A more secure ballroom will not stop the madness
This is the age of chaos Trump has made.
Public Notice is supported by paid subscribers. Become one ⬇️
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.
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.
Perhaps Trump deserves some credit for not letting the possible assassination attempt cause him to lose focus. Because this has been a curious feature of many of his recent appearances: An event starts out to be about a serious subject like the war in Iran, but before long, he starts rambling on about the ballroom.
But is the problem revealed by this event really that gala black-tie Washington dinners are held in insufficiently hardened locations? After all, security operated just as it was designed to do, and the shooter never even got to the same floor as the president. This reaction is reminiscent of the way Republicans always respond to school shootings, arguing that we certainly can’t examine our gun laws; all we can do is turn your local elementary school into a fortress.
Nevertheless, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche has sprung into action. He sent a letter Sunday to the lawyer representing the National Trust for Historic Preservation, demanding that the group drop its lawsuit challenging the way the ballroom steamrolled over the normal process for such projects.
“Your lawsuit puts the lives of the President, his family, and his staff at grave risk,” Blanche wrote.
How we survived this long as a country without it is hard to fathom; the memory of the Founding Fathers will forever be tainted by their failure to include in the Constitution a ballroom provision.
“Fight! Fight! Fight!”
If you asked Trump and his movement to select one image to encapsulate everything important about him and his movement, it would be the photograph taken as he was led away from the stage in Butler, blood streaming down his face from a nick to his ear produced by the would-be assassin’s near miss.
Ever the showman, in that moment Trump knew all the cameras were on him, and he stopped to raise his fist to the crowd and shout (or at least mouth; the audio is unclear): “Fight! Fight! Fight!”
It’s impossible not to think of that image after Saturday, even if Trump’s exit from the dinner was rather less vigorous (he tripped and fell as Secret Service agents bodied him from the dais).
Immediately after Butler — and ever since — Trump and his supporters put that image everywhere. It hangs, poster-sized, in the Grand Foyer of the White House. The Treasury Department is considering putting it on a commemorative coin, without the blood but with the words “FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT” around the perimeter. You can buy a “Fight Fight Fight” Trump-branded watch for $499, with payment accepted in the president’s now nearly worthless meme coin.
The message of “Fight! Fight! Fight!” is not that political violence has become a national crisis, or even that it is wrong. Speaking to reporters after returning to the White House on Saturday evening, Trump himself didn’t say so; instead he characterized this latest incident as one more testament to his greatness.
“I’ve studied assassinations, and I must tell you, the most impactful people, the people that do the most ... they’re the ones that they go after,” he said. “And I hate to say I’m honored by that, but I’ve done a lot.”
The message of “Fight! Fight! Fight!” is that violence must be met with more violence, and the moral valence of that violence is solely determined by the political affiliation of the perpetrators and victims.
So when a Trump ally is attacked or killed, the necessary response is to wreak a terrible vengeance. But when a liberal is attacked or killed, it is either ignored (as Trump did the assassination of Minnesota Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband last June) or joked about (as Trump and other conservatives did about the near-fatal assault on Nancy Pelosi’s husband).
Violence committed by MAGA itself, on the other hand, is heroic. The January 6 insurrectionists all get pardons, their attempt to overthrow the government recast as a patriotic “day of love.” Kyle Rittenhouse, who killed two people and wounded a third in Kenosha, is invited to Mar-a-Lago and held up as an example for others to emulate. An army of masked thugs is sent into every corner of America and given free rein to treat those they encounter with maximum brutality. And when some of those thugs gun down Renée Good and then Alex Pretti in the street for the crime of standing up for their neighbors, the immediate response from the administration, before the details are known, is to call the killings not regrettable but the brave actions of heroes.
The idea that violence is good when directed at those we hold in contempt is a signature of this administration, at home and abroad. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth literally prays to God for “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy,” and seems to take an almost erotic thrill at the killing, whether those being ripped to pieces by American missiles are Venezuelan fishermen (aka “narcoterrorists”) or whoever happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time in Tehran.
The madness all around us
We cannot separate the violence Trump promotes from the campaign the administration has so enthusiastically waged against the federal government itself.
Trumpism combines authoritarianism with institutional degradation, in which so many of the worthwhile things the state used to do — scientific research, environmental protection, support for libraries and schools and economic development, the provision of health insurance and food assistance — have been reduced or eliminated, and the most visible expression of government is a masked ICE agent smashing a car window while his colleagues pepper-spray anyone raising an objection.
Meanwhile, Trump’s government ensures that the economy will increasingly run on scams, as it disempowers oversight and slashes away at any agency or regulation that might protect consumers. The world is awash in gambling apps and prediction markets and crypto schemes, just as MAGA wants it to be (especially since Trump himself and his family are so eagerly cashing in).
The social media so many of us imbibe every day make it seem like the world is a roiling cauldron of madness, an endless procession of things to be angry about and horrors to gawk at. Again, this is just as MAGA wants it; the White House employs its own army of hate-mongering edgelords to churn out a steady supply of AI slop and lib-trolling. Conspiracy theories have never had more routes to spread through the world, and no president has ever indulged and promoted them the way Trump has.
Even many young people have come to feel that the information sources they grew up on are making them feel terrible all the time. How many conversations have you had with friends and family in the last few years about how chaotic everything is? When politics, culture, and the economy are all so unsettled and anxiety-provoking, violence can come to feel like the inevitable outgrowth of a world gone mad.
There is no easy solution to that problem, even if Trump’s eventual departure may make the world feel calmer and saner for a while. But as experience has taught us, things can always get worse again.
Unless, of course, we build a big, beautiful ballroom. Then we will finally have the peace and security for which every American yearns.
That’s it for today
We’ll be back with more tomorrow. If you appreciate today’s PN, please do your part to keep us free by signing up for a paid subscription.
Thanks for reading, and for your support.
Great post today. Really encapsulates what it’s like.
& you know what's cheaper than the ballroom? The felon not going to the WHCA dinner ever again.