The President and the Press Were Never in Danger. The Rest of America Isn't So Lucky.
Trump and his administration incite violence, use violence, and pardon violent felons when it suits them. Catching a would-be attacker outside the WHCD doesn't change that.
Edwin Eisendrath hosts It’s the Democracy, Stupid on Lincoln Square and WCPT820 AM/Heartland Signal. He’s the former CEO of the Chicago Sun-Times, a long-time management consultant, a former Chicago Alderman, HUD Regional Administrator and teacher in Chicago’s public schools. Subscribe to his Substack.
In Washington, D.C. Saturday night, an armed man ran into the best-protected hotel in the country and made it about 50 feet before being subdued. One floor away, the White House press corps watched as Secret Service removed the President from the room. Subsequent coverage is full of their agonizing brush with danger.
One floor away from a violent man, and protected by hundreds of armed security personnel, media figures hid under their banquet tables. Several later took to the air waves to talk about their proximity to tragedy, and to share this moment of bonding with President Trump.
I get that it was frightening. But seriously, if you are going to cover the White House, get to know America.
According to the nonprofit Gun Violence Archive, there were 25 U.S. shooting incidents in the U.S. Saturday, resulting in five victims and two suspects killed.
Local news and police reports corroborate several of the fatal incidents:
A Chicago police officer was killed and another critically wounded at Swedish Hospital, according to ABC7 Chicago.
A 61-year-old man was killed in a shooting at a Costco in Strongsville, Ohio, according to News 5 Cleveland.
A man died after an early-morning shooting in Muskegon, Michigan, according to WWMT.
Fayetteville police reported a fatal shooting on the 600 block of Berwick Drive.
Hope Mills police were investigating the fatal shooting of a 16-year-old girl on Fox Ridge Road, according to WRAL.
In Nashville, police said a DoorDash driver was wounded and returned fire, killing an attempted carjacking suspect, according to NewsChannel 5.
In Los Lunas, New Mexico State Police said a suspect was killed in an officer-involved shooting and no officers were hurt, according to KOB.
Every single day, schoolchildren enter classrooms where they have been trained to hide from active shooters. Those children don’t have the layers of protection everyone in that ballroom enjoyed last night.
America is many wonderful things, but it is also a place of violence. Here is what the journalist Max Frankel wrote in his introduction to Rights in Conflict about the violent confrontation of demonstrators and police in the parks and streets of Chicago during the week of the Democratic National Convention of 1968:
We are known for our violence, we Americans. The creative violence with which we haul down the good for what we fancy as better. The cruel violence with which we have treated red men, and black. The intoxicating violence of our music and art. The absurd violence of our comics and cartoons. The organized violence of our athletic and corporate games. The course violence of our speech, even our jokes.
And now we have come violently to disagree about the nature of our violence in Vietnam or Dallas or Watts or Hiroshima. We seek the primitive within ourselves and bemoan the failure of affluence to civilize. Our young deplore the violence of the old and are tempted to use violence against them. The old deplore the ferocity of the young and are tempted to use violence to suppress them.
Thus we came, already maimed to 1968.
Nearly 60 years later, we carry different baggage, but similar animosity. Our democracy has suffered multiple shocks. The 2008 financial meltdown, where 861,664 families lost their homes and the banks got bailed out, bred distrust and anger.
Beginning in 2019, the COVID pandemic would go on to take more than million American lives and allowed politicians to weaponize distrust and cash in on anger. The subsequent ransacking of our Capitol shocked the whole world. Then President Trump pardoned those looters while deploying the U.S. military on our streets in the name of protecting us from protestors exercising their first amendment rights.
In 1968, we struggled to understand what to do when the right of dissent and the right of cities to protect their people and property came into conflict. In 2026, we have a president who seems determined to create exactly that conflict and use it not to heal and unite, but to further divide and rule.
Mr. Trump’s rhetoric invites and incites violence. On immigrants he said, “The Democrats say, ‘Please don’t call them animals. They’re humans.’ I said, ‘No, they’re not humans, they’re not humans. They’re animals.” He followed those words by sending his overarmed, undertrained masked thugs into our cities. In Minneapolis, they shot and killed two Americans.
Trump’s government lionizes violence in a way no other has. Pete Hegseth champions lethality not as the most important but as the only virtue of our military. Mr. Trump has used that military to kill fisherman at sea, and to launch world re-arranging wars with full confidence that violence itself- without any strategy for its use- will accomplish his goals.
All of this is far more dangerous than when Frankel described America in the 1960s. We now live in an armed nation. The Supreme Court obliterated common sense and the plain reading of the Second Amendment to allow nearly unchecked access to weapons. We now live in a country with more guns than people. In response, police forces across the country have armed and trained like soldiers of war.
The attempted violence in Washington last night is not unusual or out of place or unexpected in contemporary America. What is uncommon is the protection afforded to everyone in the hotel where the suspect was taken down. The security team did its job. The President and everyone in that room were secure in their safety, despite the armed man upstairs.
In vain, I hope to hear from officials in Washington and the press corps that cover them, honest attempts to calm our nervous nation. In vain, I imagine our government covered by a press corps that understands the everyday experience of our people.
You will not hear calls for an end to gun violence coming from politicians in DC, especially not from Republicans. Instead what you get is Republicans exploiting an incident for their own political gain. We will now pay for the Epstein Memorial Ballroom and Bordello over the top of the Trumpenfeurhrer bunker while he pockets the donations already collected. The corporate media will amplify Republican lies about violent rhetoric from Democrats. And, as usual, nothing will be said or done about the fact that this country is awash in guns, machines of death manufactured by companies that have been granted immunity from consequences by Republicans who take their bribes to fund their campaigns.
Our nation and our people--particularly our children--are captured in a state of affairs where guns have become an answer. Not only do we need leaders to calm the waters, but it will take all of us. "When will (we) ever learn...?" and it is "a long time passing..." Thank you Edwin.