Some Scattered Thoughts About Last Night’s WHCD Shooting

Last night, a man by the name of Cole Allen tried to break past a security checkpoint at the White House Correspondents' Dinner in Washington, D.C. (The event was held at the Washington Hilton, as it has traditionally been for decades — it is a venue with a certain unfortunate presidential history.) And I was prepared to make a number of interesting observations about how the “new” WHCD reflects the desperately predictable and onanistic obsessions of the Trump-era class of “influencers” and self-impressed journalists every bit as much as its rancid Obama-era version did — everything old is new again.

But then a guy with a name like a DSW budget-line shoe brand armed himself with a shotgun, an arsenal of pistols, and some knives, and had to go and try to assassinate the president — again. (It is mildly appalling that, in the age of Trump, we are beginning to become jaded about failed assassination attempts on the president.) Nobody was killed, in large part because this man seems to have been an incompetent as well as a loon — an officer was shot but was protected by his bulletproof vest.

And that, I suppose, is one reason why it’s easy to be flippant about it. (As Winston Churchill once noted, “There is nothing more exhilarating than to be shot at with no result.”) The other reason is that everything we know about the shooter so far suggests that he will turn out to profile exactly as everyone expects him to: alienated, underemployed, and radicalized by the media’s (at time subliminal, at times open) embrace of the “Luigi Nation” zeitgeist. (In his "manifesto," he apparently accuses Trump of being a "pedophile," in an alarming indication of how Epstein conspiracy theories have gone mainstream.) Apparently, Allen is the elite-educated California son of a family in the D.C. area, who carefully planned his attack, purchasing weapons and booking a reservation in advance of the WHCD event. (Apropos of nothing, my colleague Noah Rothman has a new book out soon called Blood and Progress: A Century of Left-Wing Violence in America. I’d congratulate Noah on his good timing, but, in truth, it was always a safe bet to age well.)

There is a lot of contradictory information out there right now. It seems Allen was talking with authorities at one point but has now decided to keep silent. Either way, I am grateful he is alive — dead, he would no doubt be the inevitable subject of another rash of conspiracy theories. I will leave it to others to unpack the security implications of the unsuccessful attempt. The White House itself has chosen a different political angle, emphasizing in the aftermath the necessity of building Trump’s “big, beautiful ballroom.” But I already know what the true lead story for tomorrow is going to be: “Aaron Rupar Asleep at the Wheel Again.”

[slideshow slideshow="1951928" /]