The problem is, we can’t trust a word they say

Apr 27, 2026

At 8:30 p.m. last night, the President of the United States sat on the stage in the Ballroom of the Hilton in Washington, D.C. He was there attending the White House Correspondents’ Dinner for the first time as a sitting president. For years, after being publicly mocked by then-President Obama, Donald Trump had refused to return.

By 8:36 p.m., chaos had erupted just a floor above, and it reached them almost instantly. Within seconds, Vice President J.D. Vance was grabbed by the shoulders, yanked from his chair, and rushed off the stage. Trump remained seated on the stage longer before agents eventually descended on him, shouting for everyone to stay down as they moved to secure him. As they worked to take him to safety offstage, he stumbled and collapsed to the floor, forcing agents to lift him back to his feet and practically carry him away.

The event would eventually be canceled and the room cleared. And shortly after, the President of the United States would stand before cameras to address the nation. Still in his tuxedo, two hours after shots were fired, he walked to the podium in the White House briefing room along with members of his cabinet and addressed the nation. Not to speak about gun violence, or even to ask how something like this keeps happening. But instead, to use what had just happened as the justification to demand that his long-disputed vanity project, the White House ballroom, be allowed to be built. That is where the president’s mind went in a moment of crisis. He could only think about how he could twist this dangerous situation into immediately benefiting himself.

The first thing he said was, “That was very unexpected.” He called it “always shocking when something like this happens.” He called the shooter “a lone wolf whack job.” He said he had “fought like hell to stay” at the dinner, but Secret Service insisted he leave. He told the assembled press that he had prepared what would have been “the most inappropriate speech ever made” for the evening, adding, “I don’t know if I could ever be as rough as I was going to be tonight.” He asked Americans to “recommit with their hearts to resolving our differences peacefully.”

And then he pivoted to the ballroom. “It’s not a particularly secure building,” he said of the Washington Hilton. “And I didn’t want to say this, but this is why we have to have all the attributes of what we’re planning at the White House.” He talked about drone-proofing. He talked about bulletproof glass. He talked about the 150 years of presidents who had supposedly demanded this ballroom. He talked about the lawsuit he wants dropped. And then he kept going through a litany of his administration’s policies and accomplishments, his signature ramble, all of it somehow finding its way into a press conference that followed a shooting by less than two hours.

Not a single word about the epidemic of gun violence, which is one of the actual reasons this keeps happening. Or that his policies and chaos are driving a huge divide in our country. Just the ballroom, the lawsuit, and then, as the very last thing, asked why he keeps finding himself near violence, he said this:

“I’ve studied assassinations, and I must tell you the most impactful people, the people that do the most, you take a look at the people, Abraham Lincoln, I mean, you go through the people that have gone through this, where they got them, but the people that do the most, the people that make the biggest impact, they’re the ones that they go after. They don’t go after the ones that don’t do much because they like it that way.” And then, asked directly whether he felt honored by that, he said: “I hate to say I’m honored by that, but I’ve done a lot.” He compared himself to Abraham Lincoln. As if he comes anywhere close to the positive historical impact of Abraham Lincoln.

Although Trump did not share much about the suspected shooter, we did learn more this morning. The suspect is 31 and from Torrance, California. A Caltech engineering grad with a master’s degree in computer science from Cal State Dominguez Hills. He was the teacher of the month at a tutoring and test prep center, who checked into the Washington Hilton as a hotel guest. Investigators believe he used a stairwell to move from his room, carrying his weapons in a bag, down to the terrace level. And at 8:36 p.m., armed with a shotgun, a handgun, and multiple knives, he rushed the Secret Service checkpoint just outside the International Ballroom, where shots were fired. One agent was hit but saved by his vest.

Allen was tackled and taken into custody near the staircase leading down to the ballroom. Minutes before the shooting, Allen sent a manifesto to his family, calling himself “The Friendly Federal Assassin.” The manifesto ranked administration officials by priority as potential targets. He wrote that turning the other cheek was only appropriate when you yourself were being oppressed, not when you were standing by while others were being harmed. That is what we know so far, and that, of course, could change as more details emerge. He will be arraigned Monday on charges including assault on a federal officer and using a firearm during a crime of violence. More charges are expected to be filed in the coming days.

There is a lot that we don’t know, so we have to treat this moment with care because there is a lot coming at us at once, and we have to be careful to stick with what the verifiable evidence shows us, we name clearly what is still uncertain, and we update our understanding when more comes out. Maybe someday we will know exactly what happened last night and why. Maybe we will find out there was more to it. Maybe we will find out it was exactly what it appears to be today. But today we can’t let ourselves abandon facts and go purely on speculation, because if we do, we have crossed into their territory, jumping to conclusions and basing our thoughts only on the propaganda we are fed.

And here is the problem every one of us is sitting with tonight: we do not trust this government to tell us the truth about what happened last night. That is not a conspiracy theory. That is the rational, earned response to an unbroken record of documented lies. This is an administration that tells us the economy is the strongest in history, while the numbers say otherwise. That tells us they are winning the war in Iran while all the evidence points the other way. That tells us their approval rating is high, while every credible poll shows something completely different. That tells us inflation is gone and jobs are booming while millions of Americans are barely making it to the end of the month. They have lied about things we can measure. They have lied about things we can see with our own eyes. They have looked at us on camera and said things that are demonstrably, provably false, and then kept saying them. So when something this significant happens, with this many open questions and this many convenient angles, it makes sense that we question and remain uncertain. We are allowed to say we don’t know yet. And we are allowed to say: we’re watching.

What happened last night, and what has been said about it in the hours since, is aimed at collapsing us all into conspiracy theorists to break our hold on reality. Fear does that. And crisis does that. A president in free fall, with approval ratings at historic lows, with his party’s grip on power loosening by the month, has every reason to want the country’s attention pulled back to him, rallied around him, afraid without him, basing the reality of our lives on whatever he says.

But we also can’t ignore what we do know. If you watch the footage from the ballroom last night, the moment it all breaks open, every person at that head table sitting with Trump reads the danger instantly. Melania Trump begins lowering herself to the floor. People are diving under tables across the room. Every single person in that ballroom understood, in their body, what was happening. And Donald Trump sat there with an unconcerned blank look on his face. As though the message had been sent and had not arrived. His wife looked shocked. The woman to his right had already gone down to the ground. The room was in chaos. And he just sat there.

And we must ask the necessary question that every American has the right to ask: if the President of the United States cannot read a room in a moment of unmistakable, immediate, physical danger, how do we trust him to accurately perceive any threat to this country? He controls the nuclear codes. He is the person who has to make unthinkable decisions. He is the person on whom the safety of hundreds of millions of people depends. And he couldn’t read what everyone around him read in seconds. That question deserves an answer.

And maybe his distance from reality is because he’s not living in it. When Trump stood before cameras while still in his tuxedo, he was more focused on the ballroom than anything else, saying, “It’s drone proof. It’s bulletproof glass. We need the ballroom. That’s why Secret Service, that’s why the military are demanding it. They wanted the ballroom for 150 years for lots of different reasons but today is a little bit different.” The next morning on Truth Social, he wrote: “What happened last night is exactly the reason that our great Military, Secret Service, Law Enforcement and, for different reasons, every President for the last 150 years, have been DEMANDING that a large, safe, and secure Ballroom be built ON THE GROUNDS OF THE WHITE HOUSE. This event would never have happened with the Militarily Top Secret Ballroom currently under construction.”

This is just one of the reasons why so many people think what happened last night was a “false flag.” Trump’s presidency is in free fall. His approval ratings are at historic lows. People are frustrated, not represented, watching this government loot everything it touches. When a leader is losing that badly, when his own party’s grip is visibly loosening, a crisis that unifies people around him is not an inconvenient complication. It is a gift. Butler was a gift. It helped him. And maybe he’s hoping this one will help him, too. That doesn’t mean it was manufactured. It means we are allowed to notice who benefits. And we are obligated to hold that question alongside what we know.

And as others are pointing out, it’s hard to ignore that just ten days ago, Senior U.S. District Judge Richard Leon, a George W. Bush appointee, not a liberal activist, ruled that the administration’s national security argument was, in his words, “incredible, if not disingenuous.” He had seen every argument they could make. He carved out an exception for the bunker being built underneath it, because that, he agreed, had legitimate security value. But the ballroom itself? The above-ground structure? He said it did not rise to the level of an imminent national security threat. He noted that no president in the two centuries before Trump had required a massive ballroom on White House grounds to be safe. Ten days later, there was a shooting at the Washington Hilton. And within hours, Trump was at a podium demanding the lawsuit be dropped immediately, calling it frivolous, filed by “a woman walking her dog.” He used the shooting to override a court ruling he had already lost. That is not a president responding to a crisis. That is a president who had the answer ready and was waiting for the question.

And that is exactly why so many theories are flying around on social media today. Not because people are irrational. But because they cannot trust their own government. And that distinction matters enormously, because when a population loses the ability to trust the people governing them, something breaks that is very hard to repair.

We have always known that governments are often untruthful. That is not new. Governments have always had secrets. They have always, at times, told us things that weren’t true. History is full of such moments. But this is what is different. It has never existed at this scale in this country. We have never seen an administration that lies about everything. Not classified operations or complicated foreign policy decisions, where the full picture couldn’t be shared for security reasons. Everything. The size of an inauguration crowd. The state of the economy. The outcome of an election. The cost of groceries. The number of jobs created. The status of a war. The basic facts of what happened at a press conference yesterday. They lie about things that can be checked. They lie about things we saw with our own eyes. They lie and then they lie about the lie. And they do it so constantly, so reflexively, so without consequence, that after a while a person stops knowing what the ground is. They have been flooding the zone with enough lies that we are now forced to question everything.

And that is where we are. That is the real damage of this moment. Not just that something happened at the Washington Hilton last night. But that we woke up this morning unable to know with certainty what it was. Unable to trust the official account. Unable to turn to our government for clarity, because our government has spent every day of the last year proving that clarity is not something it deals in. Other countries have had corrupt leaders. Other countries have had governments that lied. But there has been, in the history of modern democracies, a floor. A point below which even the most cynical government did not usually go, because they understood that a population that cannot trust anything is a population that becomes ungovernable, volatile, and dangerous.

What we are watching right now, whether last night was exactly what it appeared to be or something more, are the actions of an administration in freefall. Desperate actions. The actions of people who know what is coming in the midterms and are doing everything in their power to slow it down, muddy the waters, and hold on. The lies will get bigger. The events will get more dramatic. The chaos will be turned up because chaos is the only tool they have left when the numbers are this bad and the walls are closing in this fast. We should expect it to get worse. We should expect more things that feel convenient, more things we can’t quite explain, more moments where the official story doesn’t fully add up. That is not a reason to spiral. That is a reason to stay anchored. We hold open minds. We don’t jump to conclusions in either direction. We stay grounded in what we can prove. And we do not let them exhaust us into looking away.

Because here is what I know about the direction our country is heading, regardless of the chaos the Trump administration tries to create. I have heard from multiple people that members of Congress already have a plan for the moment, not the possibility, but the moment, that Democrats take back control. I wrote about this months ago. The framework for impeachment proceedings not just for Trump, but for members of his cabinet, and the Vice President. And they are not just stopping there. It includes accountability too. A plan to hold hearings the likes of which came out of Nuremberg. Every enabler. Every person who used the machinery of this government to commit crimes against the American people. Held accountable under the rules of our law. Not mob justice or retribution for its own sake. The law applied equally to everyone.

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