The look on First Lady Melania Trump’s face after a gunman tried to storm the White House Correspondents’ dinner Saturday night said it all.
Eyes wide, mouth agape, her features frozen in horror as the room in front of her erupted in chaos, tables flipping, crockery smashing, hundreds of journalists and politicians hitting the deck as Secret Service agents barrelled toward the stage, guns drawn.
By contrast, the expression on the president’s face was calm, slightly quizzical, his jaw tight, as he surveyed the ballroom and then glanced toward the agents dashing to block him with their bodies from potential other assailants before bundling him off stage.
Perhaps, after surviving his third confirmed assassination attemptin less than two years, Donald Trump is used to people trying to kill him — or perhaps he has just trained himself to have a poker face in any situation.
Either way, he was built for such moments of crisis.
Two hours later, he was at the podium in the White House press briefing room — named after James Brady, the White House press secretary shot in the head and paralyzed in the 1981 assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan outside the same Washington Hilton hotel.
The historical echowas not lost on any of the hastily assembled journalists still dressed in their black-tie finery.
If his Trump-deranged critics could be honest with themselves for a moment, they would admit that the president’s remarks that night were pitch-perfect.
Wearing his tuxedo, he offered calm reassurance, wry humor, and even kindness to the shaken reporters and to a nation sick of ongoing political violence.
He called on Weijia Jiang, president of the White House Correspondents’ Association, who had been sitting next to him on stage that night, to ask the first question, complimenting the CBS News reporter with whom he has had an acrimonious relationship.
“Madam chairman,” he said, “I just want to say you did a fantastic job. What a beautiful evening.”
Then he quipped: “And after that, it’s very tough for her to ask a killer question.”
He promised he would reschedule the dinner within 30 days, “and we’ll make it bigger and better and even nicer.”
He was magnanimous about the Secret Service, who are being criticized for the lax security at the venue, instead praising them for tackling gun-toting leftist teacher Cole Allen outside the ballroom before he could burst in and carry out his alleged plan to assassinate Trump and almost his entire Cabinet, inexplicably gathered under one roof.
He even praised the media, which no one could argue has given him the kid-glove treatment his immediate predecessors enjoyed.
“You’ve been very responsible in your coverage. I will say I’ve been seeing what’s been out, and you’ve been very responsible,” he said.
He commended his wife for her composure despite “a rather traumatic experience for her.”
For himself, he admitted to a sort of assassination fatigue.
“It’s always shocking when something like this happens. Happened to me, a little bit. And that never changes,” he said. The presidency is “a dangerous profession . . . No country is immune.”
He suggested that the shared shock of everyone in the ballroom that night — Democrat and Republican, press and prey — was a “unifying” experience, perhaps even an auger of more harmonious times ahead.
“This was an event dedicated to freedom of speech that was supposed to bring together members of both parties with members of the press. And in a certain way it did,” Trump said. “I saw a room that was just totally unified. It was, in one way, very beautiful, a very beautiful thing to see.”
He called for Americans to come together.
“We have to resolve our differences. I will say, you had Republicans, Democrats, independents, conservatives, liberals and progressives . . . But yet everybody in that room, 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,” he said.
Let’s hope the president’s words of unity prove prophetic, but with Democrats slavering over what they are certain is their impending victory in the midterm elections, and planning impeachment and retaliatory witch-hunts when they again control the House, it’s hard to imagine, despite valiant Sen. John Fetterman calling for his party to “drop the TDS [Trump Derangement Syndrome].”
After all, there’s no end to the blood lust of the “Luigi Left” — the revolutionary nihilistic segment of the Democrat base that celebrates political violence, whether it’s the assassination of Charlie Kirk and health care CEO Brian Thompson, or Trump’s near misses.
Wishing for Trump’s assassination is not even a fringe phenomenon, with late-night host Jimmy Kimmel thinking it was funny to perform a fake White House Correspondents’ dinner skit last week, fantasizing about the first lady becoming a widow to an appreciative studio audience.
“So beautiful. Mrs. Trump, you have a glow like an expectant widow.” Boom boom.
Judging by his manifesto, Saturday night’s alleged Trump assassin wannabe was radicalized by the same grab bag of mainstream Democrat attacks on Trump, from Russiagate and the “very fine people” hoax to Epstein, that are recycled night and day through the mainstream media, and amplified to apocalyptic proportions by hate-filled luminaries such as Hasan Piker, Norm Eisen and the Lincoln Project losers.
Like a lot of Trump-deranged Democrats, 31-year-old Allen moved from Elon Musk’s X to left-wing social media platform Bluesky after the election, where his pro-Kamala Harris posts morphed into calling President Trump the “Antichrist,” and a traitor beholden to Vladimir Putin.
In his manifesto, he wrote: “I am no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes.”
Will any of the political nihilists who knowingly peddled those lies about Trump pause for a moment of remorse about their roles in the unraveling of this great country?
Politics being what it is, it’s unlikely Democrats will change course from their winning formula of demonizing Trump and whipping up half the country into a frenzy of hatred. But maybe their voters will punish them for going too far.
Lax security
A colleague inside was holding my ticket, so I flashed a PDF on my phone of an invitation to a pre-dinner party to gain entry. And having the president and the vice-president feet apart at the top table, while Speaker Mike Johnson, Marco Rubio, Scott Bessent, Pete Hegseth, and other top cabinet officials in the direct line of succession were sitting in the ballroom, was crazy. If the worst had happened and the attack had been carried out by multiple gunmen or suicide bombers, that would have left 92-year-old Senator Chuck Grassley, the only one in line of succession not in the room, to become president.
The event should have been treated by the Secret Service at the same level as an NSSE (National Special Security Event), a national security source told me. Without that label, “perimeters shrink and basic security measures like inspecting hotel guests and their vehicles aren’t considered for inspection days ahead”.
Something needs to change, and an urgent first step is to bring the Secret Service back into Treasury from DHS, as has long been mooted, restoring its identity as an elite group with better focus and funding.
And the sooner Trump gets his secure ballroom built, the better.
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