610 CKTB’s Gene Valaitis and guest Jon Liedtke analyze the WHCA shooting, security lapses, the shooter’s manifesto, and the administration’s use of Valaitis and Liedtke analyze the WHCA shooting, security lapses, the shooter’s manifesto, and the administration’s use of the tragedy for political leverage.
Transcript (Gemini Generated):
Gene Valaitis: More on the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner on Saturday night, and the conspiracy theories are flying fast and furious. And you know somebody who’s already written an article about it in his blog called “Kvetch and Release.” Jon Liedtke, welcome to the show on a Monday morning.
Jon Liedtke: Good morning, Gene.
Gene Valaitis: Well, that was quite a Saturday night. Woo boy! Now, this is an interesting take from you because I was just joking around about this a second ago. You’re looking at the mentalist, Oz Pearlman, who by the way is just so good, as basically a canary in the coal mine for this disaster. Now, how does a guy who tells the media he has prepared a 25-minute routine to make jaws drop end up missing the guy with a shotgun passing through hotel security?
Jon Liedtke: Well, and he said to NPR just days ago, “I’ve been preparing a decade for this specific night.” Ten years ago, he sought out a plan to achieve this goal, to get onto a stage with the man, and here we are. It’s just—it’s ironic in a way that sucks for his career, but I don’t think it’ll be something that really is a tarnish on him. But listen, it’s meticulous, it’s obsessive planning on his part, on Secret Service’s part, on the media’s part to put the thing together. I mean, you’ve got to understand in this case, Trump was actually just a guest at this event, which makes the whole conspiracy theories that are being laid in really, really fall apart just on face value. And I don’t have time for those conspiracy theories, quite frankly. We know what happened: a guy who published a manifesto told his family that he was going to target the administration did so. But we’ve ended up with the perfect cynical metaphor for 2026, right? The entire media industry, the entire security apparatus, the entire administration, all had their eyes fixated either on their glass of wine, their dinner plates, or a magic trick on the TV screen in front of them and trying to figure out what was going to happen next, and a guy broke through the, you know, area with a shotgun. Everyone missed it because they were too busy rehearsing the illusion.
Gene Valaitis: Yeah. Meanwhile, did you see “Eating the Salad Guy” during this whole thing? They had a clip of this guy; he’s sitting there eating his salad, he said, “I didn’t want to get under the table.” And then I saw several clips of—of women, I’m sure the men were doing it too, picking up bottles of champagne and wine that hadn’t been opened and just putting them in their purses and walking out of the place. But back to your column, you describe the push for the $400 million White House ballroom as a “Saddam-style retreat.” So now that the administration has this shooting, do you think they’re going to bypass federal judges and the whole controversy around its construction and basically just seal the deal by saying, “We can’t go to big hotels”?
Jon Liedtke: Well, Trump already said it at the news conference immediately after the attempted shooting, that this was a justification for the ballroom. Yesterday evening, they filed a suit to dismiss the suits against their ballroom, saying how necessary it is because of what just occurred. But this is a net loss for the Office of the Presidency. Yeah, they want to create a bunker—they can curate the lighting, they can have the guest list, it’s a private fortress—but the isolation isn’t power, that’s surrender. And if you reach that point where you need to retreat into concrete to hold a presser, you’re not being a leader, you’re an expensive shut-in. I don’t know about you, but like when I see the Pope driving through the streets in the Popemobile with the solid glass windows and stuff, that’s a little bit funny and I laugh at it. When I see a Pope wandering through the streets and kissing the feet of babies, I go, “Oh man, this is a guy of power.” You want to project power?
Gene Valaitis: You know, um, the lack of security around this whole thing is kind of surprising. I mean, he takes a train from California to the East Coast of the United States and, you know, they don’t check you when you’re getting into a train, so he could take all the weapons that he wanted. He checks into the hotel. In his manifesto, he said the security is simply terrible. I don’t know, um, you know, that’s an American failure, but when I take a look at us here back in Canada and the way our country has changed so dramatically—do you think we should be looking at our own soft targets and border security here a little more?
Jon Liedtke: I think we do a really good job. I like how our national security apparatus on both sides of the border, quite frankly, work, although I have disagreements of course with the policy of how they execute their immigration and whatnot on their side in the United States. But this is just a loud admission that they have lost an ability to manage the open spaces around—or in this case, a closed space—around the President of the United States of America. If they can’t secure a hotel lobby from a guy who checked in as a guest—and I understand he was a “Teacher of the Year,” he wouldn’t show up as a red flag—but the guy was still able to check into a hotel, bring weapons in, and thereby be passed magnetometers and get pretty close, albeit a level away from the President of the United States. This is an issue of security being synonymous with seclusion. I don’t know exactly what the answer is, but if you become a Soviet-style premier retreating behind, you know, complete concrete forever, you’re not going to be seen as strong; you’re going to be seen as a strongman, but that’s never strong.
Gene Valaitis: Yeah. You know, I—I watched Jim Acosta on YouTube. He was the really good reporter on CNN who sort of was given the gate for who knows what reason. And, and you know, he said the reporters back on Saturday night when Trump stood up, they all should have left. So you mentioned the NATO principle regarding the press. So if the media simply refuses to show up at the new ballroom, who actually wins that standoff? The President or the Fourth Estate? Or—or would they even dare not to show up?
Jon Liedtke: Well, this is the interesting thing. I mean, we’re getting into a matter of talking about logistics, Gene, which is one of my side businesses that I do. But I mean, the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner is an event hosted by the White House Correspondents’ Association. As I mentioned, the President is an invitee. What he’s talking about is usurping the event, co-opting it, becoming the organizer, and then inviting the press to it. In a situation like that, they’ve lost the ability to dictate the entire evening, the entire routine, the guest list for gosh sake! So yeah, no, I would recommend there’s no reason to show up to that because that’s just a press briefing and they can hold that in the Brady Room until he decides to get rid of that.
Gene Valaitis: And wasn’t that briefing in the Brady Room only an hour after everything went down? Um, I mentioned in light of the news, I found it rather strange. I mean, here—I mean to begin with, Melania of all people was in the room, and cabinet officials were there along with other government officials, and they were just like laughing and joking and having a good time just like it was like a post-wedding party. I’m still trying to wrap my head around that one.
Jon Liedtke: Well, you know, Trump’s never going to miss an opportunity to seize an opportunity to do a play on the—the pun that goes the other way. The thing happened, he knew that everyone’s eyes were on the world, they weren’t going to be hosting the event that evening, so why not usurp it for his own purposes? Would it have been how I would have recommended handling it? Not quite. If it was me, I would have gotten Dr. Oz on stage first walking out. Not Dr. Oz, excuse me, the mentalist Oz. Although, you know what? Dr. Oz would have been good too.
Gene Valaitis: Yeah, he was probably there as well. Just was—was a very, very odd night. Um, you know, everybody in the US is talking about this ballroom, anonymously funded to the tune of over $400 million, there’s legal challenges, somebody is challenging it saying it’s an historical site and you can litigate against anything including a ham sandwich in the United States. But as a result of what happened on Saturday night, you think he has flipped the script by turning this security failure into a reason to build the private bunker and only have events there?
Jon Liedtke: I think he did a really good job at it, and I think if they keep hammering it, they’ll be able to justify it. And then if they can legislate it and get, you know, Republicans in the House and the Senate to pass it—push it through with him signing it to say that there can only be events that are in Secret Service designated venues—sure, that sounds like a pretty easy sell, quite frankly. And we know how easy America is to buy things that are wrapped up in the flag and sold with the sheen of safety. But I mean, we have to be honest, the truth in every scenario here is that the collateral damage has been left lying on the floor with the shattered glass in the lobby, or at least whatever the—the fragments that came off of the Secret Service agent’s vest. This is—this is a very tough sell to the public in America, and I don’t understand how the public in Niagara could buy this.
Gene Valaitis: Yeah. Well, one thing is for sure, the tinfoil hat crowd on Twitter is having a field day today. It’s—and the thing that’s really trending is, “it was staged,” “it was staged.” I don’t think it was staged.
Jon Liedtke: No, I—I don’t see how it could be staged. Again, I think that it takes such a either willful blindness to what happened, or ignorance to—and I don’t mean that in a rude way—but I think that if you understood that this was organized by all of the media. It wasn’t organized by the government. In fact, Trump’s team didn’t even go and give it the highest level of security detail because it was one of those public events, as I understand it, that had the media at it, so they didn’t want it to go to such a high level, and that can be argued about of whether or not that could be seen as staged, I suppose, to one extent. But no, I think what you just have to accept is—is that there’s crazy people in the world. America has 380 million people, there’s more guns in the country than there are people. This was a guy who won “Teacher of the Year” award two years ago, and it seems like he just flipped, like a lot of people are doing these days. It’s a shame. I wish it didn’t happen. Do I expect that it won’t happen again? Absolutely not.
Gene Valaitis: All right, great take this morning. Nice job.
Jon Liedtke: Thank you.
Gene Valaitis: There he goes, Jon Liedtke. Always has a good take on what’s going on, always has a good angle. All right, a quick break, when…
This aired on 610 CKTB
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