Last night in Washington, the festive “press celebration” ended with the sound of gunshots. During dinner, discussions should have revolved around punchlines and freedom of expression; instead, “shots fired” were heard, and the President of the United States disappeared behind a wall of bulletproof vests, evacuated like a head of state in a war zone.
This incident did not happen out of nowhere and follows the attempt on Butler in Pennsylvania in July 2024, where Donald Trump, then a candidate, was injured in the ear during a meeting. It is part of a broader sequence of increasing threats against elected officials, judges, journalists, and political opponents.
In a stable, wealthy, and technologically dominant democracy with unparalleled security apparatus, the fact that more than one in three presidents have been targeted by murderous plots cannot be dismissed as isolated events. It reveals several characteristics of American society: the violence of its birth, the extreme personalization of power, its gun culture, and the growing difficulty in recognizing the opponent as a legitimate interlocutor rather than an enemy to be taken down.
In the United States, the president is not just an institutional arbiter. They are simultaneously the chief executive, commander in chief, the face of the country globally, the embodiment of the national narrative, and the main focus of media attention.
The American power is legally structured but politically over-personalized. The stronger the institutions, the more anger is focused on the individual embodying them.
This contradiction weakens the system: the more stable the institutions, the more the rage concentrates on the person who claims to represent them.
This resilience does not idealize institutional strength. It mainly shows that the system can manage the aftermath of a catastrophe rather than prevent the radicalization leading to it.
In the past decade, American politics has entered a phase of continuous radicalization with the arrival of Donald Trump. Several analyses note a sustained increase in threats against elected officials and an atmosphere reminiscent of aspects of the 1960s.
Democratic violence has been part of American history, but the majority of Americans believe their Constitution should not be altered significantly.
As the US celebrates its 250th anniversary this year, the resilience of its democracy, despite political violence, remains a topic of discussion and reflection.
The tentatives of assassinations against Presidents are not just criminal events; they reflect a collective emotional regime that can no longer conceive limits, defeat, and alterity without fantasizing about elimination.
The real question is not whether American democracy still exists; its elections, courts, states, and debates are proof of that. The more concerning question is: what kind of democratic fabric remains in a society where losing an election is unacceptable, winning does not appease, governing does not unite, and contesting does not rule out the perspective of violence?
The scene at the Washington Hilton last night does not provide an answer to this question, but it forces us to ask it. When a major democracy struggles to protect its moments of frivolity against the intrusion of weapons, it is not just its security that is at stake. It is the very idea the nation has of itself that is being challenged.
