On Saturday evening, Cole Tomas Allen was apprehended while carrying multiple weapons and apparently trying to enter the ballroom at the Washington Hilton, where the White House Correspondents’ Dinner was being held. In his manifesto, Allen said White House officials1 were “targets, prioritized from highest-ranking to lowest”. President Trump, Vice President Vance, and other Cabinet officials and VIPs were in attendance at the dinner. This was the latest of several assassination attempts against Trump and Allen was officially charged with attempted assassination today.
As I wrote after the assassination of Charlie Kirk, we struggle with how to cover this sort of political violence at Silver Bulletin. On the one hand, these stories don’t really play into our expertise. And “takes” in the immediate aftermath of these events are notorious for relying on incomplete or inaccurate information and otherwise “not aging well”. On the other hand, it’s an objectively important political story — it would have felt weird to publish the story we were originally planning for today (a good politics story but not time-sensitive) as though nothing had happened over the weekend. And to some extent, the premise of any good blog is in having access to the author’s thought process while events are still in progress.
So I compromised by talking it out with Eli, who was attending the Substack New Media Party near the White House2 when the WHCD incident went down. You can find the video above. (Note that there are a few minutes of dead space at the end.) As much as I’m trying not to write a long, complicated essay about this, there were basically two points that I kept returning to in our conversation.
People shrugged this off, but it’s not a good sign if this feels “normal”
How one experiences breaking news depends on one’s circumstances. On Saturday night, I was in kind of a zone trying to get our soccer/World Cup model over the finish line. And uncharacteristically, I wasn’t really checking my phone. By the time I learned about the WHCD incident, the danger seemed to have passed.3
I know from friends how harrowing the experience was if you were actually at the Washington Hilton. But as Eli says, otherwise the show pretty much went on. (Including at the Substack party, where guests were literally locked in for some period of time.)
On Twitter, people were continuing their usual conversations about the NBA playoffs and the red and blue button4 and whatever else. Roughly two or three times a year, there’s a political event that stops the world in its tracks, where writing about anything else would seem “tone deaf”. Both the assassination attempt against Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania in 2024 and the Kirk assassination fell into that category. Based on the social media vibes, Saturday night didn’t feel the same way — even though the events unfolded at the literal epicenter of media and political power.
And maybe that’s … not great. I never want to tell people what they should or shouldn’t care about or critique their emotional reactions. But an assassination attempt against the president of the United States is the very definition of a major political story. And the fact that this sort of thing is happening more often is a reason to feel more worried, not more complacent because you narrowly averted disaster. If your next-door neighbor drives home drunk every Friday and has knocked down every other mailbox on your block at some point, your conclusion shouldn’t be that he’s a great driver because he’s avoided worse.
One can debate exactly how close Allen got — he’d checked in as a guest at the Hilton, and his manifesto trolled the Secret Service. But multiple layers of security exist for a reason, and he was stopped. It wasn’t Butler, where a bullet literally hit/grazed5 the president’s ear.
Still, one theme in studying low-probability events is that near-misses are informative. A candidate who loses an election by 100 votes in what would have been a huge upset — well, for forecasting future elections, that tells you basically the same thing as if she’d won by 100 votes.
Saturday night could easily have been much worse. So, obviously, could Butler. So could January 6 but for the bravery of the Capitol Police. The lesson we should take from these events shouldn’t be “usually, everything turns out OK”. It should be that the nation is constantly flirting with disaster.
Rationalization, minimization and denialism
Here are a couple of points I’m specifically not making:
I don’t particularly care whether the left or the right is “worse” at stochastic political violence in America in 2026. It isn’t a race you want to win. Or if it is a race, it’s a race to the bottom. The fact that I can rattle off from memory a half-dozen recent violent incidents with Republican or right-coded targets and another half-dozen with Democratic or left-coded targets … in either case, that’s way too many.
I’m not into language policing. Lots of common idioms involve gun metaphors or other violent imagery (“the CFO had a target on his back”). Actually, most people understand metaphors and have a lot of experience distinguishing figurative from literal speech. I’m also not much into tone policing. I don’t think people should feel any obligation to express outrage or “thoughts and prayers” especially when it isn’t sincere. You don’t have to say something about every terrible thing.
Rather, what I object to are substantive rationalizations of political violence. Few “respectable” people do this outright. Instead, as Eli and I discussed, it usually comes in the form of “yeah, buts”. One classic example of a “yeah, but” is U.S. Senator Chris Murphy after Luigi Mangione’s murder of a health care CEO:
Listen, I’m never going to condone violence. I don’t here. I spent my entire life fighting gun violence because I know that the devastation is enormous. ... What I see happening in this country, though, is a real visceral anger that the outrage at Brian Thompson’s death or the outrage at the death of any powerful person isn’t matched by the anger over the thousands of people who die often anonymous deaths every single day in this country at the hands of a healthcare industry that mostly doesn’t give a s--- about people and only cares about profits.
Let me be precise here: I definitely don’t think that Murphy is condoning or endorsing Brian Thompson’s murder. But he’s providing a rationalization for Luigi. And his preamble doesn’t change that much. If you tell your waiter “no offense, but this is the worst meal I’ve ever had, and your service stunk too”, the waiter is within his rights to take offense. If you’re yeah-butting, the “yeah” doesn’t give you immunity for what happens after the “but”.
The other main technique is denial. I wouldn’t say it’s super pervasive, but I’ve been surprised at the number of semi-respectable Democratic-leaning commentators who have flirted with the idea that Butler was a “false flag” or that Saturday night was. Another form of denial is to misinform your audience about the identity of the shooter or his motivations: sure this was bad but our side didn’t do it. I was very disappointed by Heather Cox Richardson, for example, when she implied that Tyler Robinson, Charlie Kirk’s assassin, was a right-wing MAGA Groyper, and did nothing to correct the record when it became clear that he obviously wasn’t.
Somewhere in between denial and rationalization is minimization. The most common form of this is the other side is worse or just as bad. Alternatively, you can minimize the larger argument by foregrounding irrelevant details. There are just so many times when I’ll see someone trying to score some narrow political point in the wake of a tragedy or near-tragedy. They probably think they’re being persuasive, but it’s a reliable sign that they’re not worth listening to the next time around.
Allen explicitly exempted Kash Patel, for some reason presumably involving his role in the Epstein files.
I was safe at home. The White House Correspondents’ Dinner is very much not my scene. Basically, everything I dislike about Washington, politics, and journalism encapsulated in one ballroom. Though the Substack party sounds like fun.
Though it was hard to tell given how much worse Twitter has become for following breaking news. I was basically just refreshing the New York Times homepage constantly.
Team blue here.
I don’t feel like debating these semantics.
