A Secret Service agent was lying in a hospital bed with a bullet wound from the White House Correspondents’ Dinner shooting — an actual assassination attempt on the President of the United States — and former Rep. Katie Porter was hunched over a laptop somewhere in California making sure the fundraising email hit inboxes before the news cycle moved on. Hours. Not days. Not a respectful week. Hours.
Because nothing says “I care deeply about political violence” like a subject line that basically reads: “SHOTS FIRED — Can you chip in $25?” You’d think even the most shameless Democrat operative would have the basic human decency to wait until the wounded agent was out of surgery before cranking up the grift machine. You’d think wrong. This is Katie Porter we’re talking about — the woman who turned a whiteboard into a personality and confused being loud with being competent.
Let’s walk through the timeline here, because the timeline is the whole story.
On the evening of April 26th, a gunman opened fire at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. A Secret Service agent was shot protecting the President. The nation was — for a brief, bipartisan moment — united in shock. People on both sides of the aisle expressed relief that the President survived. Normal human beings were processing the gravity of what just happened.
And then, on April 27th — hours later — Katie Porter’s campaign apparatus fired off a fundraising blast. The body wasn’t even cold. The agent was still in the hospital. And Katie Porter decided this was her moment.
We’ve seen this playbook before. Every mass shooting, every national tragedy, every moment when decent people pause and reflect — there’s always some Democrat with their finger hovering over the “send” button on a pre-loaded email blast. But this one hits different. This wasn’t some random act of violence they could spin into a gun control pitch. This was an assassination attempt on a sitting president. Their political opponent, sure. But a president.
And Porter couldn’t even pretend to care for a full 24 hours.
Here’s what gets me. These are the same people who lectured us — for years — about “tone” and “rhetoric” and “the temperature of our politics.” They blamed every act of political violence on conservative speech. They told us our words were dangerous. They said we needed to “do better” as a country.
Then a man tried to kill the President, and Katie Porter saw a fundraising opportunity.
You want to know why normal Americans are done with the Democratic Party? It’s not policy. It’s not ideology. It’s this. It’s the absolute inability to be a human being for five consecutive minutes. It’s the instinct — and it is an instinct at this point, baked into their DNA — to monetize everything. Every tragedy is a transaction. Every shooting is a subject line. Every dead or wounded person is a conversion rate.
Porter, for the uninitiated, lost her Senate race in California’s 2024 primary. She couldn’t even win in California, which is like losing a hot dog eating contest at a county fair — you really have to try. But she’s been rattling around the political landscape ever since, fundraising for… something. A comeback? A PAC? A whiteboard museum? Nobody’s entirely sure.
What we are sure of is that her team saw a Secret Service agent get shot and thought: “This is going to drive engagement.”
Let me be clear about something. We’re not talking about a politician releasing a statement expressing concern and then, somewhere at the bottom, including a donate link. That would still be tacky, but it’s the baseline level of tacky we’ve come to expect. No — this was a dedicated fundraising email. The kind with the bold text and the countdown timer and the “WILL YOU STAND WITH ME?” button. The kind that gets A/B tested for optimal open rates.
While a Secret Service agent’s family was sitting in a hospital waiting room.
You know what the actual difference is between Republicans and Democrats in moments like this? When Steve Scalise got shot at that congressional baseball practice in 2017, Republicans didn’t blast fundraising emails. They prayed. They visited him. They went back to work. When Trump took a bullet in Butler, Pennsylvania, the right didn’t immediately monetize it — regular Americans just showed up at rallies in bigger numbers because they were genuinely angry and genuinely scared for their country.
Democrats? They see a bullet and they see a billing opportunity.
Katie Porter owes that Secret Service agent an apology. She owes the country an apology. She won’t give either one, because apologizing doesn’t convert to small-dollar donations.
But we’ll remember. We always do. And the next time some Democrat lectures us about “civility” and “decency” and “the soul of the nation,” we’ll remember that Katie Porter couldn’t even wait for the ambulance to leave before she started asking for money.
That’s not politics. That’s a disease.