Looking glass of rage

Abraham Lincoln was shot in the back of his head in 1865 while watching a play at Ford’s Theatre in Washington DC. James A. Garfield was shot twice at a Washington train station in 1881 and died weeks later from infections.

William McKinley sustained a gunshot wound in the abdomen in 1901 during a public reception in Buffalo, New York. John F. Kennedy was killed by rifle fire in Dallas on 22 November 1963, his death immortalized in film footage that transformed political violence into a mass media spectacle.

Others survived.

Theodore Roosevelt was shot in the chest in Milwaukee in 1912 but still finished his speech before seeking treatment. Ronald Reagan nearly died outside the Washington Hilton on 30 March 1981 after a bullet punctured his lung. The hotel, by the way, is the same one in this latest incident.

America has long treated presidential violence as a tragic exception. Today, however, assassination attempts increasingly feel less like historical aberrations and more like symptoms of its deeply fractured political culture unraveling in real time.

Take Donald Trump.

Trump is an unprecedented figure in modern American politics, one so polarizing that assassination attempts against him seem woven into the ordinary rhythm of public life.

The first attempt came on 13 July 2024 in Butler, Pennsylvania, when a gunman armed with a semi-automatic rifle opened fire during a campaign rally, grazing Trump’s ear and killing a supporter before Secret Service snipers killed the attacker.

The second followed two months later in West Palm Beach, Florida, where an armed man concealed himself near Trump International Golf Club with a rifle before agents discovered him.

Then came the latest incident during the White House Correspondents Dinner in Washington last weekend when an armed suspect, Cole Allen, a teacher, attempted to breach security while Trump sat in the ballroom.

Even in a nation with a long history of political violence, three assassination attempts in less than two years is extraordinary, particularly because America itself has spent decades normalizing assassination abroad while sanitizing the language around it.

Washington calls them targeted killings. Israel calls them preemptive operations. When the United States assassinated Iranian General Qasem Soleimani in 2020, much of the American establishment defended it as a strategic necessity.

More recently, Israeli and American operations, culminating in the death of Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei during the Tehran airstrikes, were framed by supporters as legitimate wartime action.

Once assassination becomes acceptable statecraft overseas, the psychological firewall separating foreign enemies from domestic opponents begins to fall. Trump himself helped create the atmosphere that now surrounds him.

Long before becoming a target, he transformed politics into a blood sport, treating opponents not merely as rivals but as existential threats. His enemies responded in kind, portraying him as uniquely dangerous, even apocalyptic.

Then came social media, which converts every national trauma into instant collective delirium. The most revealing aspect of the latest Washington shooting was not just the gunfire but the speed with which conspiracy theories flooded social media before investigators had established the facts.

The worrisome part is not merely that three men have tried to kill Trump, but how quickly millions online began debating whether somebody should have. On X, according to a New York Times report, thousands almost instantly claimed the correspondents’ dinner attack had been staged, revealing how reflexive cynicism now outruns facts, evidence and even basic human shock.

For Filipinos watching from afar, the lesson is uncomfortably familiar.

A discordant society eventually reaches the point where institutions weaken, public discourse collapses and violence ceases to shock because democracy itself has slowly become a looking glass of rage, reflecting grievance, spectacle and permanent division back at itself.