Last night, shots were fired at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in Washington, D.C. President Trump was rushed off the stage by Secret Service agents. Vice President JD Vance and members of the Cabinet were evacuated. A law enforcement officer was struck, saved only by his bulletproof vest. A suspect, identified as Cole Tomas Allen, a 31-year-old from Torrance, California, was taken into custody near the security screening area outside the ballroom. He was carrying a shotgun, a handgun, and knives. No one was killed. And we are already, barely hours later, watching the internet do exactly what the internet does, which is fracture into a thousand different narratives, a thousand different reactions, a thousand different versions of what this means and what should come of it.
I have been sitting with this all night. And I want to be honest with you about something before I say anything else, because I think honesty is the only way this conversation is worth having. There is a part of me, a part I am not proud of, that when I first heard the news, felt something complicated. Not celebration, not quite. But something in the vicinity of a dark and tired and frustrated exhale. And I think if you are someone who has watched the last several years unfold the way they have, who has felt the weight of what this administration has done and what MAGA as a political movement represents and what it has cost people, real people, people you know or people who look like you or people whose lives have been made smaller and harder and more frightening, I think if you are that person, you understand what I mean. I am not going to pretend that complicated feeling does not exist. I think pretending it doesn’t is its own kind of dishonesty.
But here is what I know, and what I have to say clearly and without qualification: we cannot call for violence. We cannot celebrate it. We cannot quietly root for it. Not because of optics. Not because it makes us look bad. Not because some political consultant somewhere thinks it’s bad strategy. But because it is wrong, and because it doesn’t work, and because the two of those things together are reason enough.
Let me start with the practical, because sometimes the practical lands first. If something were to happen to Donald Trump, if some act of violence succeeded where others have failed, what would actually change? MAGA is not a man. It is a movement, and movements do not die with their figureheads. They transfigure them. They canonize them. They turn them into something more powerful than the living version ever was, because the living version can be contradicted and embarrassed and voted out, but a martyr cannot be any of those things. A martyr is frozen in amber at the moment of their death, perfect and permanent and impossible to argue with. We have already watched this process begin with Trump while he is still alive. The assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania in 2024, the image of him with his fist raised and blood on his face, that image did not weaken him. It made him a symbol. It gave him a story. It handed his movement exactly the fuel it needed to tell itself that he was a man being hunted by his enemies, which is the oldest and most potent political mythology there is.
And last night has already started doing the same work. Within hours of the shooting at the Correspondents’ Dinner, the machinery was turning. The framing was being set. The story was being written in real time on every platform and in every comment section. And I have already seen people, people who oppose Trump, people who are scared and angry and exhausted by what this country has become, I have seen them questioning whether the whole thing was staged. Whether it was manufactured. Whether it was a false flag designed to generate sympathy and consolidate power. And you know what I want to say about that? I want to say that it doesn’t matter. I want to say that whether it was real or staged, whether the full truth ever comes out or never does, whether Cole Tomas Allen acted alone or was motivated by something we don’t yet understand, none of that changes the point I am trying to make. Because the point I am trying to make exists independently of every possible version of last night’s events.
The point is this: violence has been normalized in this country to a degree that should terrify every single one of us, regardless of who we vote for, regardless of what we believe, regardless of where we stand on any of the issues that divide us. That is the thing that is true no matter what. That is the thing that holds across every scenario, every interpretation, every version of events. We are a country where it is apparently unremarkable that a man can show up to one of the most prominent media events of the year carrying a shotgun, a handgun, and knives. We are a country where the sitting president has now survived multiple assassination attempts. We are a country where a sitting member of Congress was shot on a baseball field, where a former congresswoman was shot in the head at a constituent event, where a pipe bomber mailed explosives to news organizations and Democratic politicians. We are a country where January 6th happened, where journalists were attacked by a crowd chanting to murder them, where elected officials were hunted through the halls of the Capitol. We are a country that has decided, apparently, that this is just the atmosphere now. That this is just the weather.
And that normalization is not a left-wing problem or a right-wing problem. I want to be precise about this because I think imprecision here is dangerous. Political violence in America has come from many directions, from many motivations, from many ideologies. It has been committed by people on the left and the right and by people whose politics were incoherent or nonexistent. The common thread is not ideology. The common thread is a culture that has built violence into its grammar. That reaches for it faster and faster. That is increasingly unable to hold conflict without someone deciding that the conflict must be resolved by force. That inability, that failure of political imagination, that collapse of the belief that change is possible through any means other than destruction, that is what we are living inside of. And it is getting worse.
Here is what violence actually does. It does not remove the conditions that created the thing you are trying to destroy. Trump and what he represents did not emerge from nowhere. He is a symptom of decades of economic abandonment, of cultural anxiety, of institutional failure, of a Democratic Party that lost touch with working class people and a media ecosystem that rewarded outrage above all else and a political culture that had been corroding for a very long time before he showed up to take advantage of it. None of that goes away if Trump goes away. None of the fear that MAGA voters feel becomes less real. None of the legitimate grievances that were cynically exploited by that movement become less legitimate. None of the underlying rot is addressed. What violence does, in this context, is make everything worse. It hardens people. It closes minds that might have been cracked open. It gives the opposition a story to tell about you that they will tell forever, that they will use to justify everything, that they will teach to their children. It takes all of the moral authority you might have had and hands it to the people you were fighting against. It is a gift to your enemies dressed up as resistance.
And beyond the strategic, beyond the political, there is something simpler and more fundamental that I keep coming back to. The people who would be hurt most by an escalation of political violence in this country are not the people at the top of the power structure. They never are. They have protection. They have resources. They can leave. The people who get consumed by the fires of political violence are always, always the most vulnerable. The people who live in the neighborhoods where things turn chaotic. The people who cannot afford to protect themselves or relocate or wait it out. The people who are already being ground down by the systems and policies we are trying to change. Violence does not liberate those people. It lands on them. It always has. History is very clear about this. The romanticization of political violence is almost always done by people who believe, consciously or not, that they will be watching from a safe distance. The reality is almost never that clean.
I understand the despair. I want to say that plainly because I think a lot of commentary on this subject skips past it and goes straight to the moral lecture, and I think that is why the moral lecture often fails to land. The despair is real. The feeling that the systems designed to protect people are not protecting them, that the ballot box has been or will be undermined, that the courts have been captured, that the institutions have failed, that nothing is working and nothing will work and the harm being done is so concrete and so immediate that there is no time to wait for the slow turning of democratic gears, I understand why people arrive at that place. I have been in that place. I think a lot of us have been in that place over the last several years. The despair is not irrational. It is a reasonable response to a genuinely frightening situation.
But despair that becomes violence is not resistance. It is collapse. It is the moment when you have abandoned the belief that a different world is possible and decided instead to simply destroy the one you are in. And I refuse that. Not because I think this world is fine. It is not fine. But because I believe that the work of building something better is still possible, is still worth doing, and is fundamentally incompatible with burning everything down in the meantime.
There is also something worth saying about what it costs us internally to normalize the desire for violence in ourselves. When we begin to root for harm to come to people we see as our enemies, something changes in us. The way we think about human life, even the lives of people we despise, becomes smaller and cruder and colder. And that smallness does not stay contained to the people we hate. It spreads. It changes how we see everyone. It makes us harder and more brittle and less capable of the kind of generous, expansive moral imagination that actual social change requires. You cannot build a more humane world from a place of dehumanization. You just can’t. The means shape the ends. They always have.
So what do we do with last night? What do we do with the image of a ballroom full of people in formal wear diving for cover? What do we do with the news about a 31-year-old man from Torrance, California, whose motivations we do not yet fully understand, who showed up to one of the most televised events in Washington carrying enough weapons to do catastrophic harm? What do we do with our grief and our fear and our anger and our exhaustion and our awareness that this will happen again, that it is already happening again somewhere, that the country is saturated with weapons and saturated with rage and that these two things in combination are producing a violence that is becoming ambient, a background hum we have all learned to half-ignore?
We refuse to add to it. That is what we do. We refuse to celebrate. We refuse to call for more. We hold the line inside ourselves, even when it is hard, even when we are tired, even when we understand the temptation because we have felt it ourselves. We commit again to the belief that the only way through this is not over the bodies of our enemies but through the slow, unglamorous, frequently demoralizing work of organizing and persuading and building and refusing to give up. We remember that the people who have made the most lasting change in this country and in this world have almost never been the ones who picked up weapons. They have been the ones who stood in front of them.
Last night, a law enforcement officer survived a bullet because he was wearing a vest. That is how close we keep getting. That is how often we keep almost losing people to this particular madness. At some point we have to decide that the almost is no longer good enough. That we are going to take the normalization of this violence seriously as the civilizational crisis that it is. That we are going to look at what is happening to us, not just politically, not just ideologically, but as a people, as a culture, as a country, and demand something different. Not with a weapon. With everything else we have. Which, if we are honest, is still quite a lot.