Cole Tomas Allen’s failed attempt to storm the White House Correspondents’ Dinner did so much to boost President Trump’s political fortunes that some people were left to wonder if that was the actual intent of the demented self-described “Friendly Federal Assassin.”
And Trump was so quick in capitalizing on the moment that this misapprehension was joined by a paranoid fantasy that the assassination attempt had been staged.
The gunshots yards from the entrance to the ballroom at the Washington Hilton caused everybody inside to share the instant danger with the Great Divider. Trump was thereby able to speak about the beauty of the unity in the immediate aftermath.
“We have to resolve our differences,” Trump said in a White House press briefing following the shooting. “I will say, you had Republicans, Democrats, independents, conservatives, liberals, and progressives. Those words are interchangeable, perhaps, but maybe they’re not. But yet everybody in that room, big crowd, record-setting crowd, there was a record-setting group of people, and there was a tremendous amount of love and coming together. I watched, I watched, and I was very, very impressed by that.”
Trump had said much the same in a speech in the week after the 2024 assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, when his ear was nicked by a bullet, and he rose bloody-faced, an outsized American flag in the background.
“The discord and division in our society must be healed. We must heal it quickly,” Trump said six days later in a speech at the Republican National Convention accepting the nomination. “As Americans, we are bound together by a single fate and a shared destiny. We rise together. Or we fall apart.”
That did not last even to the end of the speech, when he said the Democrats had “used COVID to cheat” in the 2020 election and in “that horrible result,” President Joe Biden had done “unthinkable” things to the country.
What did last was the image from Butler, so perfect that it got him elected to a second term. Some people imagined it had been staged, much as they did after Saturday night’s shooting at the Hilton.
And that illusion was fortified when Trump immediately used the hotel ballroom attack as a reason to complete the construction of the gratuitously grandiose $400 million White House “grand ballroom” that Trump made room for by tearing down the East Wing. A federal judge has halted the project pending congressional approval.
“I didn’t want to say this but this is why we have to have all of the attributes of what we’re planning at the White House,” he said at the White House press briefing. “It’s actually a larger room, and it’s much more secure.”
The proposed White House ballroom is projected to be 22,000 to 25,000 square feet, actually slightly smaller than the 29,000-square-foot one at the Hilton. But Trump’s ballroom, as planned, does have a higher ceiling, 40 feet as opposed to 30. And the design of the White House venue calls for both bulletproof windows and a drone-proof roof.
Trump continued, “We need the ballroom. That’s why Secret Service, that’s why the military are demanding it.”
He added, “They wanted the ballroom for 150 years for lots of different reasons, but today is a little bit different because today we need levels of security that nobody has ever seen before.”
He kept pressing the issue with a Sunday post on Truth Social.
“This event would never have happened with the Militarily Top Secret Ballroom currently under construction at the White House,” he wrote. ”It cannot be built fast enough!”
Also on Sunday, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche posted on social media a letter to the lawyer representing the National Trust for Historic Preservation, pressing the organization to drop its “frivolous lawsuit” to halt the ballroom construction.
Blanche alluded to the 1981 assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan at the Washington Hilton, saying, “As history proves, that venue is demonstrably unsafe for the President of the United States because its size presents international security challenges.”
In fact, Reagan was shot outside the hotel by a gunman who sidled into a press pen where nobody checked for his credentials, as a high-ranking NYPD chief had for journalists when Reagan visited New York a few days before.
But Blanche had a point he wanted to make.
“Yesterday’s assassination attempt on President Trump proves yet again, that the White House ballroom is essential for the safety and security of the President, his family, his cabinet and his staff. When the White House ballroom is complete, President Trump and his successors will no longer have to venture beyond the safety of the White House perimeter to attend large gatherings at the Washington Hilton ballroom. The White House ballroom will ensure the safety and security of the President for decades to come and prevent future assassination attempts on the President at the Washington Hilton.”
The letter continues, “Put simply, your lawsuit puts the lives of the president, his family, and his staff at grave risk. I hope yesterday’s narrow miss will help you finally realize the folly of a lawsuit that literally serves no purpose except to stop President Trump no matter what the cost.”
The letter gave the organization until 9 a.m. Monday to dismiss the lawsuit. The DOJ would otherwise “move to dissolve the injunction and dismiss the case in light of last night’s extraordinary events.”
The letter declares: ”Enough is enough.”
That is exactly what gun control advocates have said again and again and again as one shooting horror followed another and another and another. But when Face the Nation host Margaret Brennan asked Blanche on Sunday how the unhinged gunman from the latest Washington Hilton shooting was able to transport multiple weapons, he responded, “This isn’t about in my mind changing the law, or making the laws more restrictive around possession of firearms.”
Brennan inquired, “I’m asking about crossing state lines with that firearm.”
Blanche shrugged, ”I don’t think that’s something we should be focused on.”
A new bulletproof White House ballroom or not, the president will still periodically have to venture forth into a country where the right to bear arms has translated to 120 guns for every 100 people. The enabling Second Amendment is rooted in the British attempt to seize arms from colonists back in 1775, thereby sparking the American Revolution. Britain presently has fewer than five guns per 100 people.
As it happens, the current King of England arrived in Washington D.C. on Monday to begin a state visit, which is going ahead despite the Hilton ballroom shooting, and despite Trump’s thirst for a ballroom of his own still hitting a blockade.
