Under the Table

Secret Service and Security Personnel at the White House Correspondents Dinner. Source: The New Yorker.

Saturday night was supposed to be a détente. For the first time in either of his terms, Donald Trump showed up to the White House Correspondents' Dinner, which is the annual ritual where the press and the president share a room. It was a small but symbolically loaded gesture from an administration that has spent two years treating journalists as enemies of the state. Then the shots rang out. The shooter, Cole Tomas Allen, a 31-year-old from Torrance, California, rushed the security screening area outside the Washington Hilton ballroom armed with a shotgun, a handgun, and knives. A Secret Service agent was struck by a round but was wearing a bulletproof vest and is expected to recover. Between five and eight shots were fired in total. Trump, Vance, and most of the Cabinet were hastily evacuated by secret service. The security picture that has since emerged is alarming. Watch the surveillance footage and you see Allen doesn't slip through a gap or exploit some sophisticated vulnerability — he runs straight through a checkpoint in plain sight, past officers who fail to block his path in time. Journalists who attended reported that invitations were simple paper printouts and that IDs were not checked against a list. The event, attended by the president and much of the Cabinet, was not given the top security designation that would have unlocked the full weight of federal resources. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche called it a “massive security success story.” That characterization is hard to square with the footage. Which brings us back to Trump's decision to attend in the first place. The irony is sharp: the president who spent years boycotting the dinner as a symbol of media hostility finally showed up, only to be rushed out as 2,600 attendees dove under tables. Whatever rapprochement the evening was meant to signal was drowned in the chaos. Trump has since called for the dinner to be rescheduled with tighter security, a reasonable ask, but it doesn't explain why the security wasn't tighter the first time around, given that this was the most consequential gathering of the American government in a single room all year. The dinner was always more theater than diplomacy. Saturday proved it can be a target, too.