No one was shot and killed at the annual White House Correspondents' Association dinner on Saturday night at Washington D.C.'s Hilton Hotel. President Donald Trump—who is presently waging an illegal war of aggression against the nation of Iran and aiding and abetting a genocide in Palestine; who is responsible for the killing of at least 180 people in military strikes on civilian boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, and hundreds of thousands of deaths around the world due to the targeted withdrawal of humanitarian aid; who is orchestrating a campaign of domestic terror and brutality against immigrant and minority communities in the U.S.; who is weaponizing the Justice Department against his personal enemies; who is running the most nakedly corrupt and lawless administration in U.S. history; who a few weeks ago threatened to jail a journalist who reported on the downing and rescue of an American pilot in Iran if they didn't reveal their sources—was unharmed.
On a different floor of the Hilton, several layers of security away from the Correspondents' event, an individual carrying at least one firearm reportedly sprinted through a security checkpoint, exchanged fire with law enforcement, and was arrested. According to authorities the assailant is named Cole Tomas Allen, and evidently traveled by train from the Los Angeles area to D.C. for whatever he was trying to do at the Hilton. In the commotion of his attack and arrest, Allen is reported to have fired a shot that struck a Secret Service agent's bulletproof vest. As a precaution, Secret Service agents evacuated Trump—who recently threatened to annihilate the civilization of Iran and disseminated an image of himself depicted as Jesus Christ—and vice president JD Vance from the dinner.
After the remaining guests—who'd assembled in their finery to fête and network with the authoritarians strip-mining American society, rolling back rights and civil liberties, and rounding up demonized minorities into literal concentration camps, and who will return unscathed to their stations of power over the rest of us tomorrow—milled around for a while, taking selfies and helping themselves to the abandoned bottles of expensive champagne left on tables, security personnel informed them that the evening's festivities would not resume and instructed them to leave. A little while later Trump spoke to the press, including CBS News White House correspondent and WHCA member Weijia Jiang, who'd been seated beside him at the dais during the dinner. The recipient of a $400 million luxury airliner gifted him by the royal family of Qatar, presently engaged in a scheme to sue his own Treasury Department into paying him 10 billion dollars, boasted that, to the extent the fracas at the security checkpoint may have represented an attempt on his life, it attested to his historical importance.
"I hate to say I'm honored by that," he said, "but I've done a lot."
