snip...

Oh, the strange ironies of life.

Renee and I were at the fabulous Puck Penthouse party on a rainy and cold Saturday night in Washington, D.C., before the White House Correspondents Dinner. We had no plans to attend the dinner, but the Puck party was next door to the Washington Hilton. Just before we left, I walked Renee over to a window that overlooked the famous spot where John Hinckley tried to assassinate Ronald Reagan. The photo for the article is what we could see from that window.

Odd foreshadowing, but here we are.

We left the party, headed to the Renwick Gallery for the Substack Party, and a few minutes after we arrived, the news broke that there had been shots fired at the Hilton.

You knew the sequence, even before the sound of the gunshots died down in the Hilton lobby. Ignore the loose security that night. Ignore the fact that Trump was never in immediate danger. Cast the shooter as an agent of "the left." Invoke the sacred incantation of Donald the Martyr.

snip...

By Sunday morning, every Fox and Sinclair affiliate was repeating the same story: "Donald J. Trump, Anointed by the Lord, Survivor of Butler, has now cheated death a third time."

Cole Tomas Allen, a 31-year-old Caltech-educated schoolteacher who tried to get past security two floors and over 800 feet from the President, was instantly made into part of the Trump Resurrection Triptych. Butler. West Palm. The Hilton. Father, Son, and Magnetometer.

The Trump team knew within seconds they had a chance to revive the MAGA base, guilt-trip the press into silence for weeks, and shock the easily paralyzed Democrats off their game as election season heats up. The thought "Finally, we can really change the subject from ... well, everything else."

And they tried. Bless their predictable hearts, they tried.

Until Trump utterly blew it.