Trump doesn’t take attempts on his life seriously except to exploit them
Narcissism drives him. It’s hard for many people to sympathize with someone who sees opportunities for self-promotion in assassination attempts against him.
We’ve now watched Donald Trump survive three assassination attempts, and in all three situations, Trump didn’t respond as would the great majority of human beings whose lives are threatened nor, certainly, like the many other presidents who survived such attempts.
Trump’s first instinct is self-promotion and opportunity. As a narcissist, he doesn’t experience emotions in the same way as others. After surviving assassination attempts, Ronald Reagan, Gerald Ford, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and other presidents in recent decades rallied the American people, largely united against political violence.
Unlike Trump, Reagan, for example—who survived a serious bullet wound—refuted the idea that the attempt against him was evidence of a “sick society“ and instead focused on the support he received that came from Americans no matter their beliefs and political parties: “The society we heard from is made up of millions of compassionate Americans.”
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That was of course the right thing as well as the politically smart thing to do. It shows a leader with empathy, in that moment, for a public grappling with its own fears about the event. The us vs. them dynamic was about all of us against extremists of any kind who’d engage in violent attacks rather than about the targeted president against his opponents in the other party.
Not Trump. At the rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, in July of 2024, Trump’s first thought as a gunman shot at him was to get a photo-op with his fist in the air, even as Secret Service agents were trying to pull him down to take cover. And Trump—who’d actually called for the execution of the chairman of the joint chiefs just a year before—blamed Democrats and his opponents for supposed violent rhetoric when no Democrat has said anything close to what Trump has in conjuring up violence against his opponents.
After a man with an semi-automatic rifle was caught having entered Trump’s Mar-a-Lago compound in September of 2024 attempting to shoot Trump while he was playing golf, Trump’s first thoughts were to rail against Joe Biden and his then-opponent, Kamala Harris in a post on Truth Social, for being “obsessed with ‘Getting Trump’ for so long” as well as vilifying all Democrats, calling them “the enemy from within.” He galvanized his supporters around that ugly message.
And less than two hours after the shooting at the White House Correspondents Dinner last Saturday, Trump gave a press conference using the attack to push for building a $400 million ballroom with taxpayer dollars after saying last year that it would be paid for privately, using the event to try to get the American people behind forking over money for his outrageous, illegal destruction and rebuilding of a part of the White House.
There was a lot of disbelief about the attack on Saturday, as conspiracy theories exploded, and “staged” trended on social media (as happened after the attack in Butler). But this time, there were also a lot of yawns, with many people tuning out of yet another day of insanity in Trump’s America. It’s looks like that included at least some of Trump’s own exhausted supporters.
That may seem callous, no matter one’s political beliefs or party. A president and his cabinet were targeted at a large public event, and we should all want to pay attention to such horror. But to many people, if Trump wasn’t going to take it seriously—instead of promoting his obsessive vanity project in the middle of a war he started for no reason—why should they?
And there was also a lot of outrage, as Trump took an event that should garner sympathy even from those who don’t support him—we in the opposition do not condone political violence, no matter what we think of Trump or MAGA—and turned it into an opportunity.
The White House immediately sent the talking points out to Republicans, right-wing media outlets, and online sycophants, all of whom were on-message, claiming that a new ballroom will prevent these kinds of attacks. Put aside the fact that the White House Correspondents Dinner, hosted by a private organization, would never be held at the White House; this ludicrous claim presupposes presidents will never speak outside the White House again, including at rallies while campaigning.
None of this was to be taken seriously, and it’s not shocking that people believe the assassination attempt was faked. For the record, I’m not among those people. The 31-year-old alleged shooter traveled to Washington with the intent of doing harm to Trump and others. The last thing Trump would have put in the manifesto, after all, is a claim that he’s a “rapist” and “pedophile,” bringing his sex crimes and the Epstein files back into the media.
Trump viciously attacked Norah O’Donnell’s for reading those words in the “60 Minutes” interview on Sunday—calling her “a disgrace”—and putting to bed the preposterous notion floated by some that he’d bonded with the White House press on the traumatic event they shared.
Trump has been very aware that the ballroom project is in trouble, hitting opposition in court and seeing that only 20% of Americans support it in polls. But this lame effort to use attempted murder to garner support for it has already backfired. Democrats rightly slammed it out of the gate, and much of the public, struggling under soaring gas prices and groceries, doesn’t appear to be rallying around the idea of spending money on a corrupt president’s obsessions.
Similarly, Trump tried to use the shooting to go after Jimmy Kimmel once again, backing a call on social media by Melania Trump for Kimmel to be fired for joking—four days earlier—that she looked like “an expectant widow.” Of course Kimmel was referring to Trump’s health clearly being in great decline as he’s turning 80.
But again, it flopped. This time there were no affiliates dropping the airing of Kimmel’s show, nor did ABC bat an eyelid. Kimmel wasn’t suspended; he was on the air the next night, slamming Melania again.
The administration doesn’t realize it lost that war, and again, they’re squandering whatever sympathy the public might give them on the shooting to go after Trump’s perceived enemies again. The FCC is moving to “review” ABC’s license, but this will only galvanize Americans, as happened the last time Trump threatened the first Amendment by moving to pull Kimmel off the air.
Without missing a beat, the Department of Justice was on to indicting former FBI director James Comey again this week too, in a case that will be thrown out by a jury, if it gets that far. Even Fox’s own partisan legal analyst Jonathan Turley called it. “weak.” And this shows Trump and the DOJ are more preoccupied with going after Trump’s perceived enemies than keeping attention on the shooting.
America has moved on from yet another assassination attempt against a despised president. It’s not, however, because people support political violence. Far from it, it’s because we take political violence seriously and not as an opportunity to gaslight the public, attempt to strip free speech rights, and squander the American people’s money. Trump has only himself to blame for the collective ambivalence.
Trump is all about Trump. He has not one ounce of compassion or responsibility in his body. He sees the Treasury as his piggybank and plasters his face on monuments to honor his deranged ego. How can we survive 3 more years of his insanity and incompetence?
I’ll keep typing this on different platforms until my fingers fall off: we all need to stop calling in a ballroom and call it what it really is, a bunker with a gilded entrance on top. “Ballroom” is just a way to gaslight people into conjuring a benign, happy gathering place when it is not.