It was a little after 8:30 PM and I had just sat down at Café Milano, the white-tablecloth Georgetown watering hole loved and hated by both sides of the aisle, when the comedian Matt Friend announced to our table that shots had been fired at the White House Correspondents Dinner.

The first question was, Is everyone dead? A chill entered the room. When it turned out that any apparent threat had been neutralized, no one had died, and hardly anyone was injured, the next question was, Are the afterparties still happening?

It’s a testament to the non-stop insanity of the Trump era that an active shooter getting close to the president — for a second time — was so quickly metabolized by Washington. While much mocked and much degraded in recent years, the White House Correspondents Dinner and its attendant festivities remain the biggest night of the year for the capital’s journalists, who were caught between reporting the shocking turn of events and indulging in gallows humor. “I don’t mean to make light but sooo many Washington correspondents have got/are getting texts from their exes tonight,” one journalist texted me.

All was chaos across town at the Washington Hilton but few seemed bothered at Café Milano, where the speakers were blaring “Oops I Did it Again” and the TV screens were tuned not to the news but to a stock image of a castle in Dubrovnik. Heather Podesta was sitting at a table watching CNN’s coverage on her phone. Friend, the comedian, was losing his mind over how upsetting this was for........

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