The look on First Lady Melania Trump’s face after a gunman tried to storm the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on Saturday night said it all.
Her eyes were wide, her mouth was open, her features frozen with horror as chaos erupted in the room before her, tables were overturned, crockery was shattered, and hundreds of journalists and politicians pounded the deck as Secret Service agents charged towards the stage, their weapons drawn.
In contrast, the expression on the president’s face was calm, slightly questioning, and his jaw was clenched, as he scanned the hall and then looked toward the patrons who rushed to block him with their bodies from other potential attackers before removing him from the stage.
Donald Trump, after surviving his third confirmed assassination attempt in less than two years, may be used to people trying to kill him — or he may have just trained himself to put on a bad face in any situation.
Either way, it is designed for such moments of crisis.
Two hours later, he was on stage in the White House press briefing room — named after James Brady, the White House press secretary who was shot in the head and left paralyzed in the 1981 assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan outside the same Washington Hilton hotel.
The historical echo was not lost on any of the hastily gathered journalists, still wearing their black ties.
If Trump’s deranged critics were able to be honest with themselves for a moment, they would admit that the president’s remarks that night were perfect.
Dressed in his tuxedo, he offered calm reassurance, wry humor and even kindness to shaken reporters and a nation fed up with constant political violence.
He invited Weijia Jiang, president of the White House Correspondents’ Association, who was sitting next to him on stage that night, to ask the first question, praising a CBS News reporter with whom he had a tense relationship.
“Madam President, I just want to say you did a wonderful job. What a beautiful evening,” he said.
Then he joked: “After that, it became difficult for her to ask the killer question.”
He promised that he would reschedule the dinner within 30 days, “and we will make it bigger, better, even prettier.”
He was magnanimous toward the Secret Service, who had been criticized for lax security at the venue, instead praising them for tackling heavily armed leftist guru Cole Allen out of the room before he could break 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 dispute gave him the childish treatment his immediate predecessors enjoyed.
“You were very responsible in your coverage. I will say that I saw what happened, and I was very responsible,” he said.
He praised his wife for her composure despite the “traumatic experience she went through.”
He admitted to himself a certain fatigue with assassination.
“It’s always shocking when something like this happens. It’s happened to me quite a bit. And that never changes,” he said. The presidency is “a dangerous profession… and no country is immune.”
He noted that the shared shock of everyone in the room that night — Democrats and Republicans, press and prey — was a “unifying” experience, perhaps even a harbinger of more harmonious times to come.
“This was a free speech event that was supposed to bring together members of both parties with members of the press. And it happened in a certain way,” Trump said. “I saw a completely uniform room. It was, in a way, very beautiful, a very beautiful thing to see.”
He called on the Americans to come together.
“We’ve got to work out our differences,” he said. “I will say, you had Republicans, Democrats, independents, conservatives, liberals, progressives…but yet everyone in that room, it was a standard group of people, and there was a tremendous amount of love and coming together. I watched, and I watched, and I was very moved by that.”
Let’s hope the president’s words on unity are prophetic, but with Democrats enslaved by what they are sure is their imminent midterm election victory, planning impeachment and a retaliatory witch hunt when they once again take control of the House, it’s hard to imagine that, despite courageous Senator John Fetterman’s call for his party to “Drop TDS.” [Trump Derangement Syndrome]”.
After all, there is no end to the blood lust of the “Luigi Left” — the revolutionary, nihilistic part of the Democratic base that celebrates political violence, whether it be the assassinations of Charlie Kirk and health care CEO Brian Thompson, or Trump’s near misses.
The desire to assassinate Trump is not even a fringe phenomenon, as late-night host Jimmy Kimmel thought it was funny to perform a fake skit for White House reporters last week, imagining the First Lady becoming a widow in front of an appreciative studio audience.
“Very beautiful. Mrs. Trump, you have the glow of a pregnant widow.” Boom boom.
Judging by his statement, Trump’s alleged hitman on Saturday night has been radicalized by the same bag of mainstream Democrats’ attacks on Trump, from Russiagate and the “Very Fine People” hoax to Epstein, that are recycled day and night across the mainstream media, and amplified to horrific proportions by hate-filled luminaries like Hassan Baker, Norm Eisen, and the losers of the Lincoln Project.
Like so many unhinged Trump Democrats, the 31-year-old Allen moved from Elon Musk’s
“I am no longer willing to allow a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to stain my hands with his crimes,” he wrote in his statement.
Will any of the political nihilists who deliberately peddled those lies about Trump stop for a moment to regret their role in the dismantling of this great country?
Politics being what it is, Democrats are unlikely to change course from their winning formula of demonizing Trump and sending half the country into a wave of hate. But voters may punish them for going too far.
Lax security
One of my colleagues inside had my ticket, so I displayed a PDF on my phone with a pre-dinner party invitation to get in. Having the president and vice president spaced apart at the top table, while Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, Marco Rubio, Scott Bescent, Pete Hegseth, and other senior Cabinet officials sat across the hall in the direct line of succession, was crazy. If the worst had happened and the attack had been carried out by multiple gunmen or suicide bombers, it would have left 92-year-old Senator Chuck Grassley, the only one in the line of succession who was not in the chamber, to become president.
A National Security source told me that this event should have been handled by the Secret Service at the same level as an NSSE (National Security Special Event). Without this designation, “the perimeters would shrink and basic security measures such as inspections of hotel guests and their vehicles would not be taken into account during the upcoming inspection days.”
Something needs to change, and the immediate first step is to return the Secret Service from DHS to Treasury, as it has long been proposed, and restore its identity as an elite group with better focus and funding.
The sooner Trump builds a safe dance floor, the better.