"I taught senior history for 15 years before I hung it up to raise three kids and referee a house that runs on cereal and grievance, and in all that time the hardest thing to get across to a room of 16 and 17 year olds was never the Louisiana Purchase or the Missouri Compromise, it was this: a president is not a team captain, he is not your side’s guy who beat their side’s guy, he is the head of state for 277 million adults who did not all vote for him and 73 million more who cannot vote at all because they are 11 and worried about a spelling test.
I used to teach it off Lincoln’s second inaugural, the one about malice toward none and charity for all and binding up the nation’s wounds. He gave that speech in March of 1865 with the war still going, five weeks before it ended and six weeks before somebody murdered him, about men who were at that moment still trying to kill him. Not figuratively, either. The summer before, Confederate troops got close enough to Washington that Lincoln stood on a parapet at Fort Stevens and was shot at.
On Friday night I sat on my couch with a glass of iced tea and watched a president of the United States stand in a ballroom, 3 months after a man tried to murder everyone in it, and spend an hour and 4 minutes reading out a list of people he hates.
Lily is 15, and she wandered through around the 40 minute mark with a bowl of cereal, stood behind the couch, watched for about 90 seconds and said, wait, is he allowed to say that about her?
He is allowed, and that is the answer, and it is also the entire point of the First Amendment, which, and I would like you to sit with this a moment, is what the dinner was supposedly celebrating.
WHAT HE ACTUALLY SAID
I want to lay this out flat, because I think a lot of good people heard that Trump was mean at a dinner and went on with their Saturday, and that undersells it badly. So let me walk you through what a president said out loud, into a microphone, on a live broadcast, in America, in 2026.
Some context first, because the setting matters. April’s dinner was held at the Washington Hilton, where it has been every year since 1972, with 2,600 guests invited. On the night of 25 April a 31 year old man named Cole Tomas Allen ran past a security checkpoint carrying a shotgun, a handgun and knives, and opened fire outside the ballroom. Nobody was killed. Allen has pleaded not guilty. The president, the first lady, the vice president and members of the Cabinet were evacuated.
Friday’s makeup dinner was moved to the Waldorf Astoria, which has a much smaller ballroom, and about 680 people came. Melania Trump, JD Vance and Marco Rubio all attended in April and all skipped Friday, with the White House citing scheduling conflicts.
The president’s first substantive line of the night was that it was great to be back at a place he knows very well because he built it. He did not build it. That building is the Old Post Office, finished in 1899. His company redeveloped it under a federal lease and ran it as the Trump International Hotel, then sold the lease. He opened a speech about press freedom by taking credit for a building that predates him by about 80 years.
Then he did something decent, and I will give him that and I will not take it back.
Secret Service Police Officer Victor Gonzales was in that room. He was at the security checkpoint in April when Allen tried to burst through, and he engaged the man head on and was struck in his protective vest and kept going. The Secret Service said his actions stopped the gunman going any further. Earlier that evening, before the president spoke, Weijia Jiang presented Officer Gonzales with the President’s Award for Exceptional Service, along with the staff of the Washington Hilton, who kept looking after guests all night after having been through the same thing.
The president thanked him properly, and thanked the Secret Service and the Metropolitan Police and law enforcement generally, and then he said this:
“In this country we believe in freedom of speech. We settle our differences not with bullets, but with open and vigorous debate. And no deranged loser with a gun will ever change that.”
I believe every word of that sentence and I would put it on a classroom wall.
Then he made a joke about the shooting, at the dinner held because of the shooting, with the officer who was shot sitting in the room, and the joke was that when people yelled get down, get down, Nicki Minaj started twerking, and that she was the only one who really understood what it meant.
The room did not laugh, and I would like you to picture that for a second. Six hundred and eighty people, most of whom had been on that floor in April, sitting in silence while the president of the United States waits for a laugh about the night somebody tried to kill them.
He told the room that Pete Hegseth, Stephen Miller and Tom Homan had been standing on tables during the gunfire while everyone else went under them, and then said he did not know if they were brave, if they were smart, if they were stupid as hell, which is his own Secretary of Defense, out loud, at a podium.
He did not mention that his wife was one of the people evacuated from that room in April. She did not come on Friday, and the White House said she had a scheduling conflict, and I am not going to pretend to know what was in her head. I know what would have been in mine.
THE CRUELTY, ONE NAME AT A TIME
Kaitlan Collins of CNN won an award that night for her coverage of the Oval Office meeting with President Zelensky, and she was sitting right there when the president congratulated her, said her award was fake, said she should not have gotten it, and then said this:
“She’s a young, attractive woman. She never smiles. I said, Kaitlan, do you ever smile? Smile. You have a nice position. You’re at CNN Fake News. You should be a happy person. So, smile, Kaitlan. Just smile.”
Ladies, you know that one, because every woman reading this has had a man tell her to smile, in a parking lot or at a job or across a church potluck, and it has never once been a compliment, it is a small man reminding you that your face is his business. And then, because apparently that was not enough, he compared her to a Bud Light can and worked in a joke about a transgender influencer, to a woman, at an awards ceremony, about her looks."