The Latest Trump Assassination Attempt, How Media Narratives Fuel Violence

The April 25, 2026 attack at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner was the fifth documented attempt against President Donald Trump in less than a decade. The first, largely forgotten by the media, came in 2016, when Michael Steven Sandford attempted to seize an officer’s weapon at a Trump rally in Las Vegas.

The most widely remembered was Thomas Matthew Crooks opening fire at the Butler, Pennsylvania rally on July 13, 2024, killing one rallygoer and grazing Trump’s ear, producing the iconic photograph of Trump raising his fist and shouting “Fight, fight, fight.” Between the fourth and fifth attempts on the president’s life, conservative Christian commentator Charlie Kirk was assassinated while engaging students in open dialogue on a university campus.

The media enabled violence against both men through sustained false framing. Trump was portrayed for years as a Russian asset and a threat to democracy. Using out-of-context quotes and selective framing, the media painted Kirk as a racist and a homophobe. Some on the left called for the deaths of both men and celebrated when Kirk was killed.

The media campaign against Trump began before his first election. On September 23, 2016, reports surfaced that U.S. authorities were investigating Trump campaign figure Carter Page for possible ties to Russian influence operations. This was the first public story directly linking a Trump associate to Russia. Fusion GPS, the opposition-research firm hired by the Clinton campaign, had directed Christopher Steele to share his findings with the media as early as mid-September 2016, weeks before the election.

On October 7, 2016, DHS and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper issued a public statement attributing the hacking of Democratic officials and the WikiLeaks releases to Russian intelligence acting to benefit Trump. On January 10, 2017, BuzzFeed published the Steele dossier in full, the same day Jeff Sessions’s confirmation hearing began, triggering wall-to-wall media saturation of the Russia narrative. The FBI’s own investigation, Crossfire Hurricane, had been formally opened on July 31, 2016, though the Durham Report later concluded it lacked an adequate factual basis.

The Russia narrative, the claim that Trump was a foreign-installed puppet being blackmailed by Vladimir Putin, ran for Trump’s entire first term and shaped two impeachment proceedings. The Mueller Report found no evidence of criminal conspiracy. The Durham Report concluded the FBI launched its investigation without an adequate factual basis and applied a double standard not applied to the Clinton campaign. The narrative collapsed only after nearly three years of continuous coverage built on material that, as Durham confirmed, lacked a factual foundation from the start.

Despite Russiagate collapsing, the media still runs with it from time to time, ostensibly on slow news days. However, Trump’s second term has been more acutely shaped by media framing him as a tyrant and a threat to democracy. The Intercept ran a 2024 piece arguing Trump “represents an existential threat to democracy” and that the warning “must be repeated, over and over again.” NPR aired a segment in which a political scientist argued the press had an “obligation” to cover Trump as a threat to democracy in the same way it covers climate change, with no opposing view presented.

The April 25, 2026 Correspondents’ Dinner shooter, Cole Allen, left social media posts comparing Trump to Adolf Hitler and encouraging others to buy guns. Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt’s statement after the shooting was precise: “Those who constantly, falsely label and slander the president as a fascist and a threat to democracy and compare him to Hitler to score political points are fueling this kind of violence.”

A documented series of celebrity statements explicitly invoked Trump’s assassination or injury, with minimal institutional consequence. In May 2017, Kathy Griffin posed holding a bloodied, severed head styled to resemble Trump; CNN fired her, but she reposted the image after his 2023 indictment. At the January 2017 Women’s March, Madonna said she had “thought an awful lot about blowing up the White House.” At the 2017 Glastonbury Festival, Johnny Depp asked the crowd, “When was the last time an actor assassinated a president?” and added, “Maybe it’s time.”

In March 2017, Snoop Dogg released a music video depicting him shooting a prop gun at a Trump-lookalike clown called “Ronald Klump.” In June 2017, the New York Public Theater staged Julius Caesar with the lead dressed as Trump, stabbed to death onstage nightly. Days before the April 25, 2026 attack, Jimmy Kimmel joked that Melania had “a glow like an expectant widow.” Trump called for his firing; Melania called it “hateful and violent rhetoric.” When conservatives made comparable statements about Obama-era figures, prosecutions and firings followed. Most of these incidents produced only brief apologies.

The media framing of January 6 as a violent coup attempt orchestrated by Trump became foundational to the “existential threat” narrative. The White House has noted that the House Select Committee’s report “violated House rules, deleted documents in the final days of the 117th Congress, and had a predetermined, partisan outcome.” Trump was acquitted in his second Senate impeachment trial, and no court found him criminally liable for the events.

The claim that he “incited an insurrection,” repeated as a settled fact across countless news cycles, was legally contested and never proven in court, yet it was used continuously to brand him as someone who had already attempted to overthrow the U.S. government, making further violence easier to rationalize.

Democratic politicians contributed directly to the incitement environment. Joe Biden said in 2016, “If we were in high school, I could take him behind the gym,” a remark he later repeated more explicitly, saying, “I’d take him behind the gym and beat the hell out of him.” Nancy Pelosi said in June 2018, “I just don’t even know why there aren’t uprisings all over the country. And maybe there will be,” and on another occasion, “You’ve got to be ready to take a punch. You’ve got to be ready to throw a punch.”

Hakeem Jeffries called on people to “fight” the Trump administration “in the streets.” In 2018, Rep. Maxine Waters told supporters to confront Trump cabinet members in restaurants, gas stations, and department stores and “tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere.”

The sustained characterization of Trump as a white supremacist by mainstream outlets, academics, and politicians altered the moral permission structure for violence against him. The Charlottesville “both sides” misquote is the clearest example: Trump’s full statement condemned neo-Nazis explicitly, but the selective clip, “very fine people on both sides,” was presented for years as evidence of white supremacy by major outlets and repeated by Biden as a cornerstone of his 2020 campaign, even after multiple fact-checkers noted the misrepresentation. The same pattern of selective framing applied to Kirk.

When a political figure is credibly labeled a white supremacist or a racist by mainstream institutions, the framework that inhibits violence against him erodes.

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