Trump’s Lack of a Reaction to Half-Assedinations Speaks Volumes About His Fitness for Office, None of it Good

On Thursday 23 April, Jimmy Kimmel produced a parody of the White House Correspondent’s Dinner in which he quipped, “Our First Lady, Melania, is here. Look at Melania, so beautiful. Mrs Trump, you have a glow like an expectant widow.” Two days later, a gun wielding maniac charged through the entrance of the dinner firing five or six shots and even hit a secret service agent in their bullet-proof vest before being tackled to the ground. BTW, it was a white guy. You know this because he wasn’t shot to death outside of the perimeter for having a cellphone but allowed to penetrate and definitively begin his attack before being presumed dangerous and aggressive enough to subdue. I’m jus’ sayin’.

There are some burning questions here. What did Jimmy Kimmel know and when did he know it? Was he predicting the attack? Did he have some insider knowledge? Did he CAUSE the attack?!?! Was it on purpose?!?

Or how about Mrs. Trump? The lady doth protest too much, methinks. Did Kimmel hit just a little too close to the truth? Was she planning a Florence Harding? For the uninitiated: Florence Harding was widely suspected of poisoning the philandering President Warren G. Harding to death, possibly to prevent an embarrassing philandering scandal.

Then, there is Trump himself. He has loudly proclaimed in multiple venues that he wanted the show to go on, but always in safety and comfort and far from the actual danger. First, from back stage with the shooter subdued and Secret Service in high alert. And, then, from the protective cocoon of a White House press conference.

What are we expected to think that we have a brave fearless leader and ignore the racist misogynist xenophobic white nationalists using the Bill of Rights for toilet paper! He’s willing to say he’s willing to be in the line of fire just to get a few more likes, shares, and follows. He even went so far as to post a picture of the assailant face in the carpet and video of the assault. He said it was so we could appreciate the heroism of the Secret Service, not to make himself look tough and brave.

Yeah, right Biff. Because everything you say is the absolute truth.

Fun Fact:

Reagan was shot at the same hotel as the White House Correspondance Dinner was at. It’s so bad that John Freaking Hinkley is calling it spooky. If he’s spooked, who are we not to be speculating wildly?

John Hinckley Jr., Who Shot Reagan at Same Hotel That Hosts WHCD, Says It’s ‘Spooky’ That ‘Bad Things Keep Happening’ There by Joseph Konig for the People on 27 April 2026

Explaining All of the Assassination Attempts

What are we to make of the third(?) half-assedination attempt of the Caricature-in-Chief? The Orange Doctor loves to say he is the best, did he look around and realize there have been no serious assassinations since John Hinckley tried to do the world a favor and rid us of Reagan’s disastrous budget and social service policies, and decide to be best at being assassinated but gave it his usual half-assed try?

Since the WHCD, conspiracy theories have been spewing forth on the Interwebs like the theorists are all pubescent boys and the half-assedination is their porn stash. Oh, wait. It’s not like that. Everybody, left, right, and center are posting their hot take that it all had to be STAGED! The serious chin stroking wags punditing on all the cable pundit shows are punditing that the end of democracy is nigh because we’ve seen the third horseman of the assassinations. The conservatives are squeezing every farthing out of “it’s the violent rhetoric of the left.” Kick a rock on the social media these days, and there’s a Trump half-assedination hot take under it.

Let’s begin with the precursor events.

The Events Running Up To The WHCD

Time Travel?!?

Back in 2023, there was this mysterious X post from Henry Martinez consisting of only the name, Cole Allen, the name of the shooter. The account only ever made that one post and it used an image called “Time Travel” in the header post. That’s it, right? Time travel’s real.

Predictive Markets?

Then there is Karoline Leave It! using the tired trope of “shots fired,” when describing the dinner just before it started, “There will be some shots fired tonight,” she said in her smug way. Well, that didn’t age well, did it? I mean was it a coincidence, or was it predictive? How many bets on the shooting were won on the predictive markets? Was Don-Don just bet hard on him NOT speaking, so he needed an excuse to get it cancelled?

First Signs of Trouble

Apparently, the first anyone in the ballroom knew of the half-assedination attempt was the sound of gun shots on the floor below. The people in the cheap seats recognized it as gun fire. The folks towards the front toyed with the idea that someone may have dropped some trays, from what I remember of the reporting. As soon as people started duck and covering, though, everybody else caught on real fast.

And, here’s what all of those hot takes you’ve been reading for the past few days have missed.

What all the Hot-Takers Missed

Not a National Special Security Event

The WHCD was not classified at the highest security level, despite the fact that Trump, nearly his entire Cabinet, and many high ranking Republicans were present in one room. Think about that for a second. In a post-Butler, post-golf-course-sniper world, DHS Secretary, Markwayne Mullins, i.e. Trump, decided that a ballroom full of the entire executive branch didn’t need the government’s most robust protective umbrella. Why? We’ll come back to that.

When is a Reaction not a Reaction?

Look at the screen grab of a BBC video of the folks at the head table when the gunshots begin. There are five people in the shot. Three of them have their mouths open in surprise. Four of them have alarm in their eyes. Trump looks pretty nonplused. The question is why.

This is the moment that the danger makes itself known. The people in front of them in all of their fancy dress are crawling around on the ground battling chairs and tablecloths for safety. Seriously watch the video. No body knows what is going to come bursting through that door. Anyone reacting emotionally to the sound of gunshots and the sight of people moving in fear and panic would reflect that in their face. And, everyone around Trump does.

Surprise, the Sympathetic Nervous System, and Safety

When our brains encounter something unexpected, we react with surprise. Surprise focuses our attention. It brings our bodies, brains, and emotions on alert. In an instant we judge the stimulus as being good or bad. Good, and we smile and laugh. Think, “Surprise! Happy Birthday!” moments. Bad, we jump, scream, and lash out. Think, “Boo!” as someone jumps out from behind the door. The point is our sympathetic nervous system has taken over and we are reacting without thinking without the rational part of our brain engaging because that will very likely save our lives if they’re saveable in that situation. It is fight, flight, or freeze. It isn’t fight, flight, freeze, or stupid — It’s like Trump is saying, “Hunh?!? Whutz dat?”

Explaining Trump’s Non-Reaction

There are three possible explanations for Trump’s face in that moment. And here’s the thing: every single one of them should disqualify him from holding the office he currently occupies.

Explanation One: Narcissistic Invincibility

Trump is a narcissist and genuinely believes, on some level, that nothing bad could happen to him. As he said of his decision to go to war with Iran, “It will work out, it always does.” The laws of physics, biology, and probability simply don’t apply to El Gran Jefe Estúpido. Which also explains why the WHCD wasn’t bumped to the highest security level — why would you need maximum protection when you’re cosmically untouchable? A president who can’t accurately assess his own physical danger cannot accurately assess the nation’s.

Explanation Two: Cognitive Decline

He just wasn’t processing the incoming information accurately or quickly enough to register surprise. The sensory data was arriving, but something upstream wasn’t firing right. Not at that table as the shots were fired. Not when the Secret Service rushed in and hustled him to the “safe room.” Not at his press conference that night. Not even the next day. It explains the weirdly statesmanlike eighteen hours that followed — the “we have to resolve our differences” press conference. The endless praise for the Secret Service. All the way up to the 60 Minutes interview when Norah O’Donnell quoted the half-assed assassin’s manifesto, “I am no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes.”

Apparently, reminding him that we all know he is a pedophile was enough to kickstart the old liard brain, and Trump was back to attacking the press, blaming Democrats, and justifying his Epstein room. Until then, though, he was on autopilot because there is a periodic disconnect with the reactive, impulsive, and hyper emotional part of his brain. A president who cannot process a threat in real time cannot lead in a crisis.

Explanation Three: He Knew Something

The entire world is pointing and hissing staged like they are Donald Sutherland at the end of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” but it doesn’t even have to be that. Team Trump could’ve staged the whole thing, but it’s a high-risk play with catastrophic failure built right into it’s DNA. What if the Secret Service agent had been shot in the face instead of the vest? What if a bystander had been killed in the crossfire? Sure no one working in the White House would lose sleep over something as trivial as that, but they would lose sleep when Signal chat or the emails went publlc.

However — and this is the part that connects back to the security level question — if someone on Team Trump was playing elebunty-billion-dimensional three-dimensional Vulcan chess, keeping the security classification artificially low would be a way to let something get close enough to be dramatic without being fatal. A near miss generates sympathy, rally-around-the-flag energy, and the image of a fearless leader. A mass shooting would eliminate a lot of Trump press critics and create a hyperventilating hysterical frenzy of outrage on the right. So, win-win-win, right? So why wasn’t the security level higher? Narcissism or something even darker — a stupid jenius hoping for a close call or engineering one. Either way, he cannot be trusted with the nuclear codes.

So, siblings, pick your explanation. They’re all possible. But, does it matter? If it is one of them, then Trump shouldn’t be sitting at the Resolute Desk for one minute longer. Any one of them are completely disqualifying. But, if he’s just playing opportunist politics, he is still disqualified because he’s not working to improve the country, but to justify and further his own corruption. The fact that we cannot rule any of them out tells us everything we need to know about the fitness of the man currently sitting in the Oval Office.

Image Attribution

This image was found on Animalia and has a Creative Commons license.