At the very least, what almost took place on Saturday night displays a failure of imagination, if not abject incompetence on the part of the Secret Service. And for the second time, it nearly cost Donald Trump his life.
In the aftermath of the assassination attempt at the White House Correspondents' Dinner, everyone rushed to congratulate the Secret Service and its partners in stopping the threat before anyone got hurt. In the cool light of day, however, it has become clear that the threat got much too close to its intended targets, thanks to inexplicable decisions on security around an event that put the top three people in the line of leadership on the same dais at the same time.
The Wall Street Journal took an acid look at the Secret Service's preparations for the event, and wonders what the hell they were thinking:
The sprawling Washington Hilton, located about 1½ miles north of the White House, for decades has been home to the White House Correspondents’ Dinner because of its capacity to host a large crowd and the Secret Service’s familiarity with securing it. More than 2,500 people attended the event, including five of the top six officials in the presidential line of succession. Hundreds more gathered for parties that media outlets hosted on site before the main festivities began.
Despite a visible security perimeter and warnings of tight security, guests said they could enter the hotel through checkpoints on the surrounding streets by simply showing a dinner ticket or a copy of an invite to one of several predinner receptions. The tickets were reviewed by staff but weren’t scanned and there were no identification checks, attendees said.
“Upon entering nobody asked to visibly INSPECT my ticket nor asked for my photo identification. All one had to do was flash what appeared to be a ticket and they were fine with that,” said Kari Lake, a former Republican gubernatorial and Senate nominee in Arizona now serving as senior adviser for the U.S. Agency for Global Media, in a social-media post.
Guests were able to access the Hilton’s lobby and lower levels without going through security scans, and only passed through magnetometers before they entered the ballroom where the dinner was held. It was easier to get into the dinner than many big sports events and concert venues.
This lackadaisical attitude is mystifying to me because I've had some experience with these types of events. As a frequent attendee of CPAC, I've been there when either Trump or then-VP Mike Pence spoke at the conference when hosted by the Gaylord Resort in National Harbor. The Secret Service and its security partners forced everyone to evacuate the meeting room area before setting up the magnetometers and allowing access to credentialed attendees only. This created a massive headache for CPAC, its attendees and especially its vendors, and for the media attached to the event as well, but no one gained entry to the secured area without fully processing through those checkpoints.
On Saturday night, commentators kept talking about the layers of security around the Hilton and wondered how the perp managed to penetrate those. It turned out that Cole Allen didn't have to penetrate anything. He just paid for a hotel room, negating everything but the final magnetometer layer that managed to stop his penetration before Allen reached the ballroom. As the video shows, however, Allen actually beat that layer initially and penetrated past it. Had Allen carried something other than firearms – like a suicide vest, for instance – no one would be suggesting that the Secret Service had prevented anything.
Even Allen scoffed at the lack of imagination offered by the security arrangements:
“What the hell is the Secret Service doing?” Allen wrote. “Like, I expected security cameras at every bend, bugged hotel rooms, armed agents every 10 feet, metal detectors out the wazoo. What I got (who knows, maybe they’re pranking me!) is nothing,” Allen wrote. “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.”
That does seem like a pretty big hole in their security plans, no? But as others have remarked, even the internal security inside the hotel didn't seem particularly intense. Fox News analyst and co-host Kennedy remarked yesterday that security arrangements looked the most lax in 30 years of attending Nerd Prom:
We changed hotels at the last minute yesterday, and booked a room at the Hilton at 3p.
— Kennedy (@KennedyNation) April 26, 2026
I was never asked for a key, but could’ve produced one from a different city. Also never asked for ID, and waltzed through the lobby and lower ballroom areas like I owned the place.
Only saw… https://t.co/AsyWZtL0NH
Only saw one LE dog by the red carpet, which also had surprisingly lax security. Having been to this event several times as early as 1995, this was probably the least security I’ve encountered.
Thank God everyone is safe!
Shouldn't this have been the most intense security in 30 years? Trump had been the target of two assassination attempts in the past two years. The war in Iran had generated even more threats on his life. This was the first WHCD attended by Trump as president, and also had Vice President J.D. Vance and House Speaker Mike Johnson on the dais. This was a moment for stepped-up security, not for resting on laurels.
And yet, the Secret Service failed to imagine ... or do anything but run their general playbook, and not with any particular intensity, according to people who experienced it. Including the would-be assassin, for whatever that is worth.
Moving this event to a new White House ballroom would solve most of these problems, if not all of them. In the long term, that benefits everyone. However, presidents should be able to attend public functions in hotels, and still can if the Secret Service restores its competence and forward thinking to these complex venues. Trump has already had to stop appearing in outdoor venues thanks to the failures in Butler County, PA. We need security professionals who can prevent this president and future presidents from becoming prisoners in the White House, an outcome to which Trump strenuously objected after the WHCD debacle, and rightly so. It's time to fund the Department of Homeland Security fully, provide adequate resources to the Secret Service, and to find leadership with both the competence and the imagination necessary to prevent these debacles in the first place – before someone else ends up dead besides the late Cory Comperatore.
Update: More people are speaking out about the security failures on Saturday night. CBS nat-sec analyst Aaron MacLean professed to being "perplexed" about the lack of security inside the Hilton. His experience paralleled Kennedy's:
"I was perplexed even before the incident about what I saw in security," Aaron MacLean, a CBS News national security analyst and military veteran, told "CBS Mornings" in an interview on Monday.
MacLean attended the dinner for the first time this year and said his ID was not checked "at any point in the evening."
"To get into the hotel all I had to do was show a screenshot of an invitation," he said. ... "You can't just look at something like this and pat yourself on the back that this unserious person didn't succeed," he said.
Speaker Mike Johnson, a potential target of the erstwhile assassin, wasn't impressed with the Secret Service either:
The Secret Service needs to “tighten up” and rethink their security protocols after a suspected gunman stormed a security checkpoint at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner over the weekend, Speaker Mike Johnson said on Monday.
The shooting raised doubts about the security protocols at Saturday’s event, where high-level government officials, including President Donald Trump — and the immediate two politicians in the presidential succession line, Vice President JD Vance and Johnson — were in attendance.
“From a layman’s perspective, it looked a little lax in terms of getting into the building,” Johnson told Fox News on Monday morning. “I didn’t see the magnetometers, but it doesn’t sound like it was sufficient.” ...
“We’ll do what we can in Congress,” Johnson said, “but we need leaders of the Secret Service to tighten up and reevaluate these things. That critique is right.”
We need fresh leadership at the Secret Service to tighten things up. Stop pretending all is well, and start taking action to fix it.
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