assasination

Trump:”Don’t rush me. We were in Vietnam, like, for 18 years”

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Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

HCR
Heather Cox Richardson

April 26, 2026

Today Assistant Attorney General Brett A. Shumate of the Department of Justice Civil Division wrote to the lawyer for the National Trust for Historic Preservation demanding that the organization drop its lawsuit against Trump’s planned ballroom on the site where the East Wing of the White House used to be.

The letter claimed that there was “another attempt on President Trump’s life” last night at the Washington Hilton, where Secret Service agents apprehended a man carrying a shotgun, a handgun, and multiple knives on the floor above the room where the White House Correspondents dinner was taking place last night.

The man, whom police have identified as Cole Tomas Allen, 31, of California, sprinted through a magnetometer before authorities stopped him. Shots were fired, although it remains unclear who fired them. A Secret Service agent wearing a bulletproof vest was shot but has been released from the hospital. According to the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, Jeanine Pirro, the government is charging Cole with two counts of using a firearm and one count of assault on a federal officer using a dangerous weapon.

Shumate said last night’s incident “proves, yet again, that the White House ballroom is essential for the safety and security of the President, his family, his cabinet, and his staff. When the White House ballroom is complete, President Trump and his successors will no longer need to venture beyond the safety of the White House perimeter to attend large gatherings at the Washington Hilton ballroom. The White House ballroom will ensure the safety and security of the President for decades to come.”

“Put simply,” Shumate wrote, “your lawsuit puts the lives of the President, his family, and his staff at grave risk…. Enough is enough.” He demanded the National Trust for Historic Preservation “voluntarily dismiss this frivolous lawsuit today in light of last night’s assassination attempt on President Trump. If your client does not dismiss the lawsuit by 9:00 AM on Monday, the government will move to dissolve the injunction and dismiss the case in light of last night’s extraordinary events.”

This is an odd angle to take, since, as Bluesky user Tom Shafer pointed out, the Hilton ballroom seats 2,945 people and Trump says his proposed ballroom will seat only 999. And to be clear, a judge has permitted the construction of the secure facility under the ballroom to continue despite the lawsuit; it’s just the ballroom itself that’s currently at issue.

Attending the White House Correspondents’ Dinner is not an official requirement; this is actually the first time Trump has chosen to go as president. As Emily Davies, Isaac Arnsdorf, Jeremy Roebuck, and Joe Heim of the Washington Post reported today, the Trump administration could have provided a higher level of security last night as it has for other gatherings of high-ranking officials, but it did not designate the dinner as a “National Special Security Event.” Even so, Secret Service agents did indeed stop Cole before he could enter the ballroom.

Yesterday, David A. Fahrenthold, Luke Broadwater, and Andrea Fuller of the New York Times reported that the Trump administration has secretly awarded the company it chose to build the ballroom a no-bid $17.4 million contract to repair two ornamental fountains in Lafayette Park near the White House. In 2022 the Biden administration estimated the cost of the work to be $3.3 million. The journalists explain that the Trump administration dramatically increased the estimated cost by adding an additional 27% for inflation and then adding another inflation estimate of 24%, then increased its estimate by another 50% because it wanted to get the fountains fixed quickly, then simply gave the contract to Maryland-based Clark Construction.

While Trump claims the ballroom will be paid for by private donations, the government will pay for the fountain repairs. This means the contract should have been open for competitive bidding. To justify awarding the contract without that process, the journalists report, the administration cited an “urgency” exception to normal procedures meant for war or natural disasters.

The focus on last night’s event has obscured this upcoming week’s big story.

Trump has justified his refusal to seek congressional approval for his attack on Iran by claiming Iran posed an “imminent threat” to the U.S. While Trump’s own intelligence agencies contradicted that claim, it enabled Republicans to argue that Trump had authority to launch the strikes under the 1973 War Powers Act, which allows the president to act to counter an “imminent” threat.

But the War Powers Act says the president must notify Congress of any such action within 48 hours of its start. Then, by 60 days after that notification, the president has to stop using the military for that action unless the Congress either declares war or authorizes the use of the military for that specific action. Democrats have fought hard against Trump’s unilateral decision to go to war, but Republicans have refused to press him to get congressional approval, apparently hoping that Trump would find a way out of the Middle East crisis before hitting the 60-day mark.

But so far he has not, and the 60-day window closes on May 1.

Trump appears to believe the U.S. blockade of Iranian ports will hurt the country so badly that Iranian leaders will have to agree to his demands. But that pressure will take time to build. “I have all the time in the World, but Iran doesn’t,” he posted Thursday. He told reporters: “Don’t rush me. Don’t rush me…. So we were in Vietnam, like, for 18 years; we were in Iraq for many, many years.… I don’t like to say World War II, because that was a biggie, but we were four and a half, almost five years in World War II. And we were in the Korean war for seven years. I’ve been doing this for six weeks.”

If Trump doesn’t find an end to the conflict, Republicans must either vote to authorize what is already a deeply unpopular war or let Trump continue his war without congressional approval, adding fuel to accusations that he is becoming a dictator. After all, Trump claimed in January, after he had attacked Venezuela without congressional approval, that the War Powers Act is unconstitutional and would “take away our Powers to fight and defend the United States of America.”

The idea that the president can use the military as he wishes without authority from Congress demolishes one of the fundamental principles of our democracy: that we have a right to a say in how our lives and treasure are spent.

Rather than enabling Trump, Republicans could reassert the authority the Framers of the Constitution put in Congress’s hands and stop his deadly blundering.

“We’ve heard a lot of talk from Republicans that they’ll give this president 60 days,” the second-ranking Democrat in the House, Katherine Clark of Massachusetts, told Mike Lillis of The Hill. “And this is a failed effort. And it’s long past time that he come to Congress and explain what the strategy is and what the exit is. Republicans have been saying that is a crucial timeline for them. So put your vote up on the board.”

Source: Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

Bernie: The rise in political violence threatens to hollow out our public life in U.S.

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The murder of Charlie Kirk is part of a disturbing rise in political violence that threatens to hollow out our public life. A free society relies on the premise that people can speak out without fear or humiliation. No more political violence.

Senator Bernie Sanders is the senior senator from Vermont. He is the longest-serving independent in U.S. congressional history and the ranking member of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP).

Israel’s Assault on Journalism: The Killing of Anas al-Sharif

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The killing of al-Sharif and his colleagues is “really murder,” says Irene Khan, U.N. special rapporteur on freedom of opinion and expression. “It is not killing in the context of war. It is a deliberate strategy to stop independent voices reporting.”

Democracy Now! is an independent global news hour that airs on over 1,500 TV and radio stations Monday through Friday. Watch our livestream at democracynow.org Mondays to Fridays 8-9 a.m. ET. Subscribe to our Daily Email Digest: https://democracynow.org/subscribe

It’s the conditions, stupid

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Deplore violence. Then ask why it’s happening

By Anand Giridharadas

Assassination isn’t how we get what we deserve. It isn’t how you change the world. It’s wrong. In this tinderbox time, it’s dangerous.

All of the above should be clear. And this week, in the wake of the killing of the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, Brian Thompson, it was not clear enough to many people.

Anand Giridharadas 
Anand Giridharadas 

But even as we saw the glorification of violence from some, we saw a typical but no less facile response from others: a righteous deploring of the individual act, with little curiosity about the conditions that enable it.

Deploring individual acts of political violence is right on. The problem is the common tendency to have one’s thinking stop there.

In the UnitedHealthcare killing, the facts are only beginning to trickle in. But whatever turns up, the establishment habit of deploring the individual deed and soldiering on oblivious to surrounding conditions is going to get more people killed.

We endanger our leaders and ourselves when we huff the fantasy of the bad apple, the lone wolf, the fallen scion, and refuse to see people as the social biopsies they are.

If you are willing to think, actually think, not just tsk-tsk people who break the rules, you cannot separate this one act of apparent political violence from the state of healthcare in this country — a system that millions experience, every day of their lives, as a kind of bureaucratic violence.

No more than you can separate the Trump assassination attempts this year from the conditions of a rising encouragement of political violence, often by Trump himself.

No more than you can separate riots that might break out in neighborhoods from the conditions of poverty and criminal justice and historical treatment in those places.

No more than you can separate the January 6, 2021, insurrection from the conditions of greed-fueled, lie-filled, hate-for-profit media that pump skulls full of disinformation.

There is a strange tendency in American life. When certain violent acts happen, there is a feeling in some quarters that one can either deplore or explain. Can’t do both.

Well, we can, actually. Our brains will not break.

We have to be brave and wise and curious enough to deplore the symptoms of the disease while also taking on the disease.

There is simply no question that that an America full of loneliness, isolation, despair, stagnation, status anxiety, revivified hatreds, undereducation, corporate cruelty, media collapse, and rampant disinformation is an America where desperate acts and political violence are more probable.

At this moment, more than most, we must be able to do two things at once: Deplore the things that must be deplored, condemn the actions that must be condemned, but also understand why things are happening.

Let’s deplore Trumpism while also trying, earnestly and thoughtfully, to understand the system failures that have facilitated it.

Let’s deplore the January 6 coup attempt without lapsing into the comfortable, self-congratulatory feeling that They are idiots and We are not. It’s a harder, but truer, thought that the breakdown of so many of our institutions, a breakdown in which we are involved, has engendered a situation in which many have given up on any conventional method of shaping the future and now believe only madness delivers.

And let us deplore, loudly and clearly, the assassination of a corporate leader and a family man in Midtown Manhattan while recognizing that the health insurance industry locks so many Americans in despair. That so many of our brothers and sisters and neighbors and friends have experienced that industry not as healing but as a desperate battle against bureaucrats who often seem determined to withhold the most fundamental of human obligations — care.

It is not wrong to talk about both of these things in the same breath. It is wrong not to. If we were meant to think only a quarter of a thought at a time, our brains would have been the size of walnuts, easier to carry.

We are not going to walnut-brain our way out of the dangerous condition America is in, whether it’s by individual acts of murder, the bombing of ballot boxes, insurrections, riots, vigilante acts, or any other form of go-it-alone, screw-the-system, take-matters-into-your-own-hands violence. It’s the conditions, stupid.

History shows us very clearly that this kind of go-it-alone violence fluctuates according to surrounding social circumstances. There is more of it when systems don’t work and when people don’t feel heard and helped. There is less when systems work, when people have faith in institutions.

All around us, on the left and right, we keep getting mad at individual social phenomena without mustering much curiosity about why they occur. Why did he have to kill him? Why are people so exercised about a trans issue that barely touches them? Why did so many people fail to show up for Kamala Harris? Why are extremists rising everywhere? Why are so many people succumbing to conspiracy theories?

These are disparate phenomena — and they are connected. They all take root in a basic political emotion millions seem to hold now, across the political spectrum, of defenselessness: of the cavalry not coming, of the truth not being something you can count on from anyone connected to power, of companies and governments and other large institutions not caring about you, of the establishment having no idea what your life is like, what makes it hard at present and what might, if they cared, make it easier.

Perhaps the only thing shared by Americans from left to right is the feeling that no one hears you and no one is going to help.

This is not just about one CEO killing, any more than it was about one insurrection or one protest-turned-riot. It is about the deep condition of the country, the generational pessimism of tens of millions of our neighbors and kin. Until we are talking about that every day, not just the individual desperate act, until we are thinking about how to fix it, we are just tap dancing around the thing.

Let me even offer one practical place to start. In honor of the late Brian Thompson’s life, and in the hope that no leader ever meets such an awful fate again, let us immediately pass universal, publicly provided healthcare once and for all. If we do, the words “deny” and “delay” will become distant memories, never to be seen on insurance company letters or bullets again.

If you want to tell people there is a better way to get the world they want, show them.

Source: It’s the conditions, stupid – by Anand Giridharadas