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Four US presidents were assassinated while in office, and dozens of other times, someone has plotted to kill the occupant of the White House.
These would-be heirs to John Wilkes Booth and Lee Harvey Oswald have not been highly trained killers out of a thrilling spy novel; more often they are deeply unstable people whose attempt on the president’s life came only after their own fell apart.
But like everyone, they were affected by the world around them. It gave shape and direction to their beliefs, their delusions, and their rage. And given the age of chaos in which we live, it should be no surprise that violence has become a regular feature of our political life, some of it directed at the president.
Donald Trump is not the sole creator of that chaos, but he is the axis around which much of it revolves. He is to individual acts of political violence what climate change is to hurricanes: We may not be able to blame global warming for a particular hurricane, but we know it creates the conditions for hurricanes to be more common and intense. And while Trump surely doesn’t want anyone to try to kill him, when the attempts occur, he capitalizes on them to exacerbate the feeling that the world is spinning out of control and violence is not only inevitable, but often just what we need.
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If the suspect from the White House Correspondents Association dinner turns out to have been coming for Trump, it will be the third such attempt on his life just since the 2024 campaign. Remarkably enough, the shooter who came closest to succeeding — 20-year-old Thomas Crooks, who fired at Trump from a rooftop at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, before being killed by government agents — remains an almost complete mystery in his motives.
But it’s safe to say that neither Trump nor anyone around him really cares. The Butler incident was quickly made into a story of God’s intervention to save Trump, proof that he’s an instrument of divine intent and glorious destiny. Some similar myth will doubtless be crafted out of the event Saturday night as well. But in the meantime, Trump and his supporters have a much more pressing subject to deal with.
Ballroom dancing
In the immediate aftermath of Saturday’s incident, Trump chose to focus everyone’s attention on his current obsession: the ballroom for which he demolished the East Wing of the White House.
Posting multiple times about it on Truth Social, he sent a message that everyone on the right, from politicians to pundits, seemed to receive: In the wake of this shocking event, we must talk about the ballroom.
“What happened last night is exactly the reason that our great Military, Secret Service, Law Enforcement and every President for the last 150 years, have been DEMANDING that a large, safe, and secure Ballroom be built ON THE GROUNDS OF THE WHITE HOUSE. It cannot be built fast enough!”, Trump posted.
If you don’t recall every president since the Civil War DEMANDING a large ballroom, you must not be a history buff.
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