenner)

Before I judge anyone who attended this year’s White House Correspondents’ dinner, I want to say that that I used to be one of them. During the Obama years, my HuffPost colleagues and I always looked forward to that weekend in April when we got to put on formalwear and rub elbows with celebs at all the Vanity Fair before and after parties, because it was the one weekend a year that politics reporters got to feel like we were in LA instead of DC, maybe writing about the Oscars instead of infrastructure week. We savored that annual crumb of glamour, however embarrassing it is to say now, more than anyone really worried about the implications or optics of political journalists throwing back champagne and sliders next to the administration we we were supposed to be covering.

I stopped attending any WHCD festivities after 2016, in part because I moved to New York and in part because it became clear how gross and unbearable the event looked once we had a president who was openly attacking the free press. I’m a little surprised that ten years later, amid a full-on constitutional crisis, many people who consider themselves serious journalists are still showing up to this banquet that sane-washes a POTUS who yelled “Quiet piggy” at a female reporter on his plane recently and brags about the ideological capture of CBS News. Ironically, hundreds of those journalists ended up having front-row seats at what appeared to be the third assassination attempt on Trump, which the White House is now using to further erode the First Amendment, get Jimmy Kimmel fired for a joke and pull the broadcasting licenses of eight local ABC News stations.

The “shooting” itself has unfolded so strangely—and the White House capitalized on it so quickly to twist it in Trump’s political favor—that half the country appears to believe he staged it himself. A 31-year-old California man named Cole Tomas Allen was able to rush past security at the Washington Hilton on Saturday night armed with guns and knives—toward a room filled with Trump and his Vice President and nearly every member of his cabinet—before being tackled and arrested. A gunshot was heard, which we’ve been led to believe was fired by Allen, though the Department of Justice has yet to find the bullet or confirm that Allen used any weapon. The only person hurt was a Secret Service agent, who may have been accidentally shot by a fellow Secret Service agent in friendly fire rather than by the suspect.

In that scenario, Trump’s security team not only let a man with guns and knives blow through the checkpoint towards the president—you can see from the security footage Trump posted that night that Allen got quite far into the hotel before being tackled—but the agents managed to shoot each other in the process. The Washington Post reported that the Trump Administration had provided an unusually low level of security for an event featuring this many important people, which could suggest either that this administration is incompetent or that they weren’t trying very hard to deter an incident like this. “Hypothetically, If I had hidden an explosive in my shoe or my jacket, I would have had no problem getting into one of those ballrooms,” one Fox News reporter posted on X about the notable lack of security at the event.

Allen never got anywhere near the president, but because that room was full of journalists with cell phones, we’ve been treated to unlimited content from the aftermath of the gunshot ringing out. Stephen Miller grabbed his pregnant wife’s boob and used her as a human shield as Trump watched them evacuate from behind the curtain. (Trump later said in interviews that he delayed his own evacuation by the Secret Service on purpose, because he felt calm about the incident and preferred to watch everything unfold.) RFK Jr. ditched his wife entirely to flee the room. Kash Patel’s girlfriend was found holding hands with another man. One guy continued to eat his salad amid the chaos; a Free Press writer recorded a video of herself taking deep breaths and posted it to the grid.

And it seemed like almost immediately, the incident was being spun to push an agenda. Before Trump had even released a statement and before any of the facts had come out, a swarm of paid MAGA influencers all posted some version of the same coordinated message on X: This means we have to give Trump his ballroom!

There’s no chance that Republican influencers suddenly felt inspired to post about Trump’s ballroom, considering that it has absolutely nothing to do with the Correspondents’ Dinner. The dinner would never be hosted at the White House because it’s thrown for and by the journalists and to raise money for the WHCA; the entire point is for it to appear independent of the White House, even if the president invited to it to be roasted by a comedian every year.

But Trump has become obsessed with this ballroom, which will include a massive underground bunker for himself to ride out the next insurrection in, likely because the public absolutely hates the project and a judge recently halted it. So it’s worth noting how swiftly the White House was able to capitalize on this incident with a coordinated campaign to make the ballroom sound indispensable. Like clockwork, MAGA influencers posted in unison about it; Trump himself then came out and said this is why we need the ballroom; and then elected Republicans (even “libertarian” Rand Paul) fell in line the next day behind a bill appropriating $400 million in taxpayer money for this narcissistic monstrosity that Trump claimed was going to be fully funded by outside donors. “The sooner we get the ballroom built, the better it is for the country,” Sen. Lindsey Graham said yesterday.

The White House also wasted no time using the alleged assassination attempt to crack down on free speech, much like they did in the wake of the Charlie Kirk shooting. Melania posted a self-serious tweet demanding that Disney/ABC fire Jimmy Kimmel over a joke about her being an “expectant widow” (which was about their age difference, not assassination); Trump’s FCC is threatening to pull eight of ABC News’ local broadcasting licenses in retaliation for the same joke; and Trump’s DOJ has absurdly re-indicted James Comey over an old tweet featuring a picture of seashells that were in the shape of 8645 (meaning get rid of the 45th president). So what did journalists get for inviting Trump to their First Amendment party again? Escalating attacks on the First Amendment.

Meanwhile, as Trump was using the actions of a random guy who busted through his weak security setup to make the case for a gawdy ballroom and accelerate his revenge tour, legacy media outlets are covering the situation like this:

“Trump calls for unity and bipartisan healing,” wrote PBS. CNN’s Dana Bash had Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin (Md.) on her show and asked him if the Democratic' party’s “heated rhetoric” is the problem.

In fact, every single American president has had assassination plots against him. There were at least 11 against Obama. The reason nobody remembers the attempts on Obama’s life is that his Secret Service and intelligence teams caught and stopped them before a man was able to get a clear shot at his head or bum rush his banquet, whereas Trump’s security team straight-up let a sniper climb onto the roof of a nearby building during an open-air rally. What FBI Director Kash Patel calls a “tragedy” about Saturday night is actually a security failure of such stunning proportions that half the country thinks Trump staged the attempt on himself to revive his sinking poll numbers.

Trump is going to milk this incident for all it’s worth, but we don’t actually have to play along with any of it. We don’t need to talk about the “inflammatory rhetoric” on the left. I don’t need to read Allen’s manifesto about rapists and pedos to try and understand his motivations. Trump doesn’t need a $400 million ballroom for security now any more than he did last week. We don’t need to hand-wring about jokes on late night cable. The only thing anyone needs to talk about in the wake of Cole Tomas Allen casually jogging past Secret Service packed with weapons is why an administration that guts social programs to spend trillions of dollars on the Department of Defense doesn’t seem the least bit interested in defending the president’s head in public, ever.