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Notes -
This. There's a saying in Risk Management; 'As Low As Is Reasonably Practicable', whereby you treat or reduce risks as much as you practically can. Also one of the best treatments for risk is Elimination. If the President holding DC events in public exposes him to public threats, you can eliminate exposure to those threats by holding events in private; which is to say on the White House grounds.
I know there is a motivation here to do an end run around the legal hurdles of the ballroom build, but there is a legitimate security argument for holding large events in a more controlled environment.
Or, to paraphrase another saying from fraud managements, "the optimum number of assassinated presidents is not zero."
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As an outsider, there seems to be this longstanding tension in American thought between, “the president is the tribune of the people and must be kept from harm” and, “the only way to keep the president the tribune of the people is to make sure they can kill him if they want to”.
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