Our Low-Trust, Emotionally Numb, High-Wall American Society
A few scattered thoughts on the political violence at the WHCA.
The hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World adheres to a few simple rules to help preserve staff sanity:
Don’t expound too much about politics with my extended family.
Don’t read too much about congressional primaries.
Tune out the Red Sox when they embarrass themselves.
Don’t comment on the crazy folks trying to assassinate a president.
I’m not going to violate any of these rules after the violence that overshadowed Saturday night’s attempt at a White House Correspondents Association dinner. But the violence and the reactions to it do underscore some disturbing trends in American society — and the ways in which president Trump is being hoisted by so many of his own petards that he is on the receiving end of an atomic wedgie.
Let’s start by recognizing that this is the third assassination attempt on president Trump that the public knows about, and the second one to directly impact a public event.1 Most of the firsthand reportage of this event stressed how rattled Trump’s policy principals seemed to be as they were whisked out of the room. Even though the shooter never got close to the actual dinner, the video from the event suggests just how unsettling this could have been for the attendees:
Still, Politico’s John Harris was in the ballroom, and he wrote afterwards, “At no time during the episode did I perceive myself or colleagues as in acute danger. Whatever had happened, it was clear that it had taken place just outside the ballroom. There was no indication of an active shooter or a terrorist act underway.” So I think it’s safe to look past the immediate trauma and consider the knock-on effects.
At the White House, Trump and his MAGA minions subsequently attempted to reverse engineer a rationale for building the White House ballroom from the assassination attempt, arguing (I think) that such a venue was needed for holding such events in a secure locale. That seemed, however, like a trial balloon that deflated almost as soon as it was launched.
Why? What is interesting — and somewhat more unsettling — is that the broader public reaction to this event has been either indifference or skepticism. On indifference, Puck’s Dylan Byers wrote, “The media is giving this the ample coverage it deserves. But it’s unnerving how desensitized so many people have become—to shootings, obviously, but also to political violence and the abnormality of the moment.”
Byers is correct: this is not just about the numbed reaction to political violence, but to mass casualty events more generally. A week ago a man in Louisiana killed eight children and wounded two women — and I don’t think it was even a 24-hour story in the news cycle.
As for the skeptical reaction, here’s just one example:
This morning I got a call from a family member checking in to see how I was doing after attending the eventful White House Correspondents’ Association dinner last night. They asked what happened, and was I feeling shaken?
They also had another question: Having been there, did I think it was staged?
That uncertainty about what really happened — fueled, my family member said, by seeing numerous viral posts on X — was clearly shared and stoked by many people in the aftermath of Saturday’s shooting. Wired reported that the word “staged” exploded on social media immediately after the incident. On Sunday, outgoing Texas Democratic Rep. Jasmine Crockett said of the shooting: “Maybe it’s fake… who knows.”
Distrust in legacy media and the rise of unregulated social media have helped make conspiracy theories a routine feature of the discussion about major public incidents.
This builds on a recent MAGA conspiracy theory revival that the 2024 shooting attempt of Trump in Butler, PA was “staged.” As The Hill’s Matt K. Lewis observed, the Purveyor-in-Chief of conspiracy theories is now finding himself at the center of so many of these theories:
We have entered a new and possibly ironic phase of the timeline: Trump is finally discovering what it’s like to be on the losing end of a conspiracy theory.
Trump’s failure to release Epstein files was probably the inflection point. But more recently, the conspiratorial thinking about Trump has metastasized….
The beauty of conspiracy theories is that they are unfalsifiable. As such, former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s (R-Ga.) framing of the assassination attempt — “I’m not calling the Butler assassination a hoax, but there are a lot of questions that deserve public answers” — is structurally identical to the rhetoric that has fueled past QAnon conspiracy theories….
It would be easy to lament all of this as evidence that Americans have lost trust in institutions and a common reality. And yes, that is a huge problem. But it is also difficult to ignore the cosmic irony: Trump spent years encouraging the very style of thinking that now has people claiming he is the Antichrist who faked his own assassination attempt.
As much as I want to savor the cosmic irony, the collapse of trust and emotional numbing of Americans are longer-term problems that will persist long after Donald Trump has exited the political stage.
What will hopefully end with Trump, however, is the belief that the world is so scary that the only safe option is to live in a fortress at great remove from the American public. In the short term, however, this event will accelerate what had already been a disturbing trend: Trump officials walling themselves off from the rest of the country.
The New York Times’ Katie Rogers wrote about this phenomenon last month:
Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth are neighbors, living in a row of stately homes at Fort McNair, a military installation that sits on a peninsula where the Potomac and Anacostia Rivers meet. Their homes are usually reserved for high-ranking generals….
All told, at least a half-dozen senior Trump administration officials are living in military housing in the Washington area. They include Attorney General Pam Bondi — she is the one currently dealing with a flooded basement — as well as Stephen Miller, President Trump’s deputy chief of staff….
More could join them soon.
At least one more senior official has been advised to move by security officials who assess threats, according to people familiar with the arrangements and who were granted anonymity to discuss matters concerning security. Others, including Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, and Russell T. Vought, the White House budget director, have browsed available military housing but have not yet made the move. Representatives for both did not return a request for comment.
The practice of moving public servants onto guarded military bases has no modern precedent. It raises some unsettling questions about the increase in violence against public figures, about the overall health of American democracy and, perhaps most obviously, about who is paying for this….
In their new neighborhoods, officials are finding a quieter and friendlier world than the one they faced in civilian Washington — a place where it is not uncommon for Trump officials to encounter protesters outside their homes, in restaurants and in other public spaces. In military housing, children can safely play outside. Families gather to watch sports and have dinner. Renters drop off checks at the property manager’s office each month. It is described as a suburban utopia — just on a military base, where everyone who enters needs a badge.
The shooting attempt over this weekend will likely spur more high-ranking officials to seek the safety and comfort of living on a military base if at all possible. And I have no doubt that doing so will cause these officials to become even more out of touch with the wants and hopes of the American people than current opinion polls suggest. In this way even Trump’s non-billionaire subordinates are adopting plutocratic behavioral traits.
Like most politicians, I think political violence should find no safe harbor in this country. But as much as Trump might want to capitalize on being a potential target, he has salted the earth too much to find any fertile angle of political exploitation. And while I don’t think that’s a healthy signal of the state of the union, it is Trump’s just desserts.
"president Trump is being hoisted by so many of his own petards that he is on the receiving end of an atomic wedgie."
I'm definitely going to steal this.
Plenty enough *is* orchestrated: inflation, unemployment, low wages, access to education & healthcare, data mining, the wealth gap, US military action, spending priorities, Executive Orders, Project 2025 … and more.
When will we turn all our attention to those who are behind these admitted orchestrations? No wonder everyone behind that podium last night was smiling.