Perhaps I was a bit hasty in assuming that the shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner where Viceroy Donald Trump appeared last weekend was staged to make him look like a victim, or for that matter that the Butler, Pennsylvania shooting in his 2024 campaign was a setup.
We are being told that we should not rush to judgment simply because this “administration” has lied to us before, is lying to us now about every other subject, and Donald Trump lies like he breathes, which is to say, on reflex, and if he ever tried to stop himself he would blackout and maybe die.
Upon reflection I can think of two serious reasons why the shooting was not set up by anybody in the government. The first and less obvious is that nobody in this three-ring circus can keep a secret, especially not Whiskey Pete Hegseth. On the other hand he seemed remarkably happy after the event. That would also explain why FBI Director Kash Patel was at his table looking totally lost. Hey, maybe somebody should brief THE HEAD OF FEDERAL LAW ENFORCEMENT when there’s a shooter in the building with the president? It would also explain why Stephen Miller was shown being led off by Secret Service while holding his pregnant wife in front of him. And holding her boob. I’m not kink-shaming.
The other reason is the suspect himself. Unlike the Butler shooting, the shooter was taken into custody without needing to be shot. His name is Cole Allen. Apparently just ten minutes before everything went crazy, he sent an email to friends and family as a short manifesto as to why he was going to attack. He certainly seemed cheerful. It started “Hello everybody! So I may have given a lot of people a surprise today. Let me start off by apologizing to everyone whose trust I abused. I apologize to my parents for saying I had an interview without specifying it was for “Most Wanted.” At one point he mentioned that it shouldn’t have been as easy to get through security as it was, which the conspiracy side is saying is support for Trump’s demand to build a secured ballroom at the White House. But there was other stuff he said that Trump wouldn’t like as much. Namely: “On to why I did any of this:
I am a citizen of the United States of America.
What my representatives do reflects on me.
And I am no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes.”
At this point I need to ask: What does it say about the president when the misogynist tyranny in Iran and a would-be assassin both seem more reasonable and moral than he does?
The email later made news with a preview of 60 Minutes where Norah O’Donnell interviewed Trump just after the event and asked about Allen saying he didn’t want to be represented by a rapist, pedophile and traitor. Trump said, “I knew you would ask that question, because you’re horrible people. I’m not a rapist.” And as he talked over her, O’Donnell was heard asking, “oh, do you think he was talking about you?”
It’s like somebody saying “I hate this redheaded clown who sells junk food to children” and Ronald McDonald says “Is he talking about ME??”
One point on the manifesto that a lot of skeptics have made: One of Allen’s relatives informed local police as soon as possible, and procedure where a potential attack on the president is concerned is that the Secret Service and FBI be informed as soon as possible. But Allen still got ten minutes to act, and wasn’t caught until after he made his first move. Some folks thought this was evidence that the government wanted to set up an event and let him act. Others thought this was a simple case of law enforcement not acting quickly enough.
One Facebook friend put it very well: “Before we get too paranoid, remember that he fired every single intel and counter-intel expert in the government — probably because all of them could see how easy it is to manipulate him. He’s surrounded himself with yes-men rather than professionals, and that almost certainly applies to his security detail as well. They were most likely picked for loyalty rather than competence, and this is the result.
“Or it was staged. 50-50 either way.”
It brings to mind Hanlon’s Razor: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.” Certainly a lot of what we saw is a case of not managing the security event competently. However Hanlon’s Razor has two corollaries: “Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice” and “any sufficiently advanced malice is indistinguishable from incompetence.”
Was it staged? Based on what we know of the shooter, likely not, but as The Rock would say, IT DOESN’T MATTER. Despicable Me and his minions base everything on ulterior motives and how they can game a situation, no matter what it is. If it seems like the event was staged, it’s not just because the regime has lied about everything else, it’s because THEY are the ones acting like it was staged for their benefit.
Because after the shooting, the Dinner host announced that the president was going to hold a press conference in just 30 minutes. (And everybody laughed.) And Trump used the occasion to say this is why he needed to have his one big beautiful ballroom, when the White House has never hosted the Correspondents’ Dinner, the judge who halted construction did allow for the construction of a bunker, and drone-proof bunkers are not going to help against a shooter who managed to get a longarm and shotgun past security.
Not to mention that even before the shooting, everyone was wondering why Trump wanted to attend on this particular year when he’d never attended the event as president before. And everyone was speculating on whether he could even make a speech to what was bound to be a hostile audience.
And then over the weekend through Monday Trump and other Republicans blamed the evil Democrats for inciting a climate of hatred as opposed to reacting to it. For instance, before the weekend, Jimmy Kimmel did a fake roast speech to the Correspondents’ Dinner where he said that Melania had “the glow of an expectant widow.” And for this His Majesty demanded (again) that Kimmel be fired by ABC.
A Trump supporter halfway beat Nancy Pelosi’s husband to death, and nobody claimed Trump had anything to do with it. When Trump gave his speech on January 6 saying that the Vice President should go along with his fake elector scheme, and he didn’t, Trump tweeted “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage” to do the right thing, and all of a sudden all the people who were at the speech busted into the Capitol chanting “HANG MIKE PENCE!”
But that wasn’t considered an example of free speech inciting violence. Although by Trump’s “standards”, it should have.
“They must’ve been talking about some other fast food clown!”
That hypocrisy is yet another one of the reasons why the president cannot command sympathy and support for his demands, however much he uses his Republican Party cult to make up for that. It keeps coming back to the fact that people believe that Trump would fake a shooting just to hustle for sympathy, whether he actually did or not, and he is acting like he set this up for his personal goals whether he did or not.
Why would we believe Trump would do that?
Well, what kind of person would stage a shooting at a journalists’ event just to get the public to support his demands?
The kind of person who would let a guy get shot at one of his rallies just to gin up support for his presidential campaign.
What kind of person would let a guy get shot to get support? The kind of guy who would pal around with convicted pedophiles like Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, and who has done everything in his power to cater to Maxwell, short of pardoning her, which is still not off the table.
What kind of person would hang out with the likes of Epstein? The kind of person who as president would laugh at the War Powers Act, kill fishermen in international waters, violate sovereignty to abduct one head of state, start a major war in the Middle East, target their head of state for assassination, target a girls’ school in the country, killing over a hundred children, and in his own words, threaten to end an entire civilization if they don’t bow down to him.
The problem is not that the Correspondents’ Dinner was a failure of security and a real assassination attempt. The problem is not that it looks like a staged assassination attempt. The problem is, it only looks like a staged attempt because the ruling class of this country are lower than scum, and the longer they stay in power, the more damage they will do to the entire world.