“I’ve never been in a vehicle that moved so fast,” someone in the presidential motorcade messaged me as it sped from the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner after a shooter was taken into custody by the Secret Service outside the main dining room of the Washington Hilton Hotel. Donald Trump had been onstage when the shooting began, due to give a speech at the annual dinner. I watched the motorcade rush into the north side of the White House from the steps of the Renwick Art Gallery opposite the residence. British flags fluttered on the lamp posts in advance of the King’s visit. People were scrambling to leave the Substack party I was attending. The company’s staff were told by the Secret Service to prevent people from leaving the top floor of the building. They formed an imperious barrier atop the stairs.
The shooter, reportedly carrying a shotgun, handgun and a knife, was tackled near the main dinner’s screening area. JD Vance was grabbed around the shoulders and hurled along the stage towards the exit. One reporter was in the bathroom as shots were heard outside. “The Secret Service were jumping over me on the stairs,” one attendee told me. “It was absolutely fucking mental,” another person said.
“The President will have a press briefing at the White House in 30 minutes – that is not a joke,” Weijia Jiang, the White House Correspondents’ Association President announced from the stage at the main dinner as journalists and media executives picked themselves up off the floor. Shortly after she was sitting on the front row of the press briefing room inside the White House as Trump walked in with his entourage clad in black tie. Trump was calm, impassive, and blasé about the whole thing. “Nobody told me this was such a dangerous profession,” he said – as if attempted assassination was as familiar as signing an executive order. He seemed accustomed to dodging bullets – and using them to elevate himself into sainthood. He told the adjourned press that only presidents that do something important, like Lincoln, suffer such attacks.
He stood at the lectern in what looked to me as a pre-tied black tie, his team around him similarly dressed and similarly evacuated. There stood a nodding Karoline Leavitt, her blonde waves wilting. Marco Rubio twiddled around on the soles of his feet to the President’s right. Vance impassively smiled in his winged collar. The vending machine in the White House press room was empty. Reporters sank into their seats having expected to be attending the event’s after-party at the French Embassy. Instead, they were filing copy on the latest threat to Trump’s life. A weekend that is meant to be a celebration of the fourth estate – but is really a communal act of political onanism – had resulted in the press rushing back to the White House to listen to the words of a President under whom the language – and reality – of assassination had flourished. America faces a burgeoning growth of violence we don’t yet comprehend.
Violence had inserted itself into Trump’s second term yet again. The venue was the very place, the Hilton Hotel, where Ronald Reagan was shot in 1981. The level of perceptible violence in Washington has been apparent in recent months. You still see National Guard troops walk into Starbucks, awkward and self-conscious. Deployed by Trump to stop the city’s “crime emergency”, they have become normal – a part of the landscape. At the same time, threats to Trump’s life from his detractors have become part of the rhythm of his presidency. These events, which spawn online conspiracies or oblique interpretations, fuel an ideology on Maga’s right that is gaining ground among those in power.
Take last night. His acolytes have quickly spun the attempted shooting into yet another justification for the ball room Trump is building on the East Wing. This wouldn’t have happened if everything was hosted on land under the thumb of the President, they argue. What a venue to honour the free press, indeed. Familiarity, absurdity and violence always come together in a surreal way under Trump.
[Further reading: The attempted assassination of Donald Trump]
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