Disclaimer: What follows is an analysis of patterns and behaviour, not a claim of access to secret evidence. I study crimes, hoaxes, and cons, and I’ve had face‑to‑face dealings with people who perform convenient stunts on cue. I am applying that experience here to an event whose timing and choreography are, in my professional judgment, indistinguishable from a staged spectacle.

If someone starts a war to misdirect people from the Jeffrey Epstein files, they will stage a shooting.

This has all the hallmarks of a badly coordinated stunt: Donald Trump loudly announces he is going to the White House Correspondents Dinner, somewhere he deliberately boycotted for all of his first term and last year because the press were “unfair” to him. I knew at this moment that some staged dog and pony show was being set up. I just couldn’t say with certainty what the content of the sideshow would be. It could be some “woke” protestors in misaligned cosplay for all I knew.

But a fake assassin was also not out of the realm of possibilities, either. It just depended on how mentally lazy and desperate Trump had become.

Trump has been waist-high in cow dung, and he needed something to rally his base because he lost too many allies with the Iran War, from Tucker Carlson to Megyn Kelly. That isn’t a minor loss; that is a haemorrhage. It cannot be overstated how the Iran War is Trump’s Waterloo.

Of course, he needed a misdirection and fast. Epstein, ICE acting like fascists who kill moms and nurses, tariffs, alienating the first American Pope who is conservative with veiled threats and public insults, alienated allied countries, threatened Canada and Greenland with annexation, a stacked Supreme Court knocking the tariffs, inflation, mass layoffs, gas prices, and now a war that didn’t end, let alone end fast, and the easy solution: fake a belly ache so mommy doesn’t punish you, became a viable solution before the mid-terms give the Democrats the numbers to either impeach him for war crimes or have him removed by the 25th Amendment, and this time, they would succeed.

How easy is it to know this a hoax?Beside the obvious, “Hey, everybody! I am going to the ONE PLACE I NEVER GO! YOO HOO, OVER HERE!”, there are other tells.

Big tells.

I’m not pulling this out of thin air. For decades, I’ve dealt face‑to‑face with people who perform convenient stunts on cue: shoplifters who choreograph “innocent returns,” attention‑seekers who stage crises just shy of real danger, and grifters who rehearse their victim monologues before they ever “suffer” the supposed harm. The beats are always the same: meticulous pre‑announcement, a controlled “emergency” that somehow leaves them miraculously unscathed, and then an immediate pivot into outrage, self‑pity, or fundraising.

When I worked as a Canadian correspondent for Presstime, published by the Newspaper Association of America, I got an invitation to their annual conference in Toronto, the first time they went outside the US. One of the keynote speakers was then Vice President Dick Cheney.

I went to the speech, just as I went to then ABC Anchor Peter Jennings’ speech the next day.

Here is what happened when I went to see Cheney:

1. I had to register and show my press pass and identification, both which were recorded. Everyone had to do it.
2. There were Secret Service agents everywhere walking around the perimeter. There was not a square foot not being swept by them.
3. The Secret Service dog sniffs you and, in my case, my briefcase. No, talking to the dog does not distract it. If you have no weapon or chemicals, the dog turns its back on you. You’re not fun.
4. You are escorted inside where Secret Service agents are everywhere and highly visible. At no time is there a break in this routine.
5. The Vice President gave his speech and left. Everyone inside is vetted. Everyone inside is watched like a hawk. Agents are constantly communicating with each other.

And that’s the ones that you can see.

Because there is another hidden web throughout the perimeter. There are cameras and other devices there. There are people hiding out in plain sight. and people hiding in the shadows.

And tech has gotten a lot better since them.

These people have experience and expertise a shooter would not have, and there is no “beginner’s luck.”

So how would someone be able to bypass all of these measures? Even if they knew the schedule, the protocols, and the routines (and how would they gain this intel, especially for a one-off event?), they would not be able to get in or anywhere near unless brought in for the specific purpose of making a spectacle.

You can talk some mentally weak person into doing it with a proxy to keep your hands clean, snooker him to come in, and then stop him when he is at a safe distance.

This is not how an actual shooter would do it or plan it. This is how a useful idiot would be talked into it. “Okay, just as when you are in the perfect place for you to make noise, but not damage, you fire here!” That’s not how an enraged shooter thinks. When there is genuine anger, their focus changes, and not the benefit of the target. The actual actions benefitted the target completely.

And it didn’t help that Karoline Leavitt said to a reporter less than forty minutes earlier that everyone should watch because “there will be shots fired.” We know what she meant, but the bizarre word choice is classic parapraxis. She let the cat out of the bag, given all the other red flags here.

Especially a president whose entire public career was built on distraction, misdirection, deceit, and spectacle.

The last genuine attempted assassination of an American president was of Ronald Reagan, and the Secret Service learned its lessons well. They cannot afford to look weak and incompetent, and any breach would do so.

There isn’t the chatter on the socials you would expect to see, and what is there, sounds skeptical to unimpressed.

So far, Donald Trump had one lightly grazed ear when he wasn’t in the office, and no damage now.

People fake their own abductions. People fake a lot of things for attention and to cover up their sins and mistakes. Lies covering other lies.

The timing worked for the president just a little too well. Would-be assassins don’t do those sort of favors. When you announce you are going to speak somewhere you avoided, a place none of the previous presidents avoided, promising to tell of the press, something you do on your social and in scrums everyday, anyway, and of all places, something happens here, just as your poll numbers are in the toilet, you broke your own base, and you know the mid-terms are going to wipe out the Republican majorities in the House and Senate, you go back to what you always do: lie with a dramatic flourish to make enough people distracted and feel sorry enough for you to forgive you yet again and blame the other side.

Trump is hoping for yet another reset, another mass amnesia. He’s not getting it.

I study crimes and I studied presidents, but long before that, I studied hoaxes.

It has all the narrative beats in the right order. In structure, it’s indistinguishable from a hoax: a choreographed near‑miss where the supposed target walks away untouched and somehow more beloved. This is a fantasy‑version of a near‑miss: when you dream that some scary person is about to hurt hero‑you, but somehow, you don’t even chip a perfectly manicured acrylic nail and all the good people run to you for a giant group hug.

Sure.

In hoax logic, Donald Trump is the Sherri Papini of presidents.

By the way, I’m an equal‑opportunity offender when it comes to fakery. I called out Jussie Smollett’s story as a hoax in print because I knew the patch of Chicago he described and the script didn’t match the street long before police said so. I’m applying the same standard here.