The latest attempt on the president’s life will further divide a post-truth America

Since taking back the White House last year, Donald Trump has prided himself on being the most accessible president to the press and public in modern times.

Trump frequently wanders over to speak to reporters on the White House lawn. At his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida, the president often dines and poses for selfies with guests, sometimes even taking to the dance floor.

But the latest security breach, with gunshots shattering the revelry of the White House Correspondents' Association dinner at the Hilton hotel in Washington on Saturday, is certain to prompt another urgent review of the president’s protection.

The security camera footage of the gunman, named as Cole Tomas Allen, sprinting past secret service agents in the Hilton lobby has raised new questions about how a gunman could get so close to the president. The Hilton is already infamous as the site of an attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan in 198, when the president was shot and wounded by a bullet that ricocheted off his limousine.

Allen did not pierce the main perimeter around the Hilton ballroom where the dinner was already underway. But many at the event said that security was relatively light. The veteran CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer was coming out of the toilet outside the ballroom when the shooting erupted “a few feet away”. In a building packed with senior White House officials, diplomats and journalists, police said Allen was armed with a shotgun, a handgun and multiple knives.

Trump’s security was overhauled following the assassination attempt at a 2024 campaign rally in Pennsylvania, when a catastrophic lapse saw the then-former president grazed by a bullet and a volunteer firefighter killed shielding his family in the crowd. Barely two months later, Trump was again targeted by a would-be assassin as he played a round of golf in Florida.

Trump made clear that he had no intention of being shuttered away in light of the latest attack.

“Then you just wouldn’t do any events,” the president shrugged at a hastily-convened press conference back at the White House an hour after the attack.

But he did use the incident to reinforce the case for his controversial ballroom, currently under construction on the east wing of the White House and the focus of a flurry of lawsuits. “It’s actually a larger room, and it’s much more secure [than the Hilton],” Trump told reporters. “It’s drone proof. It’s bulletproof glass. We need the ballroom. That’s why the secret service, that’s why the military, are demanding it.”

The attack has already prompted an urgent review of security around King Charles ahead of the royal visit to the US, which begins on Monday. The King is scheduled to attend a string of events in Washington, New York and Virginia this week, including a tea and banquet with Trump at the White House and an address to Congress.

Trump appealed for unity at his press conference on Saturday, but the incident has only cemented the enmity between left and right.

“They want us all dead,” the conservative activist Jack Posobiec posted on X within minutes of the attack, before the gunman’s name or motive were known.

Inevitably, in a bitterly divided, post-truth America, claims that the shooting was a staged, “false flag” attack had appeared on social media before the president even left the building.

The schism among his own supporters has fuelled a recent resurgence in online conspiracy theories that the shooting in Pennsylvania was also staged to put Trump over the top in the 2024 race.

As the president’s hold over Maga wanes, the conspiracy-minded wing of the movement has seized, without evidence, upon claims that the FBI or Israel were behind the shooting in Butler, Pennsylvania. Tapping into rising antisemitism on the political right, conservative podcasters like Tucker Carlson have drawn a line between the shooting in Butler and Israel’s influence on Trump’s decision to go to war with Iran

Among frustrated former Trump loyalists, the attack at the Hilton on Saturday has already been filed alongside the assassination attempt in Butler and the Trump administration’s frantic coverup of the so-called Epstein Files.

With Trump outmanoeuvred by Iran at the negotiating table and in the Strait of Hormuz, prompting a global energy crisis that threatens an already stagnant US economy, claims that the Hilton shooting was staged by the White House to regain the initiative are already thriving on social media.

Photographs by Jose Luis Magana & Tom Brenner/AP, Kent Nishimura/AFP/Getty Images