When Thomas Crooks opened fire at a Trump rally from a rooftop in Pennsylvania in July 2024, he killed one man in the crowd and severely injured two others, but most infamously of all he grazed Donald Trump’s ear with a bullet – producing one of the most famous images of recent years: Trump, blood on his face, fist raised high with the US flag flying behind him.
For weeks after that assassination attempt, there was near-blanket coverage about how his brush with death had changed Trump. He was a more compassionate man now, news stories told us, more serious about uniting the nation. He was, unnamed White House staffers told the media, reflecting on God, peace and love.
We all saw what happened next: less than a week after the shooting, Trump was already unable to stick to his new script, quite literally. His speech at the Republican national convention, which was supposed to be the culmination of all this, descended into an angry rant about stolen elections.
Republicans soon started decrying Democrats as the party of political violence, despite a total absence of evidence suggesting Crooks had any connection to left-wing politics.
What has followed in Trump’s second term has been one of the most brutal and divisive periods in US political history, at least since the Civil War itself.
We are unlikely, then, to see a similar wave of news coverage in the wake of the attempted attack on the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on Saturday night. The would-be assailant seems to have got nowhere near the President, meaning Trump himself was much further from being in personal danger.
Donald Trump during a press conference in the Brady Briefing Room after he was rushed out of the White House Correspondents Association Dinner (Photo: Andrew Leyden/Getty Images)For Trump, this latest attack arguably offered all of the drama with none of the personal peril of previous attacks, though one secret service agent – working at a security checkpoint several rooms away from Trump himself – was injured.
A suspect has been taken into custody and, for the moment, arrested under various firearms offences.
Even the most pro-Trump coverage might struggle to highlight any obvious change of character from the President in the immediate aftermath of this apparent attempt on his life (although it is still early days). Nowhere was this clearer than in the remarks Trump delivered from the White House Briefing Room late on Saturday evening.
Trump opened by detailing how a Secret Service agent – a man paid to protect him – had been shot just hours earlier. But within two minutes he had already pivoted to saying why the incident showed that he must be allowed to build his controversial $400m White House ballroom without any interference from the courts.
“It’s actually a larger room and it’s much more secure. It’s drone proof, it’s bulletproof glass, we need the ballroom,” he said, adding: “That’s why secret service, that’s why the military are demanding it.”
Moments later, Trump was boasting about the evening’s event having had “a big crowd, record-setting crowd” – an odd metric for an invitation-only media event that is about the same size every year.
The US Ambassador to the United Nations Michael Waltz and his wife Julia Nesheiwat, a former Homeland Security Advisor, are rushed out of the White House Correspondents Association Dinner on April 25, 2026 (Photo: Al Drago/Getty Images)He then almost seemed to boast about how assassins only try to target the most “impactful” presidents, adding: “I hate to say I’m honoured by that”.
Trump did not reflect on the possible motivations of the attacker, saying only he was clearly “a very sick person”, “crazy” and “a whack job”. But we know how the pattern of the next few days will likely go: pro-Trump influencers and the Maga media will look for a way to blame what happened on Democrats, and will launch relentless attacks along those lines.
Trump, in turn, will likely see that coverage, believe it, and gets increasingly angry – and those aides around him will use that anger to push their own agendas.
Whatever flimsy justifications can be made after this terrible incident, or connections drawn, will get exploited to further the darkest aspects of the Trump White House’s nationalist and authoritarian agenda.
There are already signs as to how that might go: the man in custody as the alleged attacker is from California, one of the most liberal states in the US, and reportedly donated a small sum of $25 to Kamala Harris’s campaign in the 2024 election. These details could easily be spun up into a narrative of a radical left war on Trump, the presidency and the constitution. That in turn could be used to justify whatever Trump’s administration does next.
A federal agent patrols after an incident at the annual White House Correspondents Association Dinner on 25 April, 2026 (Photo: Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)Before the attack on Trump in 2024, there had not been a live shooting incident involving a US president since 1981, when Ronald Reagan survived being fired at six times at the Washington Hilton – the same hotel Trump was at on Saturday night.
For decades, presidential assassinations looked like they might be a thing of the past. In Trump’s second term, they are becoming grimly routine.
As well as being a worrying sign of where the US is at right now, they also serve to fuel all of the President’s darkest instincts: his fear, his paranoia and his desire for revenge against his enemies. It will be a bleak few weeks and beyond for the US.
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