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There’s No Need to Reschedule the Correspondents’ Dinner

Or to ever hold another one again.

White House deputy chief of staff for policy Stephen Miller and his wife, Katie Miller, are taken out of the ballroom by security agents during a shooting incident at the annual White House Correspondents Association Dinner at the Washington Hilton on April 25, 2026, in Washington, DC.

This weekend’s assassination attempt targeting members of the Trump administration has provoked the now-standard suite of responses to outbreaks of political violence: the rush to detect rigid partisan motivations in an otherwise messy and meaning-challenged act; the bad-faith demands to suppress political speech; the high-formalist calls for national unity from on high.

These formulaic set pieces in recrimination theater are the means by which the country’s national discourse sidesteps the traumas of political violence, and lets the actual conditions that foment political terror remain intact. Yet this latest episode at least offers a path to one meaningful response. If milksop and insincere appeals to civility and common purpose won’t arrest the country’s drift into ever deeper currents of politically minded mayhem, we can at least start to close down our nation’s cottage industry in bogus civility. It’s long past time to mothball, one and for all, the backdrop for this latest assassination attempt: the White House Correspondents Dinner.

Cole Thomas Allen, the alleged assassin, likely just seized on the Correspondents Dinner as a venue with comparatively porous security. Indeed, in the message about his plan to target senior Trump officials, he marveled at how easy it was to conceal his cache of firearms and knives during his stay at the DC hotel that hosts the dinner—known in town as “the Hinckley Hilton,” since it was also the site of the 1981 attempt on President Ronald Reagan’s life. Yet while the event furnished a comparatively obliging target of opportunity, it also undergirds one of the most toxic fictions behind the collapse of our democracy: the idea that the national political press and the executive branch of our government are chummy equal partners in the management of the polity.

This fable is immensely flattering to members of the Beltway press, who eagerly throng to the spectacle of the WHCD as ready validation of their civic and cultural clout. It’s why the sick exercise of elite news outlets frantically recruiting A-list celebrities to sit at their tables at the dinner has become the chief source of breathless gossip and speculation in an........

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