An armed man is shot at Mar-a-Lago; the White House posts a cartoon eagle trampling a Canadian goose.

OK. Pick your jaw up off the bar. We have two simultaneous stories on a Sunday. I am going to give them to you both because the White House communications shop gave them both, on the same day, in the same hour, and the country read them together.

Story one. At 1:30 a.m. Eastern, a 21-year-old man from Moore County, North Carolina, named Austin Tucker Martin, drove into the secure perimeter of the Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach. Walked through the north gate as an employee was leaving. Got twenty or thirty yards in. Was carrying a shotgun and a gas can. Was confronted by a Palm Beach County Sheriff deputy and two Secret Service agents. Was told to drop it. Raised the shotgun into a shooting position. Was shot dead.

The man, per FBI reporting, had been struggling with mental illness and had become increasingly interested in Jeffrey Epstein and the idea of a government cover-up. The President, at the time, was at the White House, not at Mar-a-Lago. No officers were harmed.

That is story one. Armed intruder. Killed at the President’s club. Investigation underway.

Story two, on the same Sunday afternoon, hours later, the White House’s official social media account posted an AI-generated image of an American eagle with its talons on top of a Canadian goose. The eagle trampling the goose. As a response to a Canadian Prime Minister’s social media post about the 4 Nations Face-Off hockey tournament. I am not making this up. I am not embellishing. The White House, on a Sunday, responded to a foreign head of state’s hockey post with a cartoon eagle trampling Canada’s national bird.

Buddy. The same press shop. On the same day. That is running point on the armed-intruder-shot-dead-at-the-residence story is also the press shop posting goose memes at Canada.

I want you to picture, for a single quiet moment, the meeting in which the senior staff of the White House communications shop sat down on a Sunday morning with a homicide investigation in progress at the President’s home and asked themselves what should we be putting out today? And the answer was the goose meme.

The Canadian foreign minister, asked about the bird, declined to comment. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police, asked about the bird, declined to comment. The bird, asked about the bird, was not available because the bird was AI-generated and did not exist. The eagle, in the same picture, also did not exist. The only real thing in the day, hon, was the man who was shot dead at the gate.

You ever notice how the same staff that says we don’t have time for a briefing on the small story always find the time for the cartoon?

Funny how that works.