The president’s falsehoods about the White House Correspondents Dinner shooting continue a grim pattern.
Donald Trump during the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner on Saturday, April 25, 2026.
(Yuri Gripas / Abaca / Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Donald Trump’s habitual sleaziness is so repugnant that it erases any sympathy he might deserve—even when he’s the clear target of violence, as he was this weekend, when he survived the third serious assassination attempt against him in the last two years. One reason could be that he seems unable to be honest about anything that happens to him, including his near-death.
On Saturday, a gunman opened fire at the White House Correspondents Dinner (WHCD) in Washington, which Trump was attending for the first time in his presidency; nobody was seriously injured, and the suspect, who has been identified as Cole Tomas Allen, was quickly apprehended. The two earlier attempts took place in 2024 when Trump was running for the presidency. The first, and most significant, was at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, on July 13, 2024, when a gunman shot Trump in the ear. The second was at Trump’s golf course in West Palm Beach, Florida, on September 15, 2024.
Strikingly, after all three of these incidents, Trump told flagrant untruths.
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In 2024, Trump repeatedly blamed Democrats as a whole for the attacks on him, despite the fact that the motives of the two would-be assassins were murky and not easily traceable to partisan politics. In a Twitter post the day after the Palm Beach event, Trump wrote,
The Rhetoric, Lies, as exemplified by the false statements made by Comrade Kamala Harris during the rigged and highly partisan ABC Debate, and all of the ridiculous lawsuits specifically designed to inflict damage on Joe’s, then Kamala’s, Political Opponent, ME, has taken politics in our Country to a whole new level of Hatred, Abuse, and Distrust. Because of this Communist Left Rhetoric, the bullets are flying, and it will only get worse!
The alleged WHCD assassin, Cole Tomas Allen, wrote a manifesto offering this motive: “I am no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes”—a reference that any reasonable person could link to Trump. On Sunday, Norah O’Donnell interviewed Trump on 60 Minutes, where they had this exchange after she quoted from the manifesto:
Trump: I knew you would [read that] because you’re horrible people, horrible people. I’m not a rapist. I didn’t rape anybody. I’m not a pedophile.
O’Donnell: Oh, you think he was referring to you?
Trump: …You shouldn’t be reading that on 60 Minutes. You’re a disgrace
Speaking on Fox News the same day, Trump said of Allen, “When you read his manifesto, he hates Christians. That’s one thing for sure. He hates Christians, a hatred.”
This is another false claim. As the journalist Ken Klippenstein documented in an excellent reported piece on his Substack, Allen is in fact a seemingly devout Christian, one whose faith almost certainly partly motivated the assassination attempt. Allen belonged to a Christian fellowship as a university student and refers to his faith in the manifesto, taking great pains to answer religious objections to assassination.
As Klippenstein details:
Allen’s reported Bluesky social media account also contains repeated references to Christianity, including one from earlier this month in which he identifies “as a Protestant,” and repeated comparisons of Trump to the Antichrist.
On April 13, in response to the Trump-as-Jesus image, Allen replied quoting a verse from Revelations about the antichrist that now reads like a foreshadowing:
“There will be no rest day or night for those who worship the beast and its image, or for anyone who receives the mark of its name.”
Trump’s lies have consequences. Political violence in the United States, although currently at a lower level than earlier tumultuous eras such as the 1960s, is still pervasive enough to have its own set of rituals. One important one is the bipartisan coming together to denounce violence. The other is making sure the blame is narrowly cast on the perpetrator and not used to defame larger groups. Trump is incapable of making these elementary gestures towards comity. As The New York Times notes, “Trump often uses violent language” and his “frequent lies about the 2020 election led some of his supporters to violently attack the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.”
Dylan Byers, a senior correspondent at Puck who attended the WHCD, went to a nearby sports bar after the shooting. He was struck by the fact that the guests at the bar were seemingly uninterested in the attempted assassination. In fact, the bartender allowed Byers and other reporters only to watch CNN briefly before turning the channel back to a hockey game.
For Byers, this incident reflected a failure on the part of the public. On Twitter he posted, “it’s unnerving how desensitized so many people have become—to shootings, obviously, but also to political violence and the abnormality of the moment.”
But there is ample reason for the public to be disengaged from the event. For one, Trump has already cheapened the horror of attempted assassinations by his earlier politicization and lies. He continued this pattern by using the WHCD shooting to argue for his tacky plans to remake the West Wing into a ballroom and bunker.
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Further, it’s hard to get worked up about an attempted assassination when there is all sorts of violence, much of it instigated by Trump, on a much greater scale taking place, including ICE killings and the ongoing Iran War. Recently, Trump threatened that “a whole civilization will die” if Iran didn’t agree to surrender, a genocidal vow that has seemingly been forgotten by the reporters who happily hobnobbed with the president on Saturday.
We shouldn’t downplay the horrors of assassination. All political violence should be condemned. Yet condemning political violence also requires us to recognize that Trump’s own violence and dishonesty deserve rebuke as well.
With the midterm elections now firmly upon us, the question is whether Democratic candidates will do more than merely occupy ballot lines as mild alternatives to the red-hot crisis that is Donald Trump.
As Trump spends over $1 billion a day on a globally destabilizing war on Iran and admits that he doesn’t “think about Americans’ financial situation,” millions across the country are struggling with the surging costs of essentials. Democrats must seize this moment and advance bold, small-“d” populist ideas—not settle for cynical caution that once again snatches defeat from the jaws of victory.
The Nation elevates progressive ideas, movements, and elected officials achieving real change across the country into the national conversation. At the same time, our journalists are exposing how crypto and AI-funded super PACs are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to knock out candidates they oppose, reporting on the devastating impact of the Supreme Court’s evisceration of the Voting Rights Act, and sounding the alarm on attempts by red states to quickly redraw electoral maps, disenfranchising Southern Black voters.
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Onward,
Katrina vanden Huevel
Editor and Publisher, The Nation
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