Ballroom Blitz

By Nick Catoggio

Monday, April 27, 2026

 

Security at Saturday night’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner performed as well as one would expect any American institution to perform in 2026. That is, it was competent enough to accomplish its basic task yet incompetent enough to leave everyone wondering whether the country survives mostly on luck.

 

An assassination attempt on the president and his deputies was thwarted with no loss of life and without the assailant ever laying eyes on his targets. That sounds like success. Unless we expect the Secret Service to shut down the entirety of every facility in which Donald Trump is momentarily present—airports included, presumably—the fact that a would-be assassin was inside the Washington Hilton during the dinner arguably isn’t a failure.

 

Had he penetrated the security cordon around the president, that would have been a failure. He did not.

 

On the other hand.

 

“It was easier to get into the dinner than many big sports events and concert venues,” the Wall Street Journal reported. Guests were able to pass through checkpoints outside the hotel simply by flashing their ticket or an invitation to a pre-dinner reception. (Magnetometers were placed outside the ballroom but not outside the building.) One attendee claimed to have made it through three different access areas without being asked to show identification or open her purse.

 

Others told the Journal that “security protocols paled in comparison to the security screenings that VIPs faced when they went to exclusive after-dinner parties on Saturday night.”

 

The suspect managed to dodge even that cursory level of scrutiny by devising a not-especially-clever workaround. He booked a room at the Hilton beforehand and waited for Saturday night.

 

So easy was it for him to smuggle weapons into a building ahead of a presidential appearance that he felt obliged to scold the authorities over it afterward. “What the hell is the Secret Service doing?” he wrote in the manifesto he sent to family members minutes before his attack. “The security at the event is all outside, focused on protestors and current arrivals, because apparently no one thought about what happens if someone checks in the day before…. Like, if I was an Iranian agent, instead of an American citizen, I could have brought a damn [machine gun] in here and no one would have noticed s–t.”

 

Through pure chance, the executive editor of The Daily Beast checked into the room next to the suspect’s on the day before the dinner. “Nobody even looked at my luggage on Friday afternoon,” he marveled. “Worse, my colleague arrived on Saturday at 5 p.m. Nobody looked at his luggage either: No [magnetometers], no hand checks, no ID checks. Nothing.”

 

What if the suspect had smuggled in a bomb? Or if several suspects working as part of a terror cell had smuggled in several bombs? Iran’s regime isn’t above blowing up its enemies on foreign soil, you may have heard. Especially, perhaps, an enemy who’s already successfully killed much of the Khomeinist leadership.

 

It was not the luckiest the president has ever been in escaping death by assassination. But he was still quite lucky that the threat in this case was posed by someone whose plans were no more sophisticated than “grab a shotgun and make a mad dash for the ballroom.”

 

Beyond that, there are only so many things one can say about what happened without repeating oneself or sounding trite. The fact that Trump is a postliberal cretin who would rule as a caudillo if he could is no justification for harming him or anyone else. As long as the diminished American institutions I mentioned earlier continue to function, albeit badly, they remain the only proper venue for settling political disputes. The alternative is the law of the jungle, and only animals prefer to live in a jungle.

 

There is one genuinely interesting element to Saturday night’s near-miss, however.

 

Build the ballroom!

 

The reaction among the MAGA base was surprisingly subdued.

 

Not universally. You could still find the predictable “this means war” chud-ery from, er, former Neil Gorsuch clerks. And numerous Republicans went through the motions of accusing Democrats of having encouraged violence against the president by vilifying him, never mind that the only prominent elected official in the United States who reliably celebrates the deaths of his enemies is Donald Trump himself.

 

The “climate of hate” news cycle that now reliably follows any act of political violence has become paint-by-numbers stuff in modern America. The left does it to the right, the right does it to the left, and the intent in both cases is the same—to discourage accurate criticism of one’s faction by demagoging that criticism as incitement. It’s the ol’ “speech is violence” fallacy, formerly a fringe progressive belief that’s gone mainstream and bipartisan.

 

A fascist is no less a fascist because a dangerous person happens to agree.

 

But as I say, most right-wing populists eschewed the aggressive finger-pointing that we’ve come to expect. The rage and vengefulness that followed Charlie Kirk’s murder last year were largely missing, as was the galvanizing ecstasy of Trump’s defiant fist-pumping after he was nearly shot in the head during the 2024 campaign. No doubt the circumstances on Saturday partly explain why: A foiled assassination attempt in which the target was in no immediate peril was bound to inflame grassroots spirits less than one in which he was.

 

Still, I did not expect that the clarion cry of outraged MAGA social media influencers as the drama unfolded, the core grievance in urgent need of addressing, would be to let Trump move forward with the ballroom he wants to build on the White House grounds.

 

If the president had a secure site to entertain large gatherings, the influencers complained, he wouldn’t have had to risk visiting the Hilton. Is that so? Color me skeptical that Donald Trump, media-hater extraordinaire, would have graciously allowed the White House Correspondents’ Association to use “his” site to host a dinner at which reporters give each other awards for unflattering coverage of his administration.

 

The only reason he’d consider doing so, I suspect, is to create leverage over the press, threatening to yank the WHCA’s access to the venue each time some newspaper ran a harsh story about him.

 

Even if I’m wrong and the dinner were to become an annual ballroom tradition, he and his successors would continue to attend large events around the country during their terms. Staging galas at the White House potentially solves only the problem of how to secure presidential appearances around Washington, D.C., not the more daunting problem of securing those outside the city limits. How many local appearances in the capital does he actually make in an average year? A half-dozen, maybe?

 

Forget the logistics, though. Focus instead on the absurdity of a movement of feral right-wing populists, forever waving rhetorical pitchforks about “draining the swamp” and restoring power to the forgotten man, rallying after their hero’s brush with death to demand that he be allowed to … construct a banquet hall worthy of Versailles.

 

From “Build the wall!” as a rallying cry in 2015 to “Build the ballroom!” 11 years later. How’s that for a populist story arc?

 

Populism without populism.

 

One could argue that it was inevitable.

 

Trump dining with the media on Saturday wasn’t quite an Animal Farm pigs-to-men moment given the animosity between the two, but I did wonder yesterday what the average MAGA blowhard would have made of this menu if a Democrat were president. High gas prices caused by a foolish Middle Eastern war are grinding down the economy and, with it, the average joe’s already compromised ability to make ends meet. Meanwhile, Trump and his cronies are eating steak and lobster with Wolf Blitzer.

 

Revolutionary populism has decayed into a vacuous personality cult in which success is measured entirely by the leader’s power to get what he wants—whether that means tariffing the world on a whim, turning the East Wing of the White House into a ballroom, or surf-and-turf with cable news anchors while the proles starve. Who could have foreseen?

 

In a way, the “Build the ballroom!” nonsense is an unusually elegant expression of authoritarianism. The core complaint against Trump’s banquet hall isn’t that it’s unnecessary, which is debatable, but that he went ahead with the project without so much as a pretense of caring that he did so lawfully. The federal judge who blocked his plans earlier this month based his ruling on that fact: If the president wants to take a wrecking ball to an historic building, he needs Congress’ sign-off first.

 

Treating Saturday’s assassination plot as cause to ignore the legal niceties and plunge ahead with construction anyway felt like absurdist satire of the “emergency” rationales authoritarians are forever concocting to rationalize their power grabs and lawbreaking. The president’s life is in danger! Only a fabulously luxe gilded ballroom built to his exact specifications without any oversight whatsoever stands between America and catastrophe!

 

Which may help explain why the MAGA reaction to the foiled attack felt tepid. On some level, these people must be dimly aware of how rotten and ridiculous their movement has become. (Even the “grassroots” influencers who’ve spent years getting rich off of them are astroturfing in plain sight.) Rank-and-file Republicans might let themselves be goaded into agitating for a presidential ballroom but only the president himself will manage to sound more than half-hearted on the subject.

 

There’s another reason the right’s response was subdued. Enthusiasm for Trump has waned, David Frum explains, which appears to have dampened the kindling of political fire:

 

As bad news accumulates for the president—the backfiring of Trump’s attempted congressional gerrymanders, the worsening of the U.S. economy, plunging poll numbers, a gathering global oil crisis—the energy and self-confidence seem to be seeping out of this administration. Trump had to relent on a scheme to prosecute Fed Chair Jerome Powell for disobeying White House commands to cut interest rates. He had to let go of Kristi Noem and Pam Bondi. Kash Patel and Tulsi Gabbard may soon follow. So far Trump appears to be bypassing a chance to use an incident of political violence to consolidate personal power.

 

It all feels like the ending of a chapter, a milestone of an authoritarian project’s faltering under the weight of its arrogance and accumulated mistakes.

 

None of that is to imply that Republicans are (or should be) less concerned for the president’s welfare now than they were in the past. But after the first attempt on Trump’s life in 2024 and the murder of Charlie Kirk in 2025, the right somewhat plausibly believed their movement was on track to permanently reorder American politics and culture. Leftist radicals were resorting to bullets to defeat them because they knew they no longer had the ballots to do so. In that context, the plots against Trump and Kirk weren’t just attempts to kill men, they were attempts to derail the ascendant postliberal project of restoring American greatness through illegitimate antidemocratic means. That was a special outrage.

 

In 2026, that special outrage is gone. The president himself, not a leftist degenerate with a shotgun, is killing postliberalism by saddling it with an unpopular war, near-total indifference to the affordability crisis, and idiotic tone-deaf monarchist preoccupations like, well, the ballroom. For all the perfunctory boo-hooing by Republicans over the last 48 hours about angry liberals using incendiary rhetoric, it ain’t Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries who have been wondering whether Trump is the Antichrist. It’s disillusioned America First-ers.

 

In fact, considering how many of them have begun channeling their disillusionment into conspiracy theories about the first assassination plot against the president, I suspect it won’t exclusively be leftists who come to believe that Saturday night’s foiled attack was staged.

 

Having drained the populism out of populism, go figure that the president isn’t seeing populists ride to his defense as fervently and indignantly as before—even after an incident in which he unquestionably occupied the moral high ground relative to his adversary. See why I think he’ll have more trouble than he expects getting a new round of “rigged election!” hysteria off the ground this fall?

 

A quiet place.

 

The irony of these frightening incidents is that Americans have, as a whole, been quite docile during the Trump era.

 

Not since Woodrow Wilson, I’d surmise, has the country been led by someone who aspires to Caesarism as plainly as Trump does, and even Wilson didn’t manage to unhinge his jaw and swallow the legislative branch whole like the current president has. From handing out pardons like candy to cronies to self-dealing that would make Tammany Hall blush, the ethos of Trump’s administration distilled to one word is impunity. And he flaunts that impunity every chance he gets.

 

His ballroom, if it’s built, will be a monument to it. He wanted to make the White House more like a royal palace and he didn’t care what the law might have to say to the contrary. In a constitutional scheme based on limited powers and designed by men who overthrew a monarchy, the relish with which the president revels in his impunity is the most contemptibly un-American thing I can imagine.

 

But We the People have mostly kept calm and carried on. I’ve spent enough time in right-wing media to know that if a Democratic president engaged in half the abuses of power that Trump has, Republican media would be awash with dark warnings about refreshing the tree of liberty with the blood of tyrants. Gun sales wouldn’t just be through the roof, they’d have achieved orbit.

 

As it is, not only does political violence remain mercifully rare, there’s barely a modern protest movement to speak of. Ten years ago, if you’d asked me how Americans would respond to an unpopular president waging an unpopular war in an era of destabilizing hyperpolarization, I would have predicted that it’d be the 1960s on steroids. 2026 America is not that, the occasional mad-dashing idiot with a shotgun notwithstanding.

 

As long as American institutions continue to operate (sort of), patriots should and must continue to do their country proud by keeping their cool amid the many abuses to come. And there will be many.