It’s difficult to imagine anything more perverse, authoritarian, diseased or corrupt than the immediate push to back President Trump’s “ballroom” as a response to security failures revealed in the shooting incident at the White House Correspondents Dinner. It involves so many overlapping bad ideas, bad motives and even bad people that it requires a some organization and staging to cover them all.

Let’s dive in.

First, despite the chorus of claims, this was not in any sense a security failure. It was a success. A man rushed a security perimeter inside the Washington Hilton — far from the actual festivities and protectees — and he was stopped. Initial reports suggested the gunman was stopped just before or even while entering the ballroom. Neither is true. He was on a different floor. The point of Secret Service security is not to prevent every violent incident but any that endanger the President or other protectees.