It's, It's...A Ballroom Blitz!

Why do Republicans talk so much about hatred of Donald Trump--but seem to care so little about what would get Americans to stop attacking him?

Apr 29, 2026

Cole Tomas Allen, a 31-year-old tutor and computer engineer from Torrance, California, in restraints after allegedly attempting to assassinate President Donald Trump at the White House Correspondents' Association Dinner on April 24, 2026. Photographer unknown; image retrieved from Wikimedia Commons

Last weekend, a potential assassin got close enough to President Donald Trump to end his life, something all reasonable people deplore. Yet it seems to be something that lots of unreasonable people want to do.

Including last weekend, when Cole Tomas Allen crashed through a security perimeter armed with several guns and knives, there have been two other close calls. Best video? Even the odious Stephen Miller wrapped his entire body around his pregnant wife, but HSS Secretary RFK, Jr. seems not to know or care where his wife Cheryl Hines is (she is climbing over tables and chairs on her own, trying to keep up: this was up. for a while on Instagram accompanied by the “Curb Your Enthusiasm” theme song.)

But assassination isn’t funny. The first serious attempt on Trump’s life was the closest call. In July 2024 in Butler, PA, during the campaign, candidate Trump was dragged from the stage with a nasty ear wound and photographed with ribbons of blood flying around his face after a lone gunman shot at him. The second was in September 2024, when a shooter managed to secrete himself in some bushes at Trump’s West Palm Beach golf course, but was discovered when the President was playing a previous hole.

There have been at least two other incidents in which individuals have been breached Donald Trump’s security: in September 2025, NYPD officer Melvin Eng successfully infiltrated the President’s detail, and in February 2026, 21-year-old Austin Tucker Martin from North Carolina, armed with a shotgun and a can of gasoline, crashed his car through the gates at Mar-A-Lago. Then, there were multiple incidents during Trump’s first presidency, including one in which a mentally ill man in North Dakota stole a forklift and drove it into a Trump rally.

I was initially skeptical when Trump was claiming the most attempts on his life ever, but it turns out that it is true. The Dallas Express has counted 17 actual attempts on Trump’s life, which puts him four ahead of the next President (Barack Obama) and 12 ahead of Abraham Lincoln and Bill Clinton. Gerald Ford is last, as usual, with three, two of whom were women.

Click to be a paying subscriber!

But here’s an interesting factoid: Ford was only president for two years. So that’s 1.5 attempts on his life per year, putting him ahead of Trump, at 1.2 per year. In fact, Obama wins—again!—with 1.6 per year.

What is clear is that, combined, presidential assassination became dramatically more attractive to the lunatic fringe in 2008, the year Obama was elected, and social media became a permanent feature of our political life. Much digital ink has been spilled on escalating political violence, and threats to public figures, and for all the breast-beating about violent political rhetoric, no one in political life has taken this historical fact seriously, just as no one has taken seriously the role of digital media companies in proliferating and profiting from revenge porn, adolescent depression and anxiety, rampant financial fraud, and more recently, gambling addiction.

Internet companies basically own Capitol Hill now, and it is unclear to me why political violence—which also now affects Congress and the federal judiciary at unprecedented levels—is not of intense bipartisan concern, except that both political parties cannot be weaned off of billionaire money. Several other things also seem obvious to me. Despite more intense surveillance and security than ever before in United States history, it remains extraordinarily easy to get close to public figures in order to hurt them, even if you are a person with a highly disordered mind, and especially if you do not care about being killed or jailed for the rest of your natural life in a windowless Super Max.

My second observation will shock you, but here goes: despite the scandals of recent years, the Secret Service appears to do a difficult job pretty well. The odds suggest that seventeen attempts on Donald Trump’s life should have resulted in more than a close call and a clipped ear—something we should be grateful for even if you think, as I do, that the world would be better off without him in the White House.

What is more interesting to me is how the most recent attempt on Donald Trump’s life reveals the dysfunction of his administration and its inability to deliver a focused narrative of events and what they mean. Here’s a small point: no one has yet explained to me why Allen, the Millennial WHCD assassin, seems to have been completely unclothed at the time of his arrest. Did he charge the security line naked? Or did the Secret Service think that Hamas-style, he might have a bomb strapped to his body?

More importantly, as of this morning, although its disgraced Director Kash Patel has brought the Bureau under intense negative scrutiny, the FBI has not said whether the Secret Service agent hit by a bullet was shot by Allen or by a fellow officer. This strikes me as a simple question of forensics—the kind of thing the FBI specialized in prior to the Kash Patel era—surely they know. So why not say? It’s easy to understand how this could happen in a hectic moment because it happens all the time: around 245 law enforcement officers are shot by a colleague every year, or two every three days (it’s why undercovers are told to wear a specific color sock ever day), and about a fifth of these incidents are fatal.

My guess? They know the Secret Service agent was hit by friendly fire, but do not wish to say because something that is a normal hazard of police work is, in the logic of Trumpism, a public relations problem.

And here is where I want to land: assassination attempts have, in the past led to national reflection, whereas in the Age of Trump the question is never, How do we understand this terrible thing? Instead, it is always, how can we use this terrible thing to cast disfavor on the Democrats and win the next election?

As usual, the fish rots from the head. On CBS’s “60 Minutes,” Donald Trump blamed the No Kings organizers who have, as Judd Legum notes, “been some of the largest and most peaceful protests in history.” He then unleashed extended verbal abuse on CBS journalist Norah O’ Donnell for reading an excerpt from Allen’s manifesto, in which the would-be assassin said he was “no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes.”

Here is the exchange that followed, as narrated by Scott Nover of The Washington Post:

“Well, I was waiting for you to read that because I knew you would because you’re, you’re horrible people. Horrible people. Yeah, he did write that. I’m — I’m not a rapist. I didn’t rape anybody,” he said.
“Oh you think — do you think he was referring to you?” O’Donnell asked in response.
“I’m not a pedophile. Excuse me. Excuse me. I’m not a pedophile. You read that crap from some sick person?” Trump responded. “You should be ashamed of yourself reading that because I’m not any of those things.”
When O’Donnell responded, “Mr. President these are the gunman’s words—” the president said that she “shouldn’t be reading that on ‘60 Minutes’” and called the journalist a “disgrace.”

We know, of course that Trump is narcissistic and highly reactive, but let’s imagine how another president, with shrewder communications strategies, might have handled this. I was also a little shocked that O’Donnell read this section of the manifesto, only because it is beside the point and failed to dig deeper into the story in any meaningful way.

But the question was also an opportunity, and Trump dropped the ball. Alternative answers might have included: that all members of his administration present at the event (except, weirdly, Kash Patel) were targeted; references to an escalating mental health crisis in this country, and how it and violent conspiracy theories are driven by social media algorithms; that so many people are murdered and wounded by mass shooters in the United States and he is but one; and empathy for the numerous people in the room, including his own wife, some journalists, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and Erika Kirk (who fled the room in tears), all of whom may have legitimate PTSD from prior incidents of gun violence.

But it is a real mistake to confine this me, me, me attitude towards dangerous violence to the President. The brigades of influencers who surround amplify the President also missed the boat, It’s as if a memo goes around, saying: “Here’s how we’re gonna use this to slime the Democratic Party!” Shooters are always immediately identified as Muslims, trans, and registered Democrats, long before such things can be accurately known, and as such, they are also portrayed as Democratic Party operatives—aligned with “the Left,” or just identified as “they” (as in “They want you to think x,” or “They tried to kill President Trump again.”)

But what these influencers also do is string unrelated events together as if they were part of an actual conspiracy being methodically carried out, as opposed to a deeply troubling zeitgeist that activates people with mental illness. For example, the rankly partisan Conn Carroll, a Washington Examiner opinion writer, posted on X:

Not only was this the third assassination attempt on Trump, but it comes after the murder of Charlie Kirk, the murder of two Israeli Embassy staffers outside the Capital Jewish Museum, the murder of two Catholic school children in Minneapolis, the attempted murder of ICE agents in Texas, the firebombing of an Israeli solidarity march in Colorado, the arson of the governor’s mansion in Pennsylvania by an anti-Israel activist, and the burning of Teslas across the country.

All of these things are, of course, terribly troubling. It is also a cherry-picked list of events designed to send one message: “they” hate Trump, Israel, and you. Other events—the murder of two state legislators in Minnesota, January 6, Unite the Right—which are equally significant, the murder of four federal judges since 1979 but two since 2020, the escalation in mass shootings since 1990, the hammer beating of Paul Pelosi by a MAGA partisan, the shooting of Congresswoman Gabby Giffords, and a campaign of violence against reproductive care centers that began over half a century ago—are equally relevant if you are focused on the real question. And that question is not, why does everyone hate poor Donald Trump, but: why do we live in such an unhinged, violent society?

The other opportunity that was telegraphed to MAGA influencers and politicians, as if they had all spontaneously thought of it within hours after the events at the Hilton, was that this was an opportune moment (in the midst of a war with Iran, escalating fuel and food prices, and a healthcare system careening towards full collapse) to make the argument for Donald Trump’s biggest vanity project: the White House ballroom!

As David Graham noted at The Atlantic, at the press conference held a few hours after the event, Trump himself cited the assassination attempt as a reason why this bloated, disorganized project needed to move ahead, despite legal challenges against it. By that logic, of course, Congress should have called a special session in 1865 to build a theater on the grounds of the White House. As usual, Trump’s influencer army insisted, almost simultaneously and in nearly identical language, that the nonsense had to stop, now:

The commentator Meghan McCain wrote on X, “I don’t want to hear one more fucking criticism of Trump’s new ballroom at the White House.” Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, a titular Democrat, cited “Trump Derangement Syndrome” to say, “After witnessing last night, drop the TDS and build the White House ballroom for events exactly like these.” And Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche fired off a letter to the attorney for the plaintiff in a federal lawsuit challenging the construction, saying that the Justice Department would move to dismiss the case if it wasn’t dropped by 9 a.m. this morning. (It was not.)

These quotes Graham reproduced are just a fraction of the tsunami of demands for ballroom-building that are supposed to be our best answer to political violence. The normally frugal libertarian Rand Paul posted, “I'm dropping a bill tomorrow. Let's build the Ballroom.” The question of why one might need legislation to do this—and numerous, diverse MAGAs, including Lindsey Graham, Lauren Boebert, Mike Lee, and Rick Scott have jumped on board—if the ballroom is being paid for by private donations, and not tax dollars, goes unanswered. Because of course the Trump administration is lying about this—sure, there will be some donations. But I would wager that building a massive addition to the White House with a military-grade bunker beneath will probably cost not $250 million, not $500 million, but about a billion dollars.

You know you wanted to listen to one of weirdest songs of the 1970s.

Which is, in a way, also beside the point when we are talking about assassinations. But should Charlie Kirk have confined himself to speaking in a White House ballroom? Should Paul Pelosi have slept there? It is this thing, of all the things, that makes the attack on the White House Correspondents Dinner a template for the failure of Trumpism: the MAGA mentality doesn’t just see violence as normal, it sees it as something to be used for political advantage and ignored if an incident does not support one of their pointless, inane policy priorities.

Go ahead: build the ballroom. But that has nothing to do with what it would take to restore this nation to functioning policies that serve the people. And pushing political assassination, a symptom of profound social dysfunction, off the stage is precisely the wrong thing to do.

Political Junkie

Discussion about this post

Ready for more?