Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Every statement is a Rorschach test

Americans of the Trump 2.0 era don’t need guns to have hair triggers. Digby already remarked on Donald Trump’s self-own Sunday night with Nora O’Donnell of “60 Minutes.” She quoted from the “manifesto” of Saturday night’s White House Correspondents’ Association dinner shooting suspect: “I am no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands in his crimes.”

Trump pounced, attacking O’Donnell for reading the line:

Trump: “I was waiting for you to read that because I knew you would because you’re horrible people…I’m not a rapist. I didn’t rape anybody.

O’Donnell: Oh you think he was referring to you?

“I’m not a pedophile,” Trump said, ignoring the question.

Everyone knows that the alleged attacker meant Trump without naming him. Including Trump. O’Donnell meant to bait him by quoting it. She got her sound bite.

But as I mentioned Friday, someone in this heated political environment will read partisan motive into any comment on current events even when no personalities, parties, programs or policies get named. Every statement is a Rorschach test. One person’s “Thank you for seeing me” is another’s thumb in the eye.

Of course, that’s exactly what Trump was hoping to give the assembled media on Saturday night before an aborted assassination thwarted his plans. He meant to get even for his roasting at the 2011 WHCA event. Getting even may be one of Trump’s few principles. Even if it takes 15 years.

Trump telegraphed his move. John Barron opines for the Australian Broadcasting Company:

Appearing back in the White House Press Briefing Room after the dinner and speech were cancelled on the orders of the Secret Service, Trump still dressed in black tie, suggested his speech would now have to be rewritten.

“I was all set to really rip it … and I said to my people this would be the most inappropriate speech ever made,” Trump said, before adding, “I don’t know if I could ever be as rough as I was going to be tonight, I think I’m probably going to be very nice … I’ll be very boring the next time.”

Trump meant to give it back to the press ten times worse. Oh, the disappointment!

The irony? “John Barron” is the pseudonym Trump once used on the phone with reporters to promote himself.

Trump gets even with people for not coming to his aid, as he told Charlie Rose in 1992. Now means to get even with NATO for not helping him attack Iran, despite NATO being a defensive alliance. NATO countries had no obligation to aid Trump.

I don’t know the gentleman below. Trump may not know “what Russia is planning for the Baltic states,” but the rest rings true. So watch for it:

Trump keeps saying “NATO wasn’t there when we needed them.” He says it like a grievance. He will keep saying it. Expect it at every rally between now and 2028.

Understand what he is actually doing. He is not venting. He is building a case.

Because he knows what Russia is planning for the Baltic states, and he is pre-loading the public argument for why Article 5 does not apply when that moment arrives.

“We asked, they refused.” That is the exit ramp. Simple. Memorable. Wrong, but effective.

Let me be precise about what is happening here.

Trump keeps saying “NATO wasn’t there when we needed them.” He says it like a grievance. He will keep saying it. Expect it at every rally between now and 2028.

Understand what he is actually doing. He is not venting. He is…

— Gandalv (@Microinteracti1) April 25, 2026

Trump has had it in for NATO since he first took office in 2017. Now he has another cudgel for getting even. He bides his time and never forgets.

(h/t NK)

O'Donnell: "The so-called manifesto is a stunning thing to read…He writes this quote…'I am no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands in his crimes.'"

Trump: "I was waiting for you to read that because I knew you would because you're horrible… pic.twitter.com/yTAzeF711h

— The Bulwark (@BulwarkOnline) April 26, 2026

O’Donnell: “The so-called manifesto is a stunning thing to read…He writes this quote…’I am no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands in his crimes.'”

Trump: “I was waiting for you to read that because I knew you would because you’re horrible people…I’m not a rapist. I didn’t rape anybody.

O’Donnell: Oh you think he was referring to you?

Trump: Excuse me, I’m not a pedophile…I was totally exonerated. Your friends on the other side of the plate are the ones who were involved with, let’s say, Epstein or other things…You should be ashamed of yourself reading that, because I’m not any of those things and I was never…You shouldn’t be reading that on 60 Minutes. You’re a disgrace. Go ahead, let’s finish the interview. You’re disgraceful.”

“You think he was referring to you?” Lol. He’s so dim I don’t think he even realizes just how much he’d self-owned right there.

Trump has been singing kumbaaya all day, saying how much the press loved him last night and how beautiful it was and how he was going to be nice.

That lasted just long enough for a reporter to fail to properly suck his … toes and he went right back to his grotesquely rude behavior. She had every right to quiz him about what was in the fucking manifesto. It’s her job. His job is to act like a leader and a grown man instead of a nasty little boy. But he can’t.

The Salad Man:

It was chaos inside the Washington Hilton ballroom on Saturday night, but not for one man who stayed in his chair, picking at a burrata salad as the people around him ducked for cover.

Michael Glantz, a top agent at Creative Artists Agency and a guest at the White House correspondents’ dinner, said there was no way he was going to hit the deck like everybody else, even though he heard the gunfire from outside the ballroom.

In a brief interview on Sunday, Mr. Glantz said that he was unfazed by the commotion and that he wanted to see what was happening. “I’m a New Yorker,” he said. “We live with sirens and activity happening all the time. I wasn’t scared. There are hundreds of Secret Service agents hurtling themselves over tables and chairs, and I wanted to watch.”

The split screen was captured on CNN, and footage of Mr. Glantz quickly went viral on social media, where he was dubbed “the salad man.” “A lot of people said, ‘Why didn’t you get on the floor? Everybody else at your table and in the room was on the floor,’” Mr. Glantz said.

He was happy to explain: “First of all, I have a bad back. I couldn’t get on the floor, and if I did get on the floor, they’d have to bring in people to get me off the floor. And No. 2, I’m a hygiene freak. There was no freaking way I was getting in my new tux on the dirty Hilton floor. It was not happening.”

After listening to approximately 177 accounts from reporters about what they saw (the same thing we all saw) and how they held each others hands and watched the secret service run around grabbing their charges and hustling them out of the room this account was a breath of fresh air.

Lol.

Does anyone remember this? It just happened in February. I admit that I didn’t and that’s because the media has hardly mentioned it. It certainly hasn’t come up in any of the reporting of last night’s events as far as I know:

The 21-year-old man who was shot and killed after having entered Donald Trump’s Florida resort on Sunday – while carrying a shotgun – came from a North Carolina family of the president’s supporters and had reportedly become increasingly fixated on the so-called Jeffrey Epstein files.

The focus of the FBI’s investigation into the intrusion attributed to Austin Tucker Martin is tightening on his movements and motives. Martin was confronted by Secret Service agents and a local sheriff’s deputy inside the secure perimeter of Mar-a-Lago and killed after he had raised a shotgun into the shooting position at about 1.30am on Sunday, law enforcement said.

Martin was a recent high school graduate who is believed to have driven down to Florida from his home in North Carolina on Saturday afternoon, obtaining the weapon en route. The New York Times reported that last year he set up his own company, Fresh Sky Illustrations, trading in original drawings of golf courses that were sold through golf course gift shops and on commission.

TMZ reported that Martin had grown increasingly obsessed with Epstein – a former friend of Trump and many other powerful people – after the recent release of files connected to the prosecution of the sex offender and disgraced financier. The website said that it had obtained a text message that he sent to a co-worker earlier in February.

According to TMZ, the text said: “I don’t know if you read up on the Epstein Files, but evil is real and unmistakable … Tell other people about what you hear about the Epstein files and what the government is doing about it. Raise awareness.”

The illustrator came from Cameron, North Carolina, where his relatives described him as quiet and generally opposed to guns. Martin’s cousin told the Associated Press that the family was staunchly pro-Trump.

“We are big Trump supporters, all of us,” Braeden Fields said. “Everybody.”

Just thought I’d mention it since we are suddenly very, very concerned with all the violent left wing rhetoric that’s inspiring all the California commies to try to kill our leaders.

Obviously, this latest made a much bigger splash because it was at an event in DC with the president and his cabinet all there along with most of the political press corps who are now making the rounds to tell “their story” about what it was like when they had to dive under he table and while they were eating their salads. It’s really about them so naturally it’s much bigger than that earlier attempt by a man who was shot dead in Mar-a-lago.

The Village is still intact.

I don’t think anyone under the age of 70 knows who “Marshall” Matt Dillon was. People must have been scratching their heads wondering what he had against poor Matt Dillon the actor.

You can’t make this stuff up.

Here’s the shooter’s manifesto. If he truly felt this way he did the stupidest, most destructive, immoral act he could have done if he believes that Trump is a threat to our democracy. All I can’t say to people who think this way is, stop helping. You’re only going to make things worse, whether you succeed or fail.

Hello everybody!

So I may have given a lot of people a surprise today. Let me start off by apologizing to everyone whose trust I abused.

I apologize to my parents for saying I had an interview without specifying it was for “Most Wanted.”

I apologize to my colleagues and students for saying I had a personal emergency (by the time anyone reads this, I probably most certainly DO need to go to the ER, but can hardly call that not a self-inflicted status.)

I apologize to all of the people I traveled next to, all the workers who handled my luggage, and all the other non-targeted people at the hotel who I put in danger simply by being near.

I apologize to everyone who was abused and/or murdered before this, to all those who suffered before I was able to attempt this, to all who may still suffer after, regardless of my success or failure.

I don’t expect forgiveness, but if I could have seen any other way to get this close, I would have taken it. Again, my sincere apologies.

On to why I did any of this:

I am a citizen of the United States of America.

What my representatives do reflects on me.

And I am no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes.

(Well, to be completely honest, I was no longer willing a long time ago, but this is the first real opportunity I’ve had to do something about it.)

While I’m discussing this, I’ll also go over my expected rules of engagement (probably in a terrible format, but I’m not military so too bad.)

Administration officials (not including Mr. Patel): they are targets, prioritized from highest-ranking to lowest

Secret Service: they are targets only if necessary, and to be incapacitated non-lethally if possible (aka, I hope they’re wearing body armor because center mass with shotguns messes up people who *aren’t*

Hotel Security: not targets if at all possible (aka unless they shoot at me)

Capitol Police: same as Hotel Security

National Guard: same as Hotel Security

Hotel Employees: not targets at all

Guests: not targets at all

In order to minimize casualties I will also be using buckshot rather than slugs (less penetration through walls)

I would still go through most everyone here to get to the targets if it were absolutely necessary (on the basis that most people *chose* to attend a speech by a pedophile, rapist, and traitor, and are thus complicit) but I really hope it doesn’t come to that.

Rebuttals to objections:

Objection 1: As a Christian, you should turn the other cheek.

Rebuttal: Turning the other cheek is for when you yourself are oppressed. I’m not the person raped in a detention camp. I’m not the fisherman executed without trial. I’m not a schoolkid blown up or a child starved or a teenage girl abused by the many criminals in this administration.

Turning the other cheek when *someone else* is oppressed is not Christian behavior; it is complicity in the oppressor’s crimes.

Objection 2: This is not a convenient time for you to do this

Rebuttal: I need whoever thinks this way to take a couple minutes and realize that the world isn’t about them. Do you think that when I see someone raped or murdered or abused, I should walk on by because it would be “inconvenient” for people who aren’t the victim?

This was the best timing and chance of success I could come up with

Objection 3: You didn’t get them all.

Rebuttal: Gotta start somewhere.

Objection 4: As a half-black, half-white person, you shouldn’t be the one doing this.

Rebuttal: I don’t see anyone else picking up the slack

Objection 5: Yield unto Caesar what is Caesar’s.

Rebuttal: The United States of America are ruled by the law, not by any one or several people. In so far as representatives and judges do not follow the law, no one is required to yield them anything so unlawfully ordered.

I would also like to extend my appreciation to a great many people since I will not be likely to be able to talk with them again (unless the Secret Service is *astoundingly* incompetent.)

Thank you to my family, both personal and church, for your love over these 31 years.

Thank you to my friends, for your companionship over many years.

Thank you to my colleagues over many jobs, for your positivity and professionalism.

Thank you to my students for your enthusiasm and love of learning.

Thank you to the many acquaintances I’ve met, in person and online, for short interactions and long-term relationships, for your perspectives and inspiration.

Thank you all for everything.

Sincerely,

Cole “coldForce” “Friendly Federal Assassin” Allen

PS: Ok now that all the sappy stuff is done, what the hell is the Secret Service doing? Sorry, gonna rant a bit here and drop the formal tone.

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.

No damn security.

Not in transport.

Not in the hotel.

Not in the event.

Like, the one thing that I immediately noticed walking into the hotel is the sense of arrogance.

I walk in with multiple weapons and not a single person there considers the possibility that I could be a threat.

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, this level of incompetence is insane, and I very sincerely hope it’s corrected by the time this country gets actually competent leadership again.

Like, if I was an Iranian agent, instead of an American citizen, I could have brought a damn Ma Deuce in here and no one would have noticed shit.

Actually insane.

Oh and if anyone is curious is how doing something like feels: it’s awful. I want to throw up; I want to cry for all the things I wanted to do and never will, for all the people whose trust this betrays; I experience rage thinking about everything this administration has done.

Can’t really recommend it! Stay in school, kids.

Nuts, absolutely nuts. It’s like a middle schooler’s cutesy Instagram post. Is everyone in this country afflicted with arrested development now?

Trump just got a ton of sympathy just at the moment the country was beginning to really see the consequences of his leadership. The political system is working, however slowly, and we have a chance to check his power legitimately in just few months. If the intent is to stop the administration, we don’t need crazies committing violence in this already volatile situation.

We are so far down the rabbit hole now I wonder if we can ever climb back out.

Read all the way to the end of this excerpt and then get ready to throw something:

Saulo Kasekela died of AIDS on March 7, in a small town called Mpongwe in the copper belt of northern Zambia. He was a 37-year-old security guard, admitted to the mission hospital two days earlier. After his body was wheeled out of the men’s ward, a nurse set aside his chest X-ray, a clouded smear of lungs devoured by tuberculosis, a hallmark of advanced, untreated H.I.V. infection. A scrawled doctor’s note indicated the X-ray should be saved for medical students.

Of the eight patients in the ward that day, four had AIDS. Lewis Chifuta, 33, was bone thin, feverish and barely able to recognize his siblings when they reached his bedside.

A year ago, in Mpongwe, there was one case like this each month, or maybe two. In January this year, there were 28 new cases; in February, 28 more; in March, seven more.

During President Trump’s first month in office, his administration upended much of the flagship global H.I.V. program that had saved the lives of hundreds of thousands of people in Zambia. The Zambian government went into emergency mode, desperate to ensure that people with the virus could continue to receive lifesaving medications.

But other crucial aspects of the program had to be scrapped — interventions that had helped stop the spread of the virus and protected the most vulnerable people, those like Mr. Kasekela.

Today, a pared-down system is operating on reduced U.S. support, and Zambia may lose that help entirely in the next few days. The Trump administration has set an April 30 deadline for the Zambian government to accept a new health funding agreement that is tied to giving the United States expanded access to the country’s mineral resources.

I don’t get the sense that there is any remorse on the part of the Trump administration. They’re all “shithole” countries in their minds. But they do have some valuable resources so maybe they might relent just a little bit.

Pure extortion with thousands of lives on the line.

Trump:

I’ve studied assassinations, the most impactful people, the people who do the most; they’re the ones they go after. Like Abraham Lincoln….I hate to say I’m honored by that but I’ve done a lot pic.twitter.com/AtpkB1LilI

— Republicans against Trump (@RpsAgainstTrump) April 26, 2026

He has been “impactful,” I’ll give him that.

However, he should probably take a closer look at the history of assassination attempts in the United States. Here’s a list of the presidents who have been the target of assasins and would-be assassins:

Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley and Kennedy, of course, were actually killed. Reagan, and Teddy Roosevelt were seriously wounded.

But assassinations were attempted or plotted against the following presidents:

Lincoln had several attempts against him before the one that succeeded as did Kennedy. Jackson, Taft, Hoover, FDR, Truman, Nixon and Ford all were targeted for assassination, most of them more than once. A would be assassin was stopped at the White House while Obama was away but the family was there.

So, while Trump may be enjoying the dubious “honor” of being so “impactful” that people want to assassinate him, one could make the argument that he isn’t all that special.

The pandemic split a generation

As an election watcher/worker, this Axios report that Gen Z is not monolithic caught my attention:

Gen Z isn’t one generation: Research suggests it’s two, split by the pandemic, and the younger half won’t sit still. After lurching right, the youngest voters are souring on the administration, per a recent Yale poll.

Why it matters: The generation raised on lightning-fast cultural and tech shifts has become a sought-after — and perhaps, predictable — swing group. Politicians and institutions treating them as a monolith risk misreading the country’s young people.

• That partisan split between two distinct sub-generations became evident in 2024, with young men, in particular, swinging rightward.
• The divide runs deeper than the ballot box, shaping the way younger and older members of the generation view institutions, brands and tech, and even how they develop trust.

NC Democrats’ chair Anderson Clayton, 28, was on the Bulwark Focus Group podcast on 3/21. The focus group was Gen Z. The very first audio clip played [timestamp 7:00] was a woman saying, “I’ve never really felt seen by either parties.” That’s what I’ve witnessed in 8 months of weekly rush-hour messaging to commuters: young people want to be “seen” more than “policied” at. They view politics as a red kid and a blue kid fighting in a sandbox over control of the sandbox and think: What has that got to do with my struggles? They don’t feel seen by politicians, so they don’t vote like seniors. Polticians don’t pay them as much attention because they don’t vote like seniors. It’s a vicious cycle.

That’s why YOUR LIFE SHOULDN’T BE THIS HARD draws thank-yous and requests for pictures week after week after month. It’s like instant trust. People feel seen.

Rachel Janfaza, author of “The Up and Up” explains that the Covid pandemic split Gen Z in two:

• Gen Z 1.0 graduated high school before COVID-19 and grew up without TikTok. Black Lives Matter was part of the cultural zeitgeist.
• Gen Z 2.0 graduated after the pandemic, their school years shaped by masking, quarantines and remote learning.

“No other generation in modern history had been through this once-in-a-lifetime pandemic,” Janfaza tells Axios. And, “no other generation has had the core mode of communication and culture shift as quickly as ours.”

What the polling looks like:

By the numbers: In Yale’s spring 2026 youth poll, 52% of voters aged 18–22 favored Democrats on the congressional ballot — a dramatic reversal from a year earlier, when they favored Republicans by nearly 12 points.

• The one exception: men aged 18–22, the sole young demographic that shifted away from Democrats.
• The earlier rightward tilt wasn’t driven by true conservatism, Edelman says, but by “rebellion and also being very frustrated with the status quo.”

Caveat: Yale’s 18–22 subsample skews male, according to the poll’s write-up.

I keep trying to get our people to pay more attention to and adjusting their pitches for younger voters. Almost half of younger registrants are registered independents. If they voted like seniors, they could upend American politics.

But then the Trump administraion is doing a pretty good job of upending politics all by itself.

Absolute disaster for the Republican Party. CNN's Harry Enten confirms the GOP's net approval rating in Congress has completely collapsed, plummeting an astonishing 89 points to negative 56! Even their own voters absolutely despise the chaotic Trump aligned Congress. pic.twitter.com/JanEI7iChw

— Furkan Gözükara (@FurkanGozukara) April 26, 2026

The “stars” did not align

Another memorable night at the White House correspondents’ dinner. This time for gunshots in the lobby rather than cheap shots from the dais.

“Trump and Media Unharmed After Attack; Officials Swarm Suspect’s Home,” reads a headline on The New York Times landing page.

Journalists, media executives, celebrities, Trump administration officials, and others had assembled Saturday evening and taken their seats in the ballroom on the lower level of the Washington Hilton. Donald Trump had entered to “Hail to the Chief” and was situated on the stage. It was his first time attending as president. Waiters were clearing salad plates. A banner over the stage read “Celebrating the first amendment.”

Then, The Washington Post reports, “loud popping sounds” came from the lobby:

“I thought it was a tray going down,” Trump would say later.

For the third time in less than two years, Trump found himself under the threat of gunfire. Hundreds of people — table after table — dove to the floor, reporters huddling next to Trump officials and other dinner guests, some draped by white linen tablecloths, others pressed up against the ballroom’s walls.

“Get down, get down!” someone yelled out.

At the front of the room, Secret Service officers first rushed Vice President JD Vance off the stage, then Trump a few seconds later. Other officials in the line of succession, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, were quickly whisked away, too.

Men in tuxes and women in gowns ducked to the floor. Secret Service and security officers swarmed across the ballroom, some shouting, “Clear a path! Clear a path!” as they hustled officials from the room. Trump et al. retreated to secure locations.

The Times reports:

No one had a hint as to what was going on — except that Mr. Trump had been rushed from the stage, which was now occupied by a pair of security officials brandishing large guns. (Later in the evening, officials said that an armed man had charged a security checkpoint and that a Secret Service officer had been shot.)

Somebody came to celebrate his Second Amendment.

The Nerd Prom got cancelled quicker than Elon Musk shut down USAID. The “in” crowd got shown out. “Chaos and Confusion,” declares Politico’s headline.

Meaning just another day in Trump’s Washington. Trump later used the incident to pitch his proposed ballroom with its bulletproof glass. He’d prepared “the most inappropriate speech ever,” but now he’d have to shelve it.

“I don’t know if I could ever be as rough as I was going to be tonight. I think I’m going to be probably very nice,” Trump said. “I’ll be boring the next time.”

A California man is in custody, reports The Guardian:

The suspect was in custody and being “evaluated” at a local hospital, though he did not appear to have been struck by gunfire. He was identified as Cole Tomas Allen, 31, of Torrance, California, the Associated Press reported, citing two law enforcement officials.

Jeffrey Carroll, the DC police chief, said investigators believed the suspect fired a shot and was armed with a shotgun, a handgun and knives. He also said the suspect was believed to have been a guest at the hotel. A motive for the attack had not yet emerged, officials said.

Jeanine Pirro, a US attorney for the District of Columbia, said the defendant was being charged with two counts of felony firearms and assault charges and would be arraigned on Monday. She expected more charges to follow.

Al Jazeera offers this preliminary background on the suspect:

Facebook posts appearing to be linked to Allen indicate he was recognised as “Teacher of the Month” in December 2024 by the Torrance branch of C2 Education, a national private tutoring and test-preparation company for college-bound students.

A LinkedIn profile under the suspect’s name describes him as a “mechanical engineer and computer scientist by degree, independent game developer by experience, teacher by birth”.

I’ve been to many less opulent “rubber chicken” dinners, and a couple in that ballroom. My neurons fire funny. The Times headline about officials “swarming” the suspect’s home immediately brought to mind chicken “swarm-a.”

Update: Of course, they did. Helluva choir.

MAGA accounts tweet in unison about the need for a White House ballroom following WHCD incident pic.twitter.com/3acgko7qv3

— MeidasTouch (@MeidasTouch) April 26, 2026