The last thing I expected to write about this morning was the nerd prom DBA the White House Correspondents Association dinner. Jamie O wrote a fine post about that event and why the media shouldn’t break bread with President Pennywise. Jamie’s argument for abolishing the event was confirmed by what happened this year.
I’m glad that nobody was seriously injured. I’m not interested in the details of the attack or the gunman’s motive. I am, however, interested in how a ballroom obsessed POTUS spun this ballroom blitz hence the featured image of the East Wing teardown. We’ll get to ballroom blather and bluster in a moment.
The Insult Comedian used the incident as an opportunity to brag about his place in history:
Asked why he thought he keeps being the target of assassination attempts, Trump compared himself to Abraham Lincoln, and said: “The people that make the biggest impact, they’re the ones that they go after. They don’t go after the ones that don’t do much, because they like it that way.”
He has been impactful but not in a positive way. Violent and hateful rhetoric inspire violent reactions as does otherizing one’s opponents as THEY. Let’s see what Lady Day has to say about they:
It’s interesting that Lincoln was the only assassination target the Kaiser of Chaos mentioned at his impromptu press conference. He’s one of the few who believes that William McKinley was a great president and he also missed a chance to compare himself to Ronald Reagan who was shot outside the Washington Hilton in 1981.
The Insult Comedian is a man of many pretexts. He used the shooting as a pretext to plug his fakakta ballroom.
But, really, he argued, the whole thing was just the latest example of why he needs to build his maximum-security, legally challenged ballroom at the White House.
“I didn’t want to say this,” he said, “but this is why we have to have all of the attributes of what we’re planning at the White House. It’s actually a larger room, and it’s a much more secure. It’s got — it’s drone proof, it’s bulletproof glass.”
“We need the ballroom,” Trump said. “That’s why Secret Service and that’s why the military are demanding it. They’ve wanted the ballroom for 150 years for lots of different reasons, but today’s a little bit different because today we need levels of security that probably nobody’s ever seen before.”
He didn’t want to say this? I call bullshit. He’s obsessed with the ballroom plans. He’s much more interested in them than in his war of choice with Iran. He’s still a sleazy real estate developer at heart.
Why would his fakakta ballroom have made a difference? Is he planning to rent it out for non-state events? That would transform the White House into Mar-a-Lago on the Potomac. Oy just oy.
The WHCA dinner didn’t resume after the ballroom blitz. Trump wants it rescheduled but saner heads want it cancelled or even abolished. I fall into the latter category. What’s the point of having this event if it gets hijacked by the president of the day, especially one who thinks he’s entitled to fulsome praise.
What’s worse MAGA spin or false flag types on the left? That was a rhetorical question, MAGA spin is worse. BUT I’m appalled that some on the left are muttering about the ballroom blitz being a false flag operation. Team Trump lies incessantly but they’re bad at it. They prove their incompetence every day, so unless there’s some evidence the false flag thing is, well, false. Besides, there’s no need to exaggerate Team Trump’s awfulness. The truth is bad enough.
The last word goes to The Sweet:
