Cole Tomas Allen’s failed attempt to storm the White House Correspondents’ Dinner did so much to boost President Trump’s political fortunes that some people were left to wonder if that was the actual intent of the demented self-described “Friendly Federal Assassin.”

And Trump was so quick in capitalizing on the moment that this misapprehension was joined by a paranoid fantasy that the assassination attempt had been staged.

The gunshots yards from the entrance to the ballroom at the Washington Hilton caused everybody inside to share the instant danger with the Great Divider. Trump was thereby able to speak about the beauty of the unity in the immediate aftermath.

“We have to resolve our differences,” Trump said in a White House press briefing following the shooting. “I will say, you had Republicans, Democrats, independents, conservatives, liberals, and progressives. Those words are interchangeable, perhaps, but maybe they’re not. But yet everybody in that room, big crowd, record-setting crowd, there was a record-setting group of people, and there was a tremendous amount of love and coming together. I watched, I watched, and I was very, very impressed by that.”

Trump had said much the same in a speech in the week after the 2024 assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, when his ear was nicked by a bullet, and he rose bloody-faced, an outsized American flag in the background.

“The discord and division in our society must be healed. We must heal it quickly,” Trump said six days later in a speech at the Republican National Convention accepting the nomination. “As Americans, we are bound together by a single fate and a shared destiny. We rise together. Or we fall........

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