My first thought after I found out there had been gunshots at the White House Correspondents Dinner on Saturday was quite possibly the same as yours and can be summed up in a single word: staged.
The fact that enough information about the shooting suspect, Cole Tomas Allen, has emerged to mostly tamp down the suspicion of it being bogus doesn’t in the slightest minimize what was so disturbing about it. This administration is so deceitful, corrupt and insincere that our default is now that we’re probably being played — because most of the time, we are.
In this case, however, the shooter doesn’t fit the typical lone wolf profile. Allen, 31, is a Caltech engineering graduate from Torrance, CA, with a master’s degree from Cal State Dominguez Hills. He’s a mechanical engineer and computer scientist as well as a game developer. This isn’t some loser dude living in his parents’ basement playing Mortal Kombat and firing out hateful messages to his fellow malcontents. He was Teacher of the Month at a tutoring and test prep center.
What caused this guy to snap and allegedly rush the Washington D.C. Hilton with a shotgun, a handgun, and a bunch of knives — driven by a manifesto to target administration officials — isn’t yet clear. But the truth is that he was no random wacko. He’s a very bright guy who evidently gave this a lot of thought before making an unfortunate choice.
This is not to say that I or anyone reading these words would ever consider a similar violent act of trying to burst into a fancy event attended by hotshot journalists with the goal of tallying a body count. But many of us surely understand the frustration and anger that can lead to it.
Anyone sticking to the “It was staged!” charge would at this point have to account for a lot of significant question marks. Chief among them is why a guy of Allen’s evident intellect and progressive politics would decide on something of a whim to throw his life in the trash to help President Trump with another timely diversion from the growing quagmire in Iran and the still-looming saga of the Epstein Files.
Yet Trump sure didn’t seem shaken up in the slightest by this incident that we can’t yet seem to easily categorize. Was it an assassination attempt? A lax response to one man’s mental breakdown? A simple security breach? All of the above?
Trump pivoted so seamlessly from the abrupt cancellation of the dinner to the necessity of building his White House ballroom/bunker pronto that it left many heads spinning. He talked about drone-proofing and bulletproof glass and 150 years of presidents purportedly demanding the ballroom and all of his usual blah blah blah.
Fortunately, no one was seriously hurt on Saturday, much less killed. You see more injuries in a typical Sunday of NFL Football. That doesn’t mean the incident wasn’t entirely genuine. But everything this administration does is so designed to mislead that it’s impossible to trust anything it tells us.
That’s not a conspiracy theory. That’s the shameful reality of 2026.
We have been conditioned now to treat everything we’re being told, every line we’re being fed, as suspect. The one thing we never hear is any accountability. We’re supposed to believe them and not our eyes. Instead, it’s about deflection, justification, branding. A security failure is cast as a further reason to build an unnecessary golden monstrosity onto a structure that once symbolized class and distinction but now stands for tackiness and hideous overkill.
At a moment when a normal human being would be counting his blessings for literally and figuratively dodging another bullet, Trump is consumed with construction, camera angles, ratings, profits.
Why would we buy a single thing he tells us about this or anything else? He contends that the economy is the strongest in history when it’s teetering on the edge of freefall. He says his approval ratings are high when they’re at historic lows. He insists we’re winning a war in Iran that all indications are the opposite. He struts around telling us he’s been “totally exonerated” in the Epstein Files when nothing of the sort has been confirmed. Down is up. Cold is hot. Fake is real.
We’re a populace that’s always being spun some new pile of bull. When that happens, every crisis feels like a con. We’re now the country that collectively cried wolf. The greatest danger is that if a real emergency were to befall us, at this point, no one would believe it. The suspicion would be that the president must be up to something again.
Here is also the truth about the White House Correspondents' Dinner: the event shouldn’t have gone on in the first place. No serious journalist should have been in that room. After all, the guest of honor was a man who has spent the past decade claiming journos are “the enemy of the people,” dangerously soiling reputations and unconscionably putting lives in danger. His assault on the First Amendment has been unrelenting.
This is the man that the association honored with its members’ presence, like so many victims of Stockholm syndrome bonding with their captor. Before shots rang out, the attendees were planning to raise a glass to Trump, laugh with him, celebrate with him, break bread with him — the same guy doing everything in his power to erase their existence.
In Trump’s Washington, this is apparently what passes for “celebrating a free press” when there is no longer a single free thing about it. He labels every story that he doesn’t like as “fake,” and yet these professionals still clamor for access.
It’s all pretty sick. In that sense, Cole Allen did them all a favor with his hostile act over the weekend. He cleared a room they should never have entered. The biggest catastrophe of the night is that the journalists themselves were complicit in their own demise.
Ray Richmond is a longtime journalist/author and an adjunct professor at Chapman University in Orange, CA.
