The Greatest Threat Is the Solution
The Greatest Threat Is the Solution
Griping about the White House Correspondents’ Dinner security misses the point.
The main question I have about Donald Trump’s latest attempted assassin, Cole Tomas Allen—a teacher, naturally—is: I wonder whether he was a fair grader to Trump supporters?
One question I don’t have is whether some new security protocol could stop random nuts from doing insane things in a country of 340 million people.
Every journalist who was at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner seems to be writing pieces saying, first, that they were at the dinner; second, they really, really were at the dinner—that was them sitting next to the energy secretary!—and third, that they noticed the lax security at the time.
Do not blame Democrats and the media for activating unstable personalities with their nonstop hysterical denunciations of President Donald Trump, provably a member of the Waffen SS! To mention just a few of the lovely sobriquets they’ve given the president:
- fascist (former Vice President Kamala Harris, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Reps. Jamie Raskin (D-MD), Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) and Ed Markey (D-MA), Trump’s first White House chief of staff John Kelly, Trump’s first Joint Chiefs chairman, Mark Milley—“fascist to the core”—MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, NPR, etc.);
- Nazi (Hillary Clinton, the former President Joe Biden, Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, Tim Walz, MSNBC, CNN, The New York Times, the Guardian, etc.);
- racist (Biden, Harris, Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY); former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), Reps. Jerry Nadler (D-NY), Ilhan Omar (D-MN), Jasmine Crockett (D-TX), Yvette Clarke (D-NY), Frederica Wilson (D-FL), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Don Lemon, Rachel Maddow—“openly racist president”—the Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson, the New York Times’ David Leonhardt; the New Yorker’s John Cassidy, CNN, MSNBC, The Guardian, etc.).
And so on.
Just tighten up security around the man they describe as a mortal threat to humanity. Noticeably, none of the proposed security measures would have stopped Allen.
The Atlantic’s Shane Harris wrote that over “the many years I have been a guest”—the rest of the piece is just filler—“I can’t recall anyone giving my invitation more than a passing glance.” Similarly, the BBC’s Gary O’Donoghue complained that, “the man on the door outside only took a cursory look at my ticket from what must have been six feet away.”
A closer examination of the tickets might have kept out striving, second-rate journalists hoping to sneak into the posh event, but wouldn’t have stopped Allen, who was staying at the hotel.
Harris also noted that “no one has asked to see my identification.” No one even asked for my embossed business cards which I had printed at Smythson of Bond Street.
That wouldn’t have stopped Allen, either. He had an ID, and he didn’t have a record. (Which is actually pretty impressive, considering that, according to liberals, black people don’t know how to get IDs.)
Attendees did have to walk through magnetometers, which Allen could not do, principally because he was carrying a 12-gauge pump-action Mossberg shotgun, a .38 semiautomatic pistol, and three knives. Rest assured, Secret Service agents may have trouble with roofs, but they are trained to look for men sprinting past them with small arsenals.
Everyone keeps citing the assessment of the aspiring assassin himself, who griped: “This level of incompetence is insane.” I’m not sure Allen has the best judgment, but that “level of incompetence” was enough to put him on the ground in shackles, half a football field away from the president.
Allen never even made it to the same floor as the ballroom where the dinner was being held. And if he had, Secret Service agents were manning the ballroom doors to prevent anyone from entering after the president had arrived.
Even if Allen had magically floated past the agents, the doors and other obstacles in his way, maybe he could have taken out a few lobbyists in the back of the room, and that would have been traumatic for the country. Who would represent Lockheed Martin?
There’s a better chance of Washington’s elite being shot or knifed walking to the Hilton. Even factoring in all the psychos who keep trying to kill Trump (with the active encouragement of Democrats), everyone in that room is less likely to be killed by a crazed gunman than to die from a heart attack, a car accident, a fall, a mugging, an allergic reaction, an overdose or a suicide.
But because Saturday night’s freakishly rare event was so dramatic, lawmakers will inevitably try to “do something” that will end up making things much, much worse.
To take one example, off the top of my head, responding to the 9/11 terrorist attack, we got the DMV ladies at the airport—or as the Times promised us, a “highly trained federal force.”
In tests, TSA screeners don’t catch 90 percent of weapons. But on the upside, the whole pointless exercise eats up about 300 million hours of American travelers’ time each year, or the equivalent of 428 full human lives. Over the past 25 years of this horror, that amounts to more than three times as many Americans as died on 9/11.
Air travel has become so unpleasant that millions of Americans prefer to drive—a method of transportation that is 190 times more likely to kill them than flying. Many consider that a fair trade-off.
Ending TSA would save more American lives than the Iran War ever could. And rather than costing $230 billion, it would save us $15 billion. (We’d also free up more security guards to work Carnival cruise lines.)
One nervous WHCD attendee later wrote of his experience: “The worst-case scenario I could imagine was a handful of heavily armed gunmen rampaging through the ballroom.”
Is that what we have to guard against? We’ll have to return to the Covid-19 lockdowns, and then we’ll all die of heart attacks from fear of armed gunmen bursting into our homes.
A better idea is to accept the fact that no new regulation can prevent bad things from ever happening, and the best we can do is lock up criminals, not allow other countries’ criminals to immigrate here, and ask Democrats to drop the Tourette’s syndrome whenever they talk about Trump.
COPYRIGHT 2026 ANN COULTER
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