Opinion
Updated ,first published
Updated ,first published
The White House Correspondents’ Dinner is a fixture of the Washington calendar — perhaps the only night where every corner of the political spectrum gathers to celebrate free speech. Its centrepiece is a roast of the president: proof that no citizen, however powerful, stands above any other. The office may command respect, but its occupant can be lampooned like anyone else.
Even for just one night, it reminds the American political world that the free flow of ideas matters more than the ego or office of any individual.
We live in poor times for such ideals.
Political violence has risen sharply over the past decade — more so than at any of the five moments in US history where a sitting president has been shot, leaving four dead and one gravely wounded. Donald Trump has been the leading accelerant of that rise, throwing fuel on the fire at every opportunity.
Just days ago, he was posting threats to erase an entire civilisation from above. In November, he wrote that six politicians who had criticised him had committed an offence “punishable by death”.
In 2018, a Trump supporter mailed pipe bombs to 16 Democratic politicians and their supporters — killing no one, by luck alone. That year, I was running an event for the Democratic candidate for governor of Florida when law enforcement found the bomber’s van nearby. I had less than a minute to get my candidate out.
In 2022, Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul, was attacked by a man who prosecutors described as a far-right conspiracy theorist who was seeking to kill the then-Speaker of the House. A year later, at a fundraiser for California Republicans, Trump mocked both: “We’ll stand up to crazy Nancy Pelosi, who ruined San Francisco — how’s her husband doing, anybody know?”
In 2025, Melissa Hortman – the first woman to be the Speaker of the House in Minnesota – was shot and killed at her home by an assailant who found himself firmly in the middle of the dangerous and conspiratorial world that Donald Trump has fanned for his own politics.
While Democrats and liberals have overwhelmingly been the targets of political violence, the wildfire has not stayed contained. Trump was the target of two assassination attempts while running for re-election in 2024, and Trump ally Charlie Kirk was killed in front of a crowd last September.
We all now pay the price for Trump’s naive and callous political logic. He is at once convinced that his word should be final on any topic, and also that he bears no responsibility for any bad outcome that might arise.
That logic has made the Secret Service’s job harder. Agents are being asked to maintain order in an increasingly dangerous political environment, for substantially less pay than the private sector would offer. They are being asked to work alongside newly hired ICE agents with reduced vetting standards — some with reported ties to neo-Nazi groups or domestic violence charges. And they are doing all of this through a months-long administrative shutdown that has left parts of the agency unpaid and furloughed.
These same agents operate in a country where every attempt to address the epidemic of gun violence collides with the lobbying power of America’s firearms industry. On his first day in office, Trump disbanded the White House Office on Gun Violence Prevention. His administration subsequently moved to restore gun access for convicted domestic abusers — something explicitly prohibited by federal law — and scaled back the government’s capacity to track and prosecute illegal arms dealers.
We don’t yet know what motivated the attack at the Correspondents’ Dinner. We may not for some time, particularly given the turmoil engulfing Trump’s Justice Department and his embattled FBI Director, Kash Patel. What is notable is that neither Trump nor anyone on his team rushed to assign a political motive — a restraint conspicuously absent in comparable incidents over the past decade.
Trump, predictably, has already turned the attack to his own purposes: in his press conference after returning to the White House it had become an argument for why his new ballroom must be built.
We cannot know whether the gunman was headed for the president, the cabinet, or the press gathered in their thousands. In the end, it doesn’t matter. Violence committed against any of them sends a message that being involved in politics now carries a risk.
This is exactly why political violence of any kind is so abhorrent, and why it must be condemned at every turn – regardless of its source, its target, or its accelerant.
The political violence now woven into American daily life has found much of its oxygen from Donald Trump. Perhaps this attack — thwarted by the Secret Service and their partners — will serve as a warning.
Fire does not discriminate. Every time that Trump makes violence more normal, more acceptable, he only makes it more likely. This is a fire that consumes everything in its path, making no distinction between the person who lit the match and the ones trying to put it out.
Cory Alpert is a PhD researcher at the University of Melbourne looking at the impact of AI on democracy. He previously served the Biden-Harris administration.
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Cory Alpert is a PhD researcher at the University of Melbourne looking at the impact of AI on democracy. He previously served the Biden-Harris Administration for three years.
