After the latest presidential assassination attempt saw Saturday night’s White House Correspondents Dinner cancelled, we know at least one G20 ambassador who ended up hosting fellow envoys back at his official DC residence for pizza!
You think they chatted about the cherry blossom bloom? The latest Nationals MLB wobbles? Or the ‘omg have you tried it’ Joia Burger? No.
You don’t need a top secret clearance to know they and every other foreign ambassador will now be pondering what this latest shooting reveals about America, starting with…
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- Rising polarisation
There’ve now been more actual attempts on Trump than on any other US president in modern history — Ford survived two, Reagan and Truman each survived one, and JFK fell to his first. That all sits against hard polarisation metrics, like the Pew data suggesting two-thirds of Americans now view the opposing party as a “serious threat to the United States“.
Our point? No foreign ambassador will be chalking Saturday night’s events to random bad luck. Rather, it’s a reflection not just of deep fractures across US society, but also a structural risk at the heart of US power.
And that leads us to…
- Declining trust
Even before Saturday’s incident, polls suggested barely 30% of Americans trusted the Secret Service to protect candidates, while maybe ~5% privately trust the federal government or legacy media (not Intrigue!) to tell the truth about what’s going on.
With trust so low, can you guess what fills the void? Yes, nearly half of all Americans now hear conspiracy theories (and up to a ~third believe them) within days of each incident.
Compare that to 1981, when authorities told folks via America’s three TV channels that someone tried to kill the US president due to *checks notes*… an obsession with Jodie Foster? Everyone pondered the news then got back to work, which takes us to…
- Eroding bandwidth
With a political class focused inwards, and a media class focused on the political class, it doesn’t leave much bandwidth for a sensible and nuanced discussion on (say) the end-game with Iran, or countering a revisionist China, or even budget repair: DC just racked up another trillion in debt in just 71 days, its quickest in non-Covid history.
You can see priority cannibalisation in the data, too — as our world gets wilder, just 25% of Americans cite foreign policy as a top priority, down from 35% from a year earlier.
And that takes us to…
- Spinning rivals
As usual, the Kremlin has milked this latest incident, with state outlets amplifying anything from weird conspiracies and alleged Secret Service incompetence, through to the shooter’s own manifesto.
Why? It all a) reassures Russians that a stable dictatorship is better than chaotic democracy, b) helps weaken US soft power and credibility across the Global South, and c) erodes US reliability among its allies, which takes us to wrap this up with…
- Fretting allies
Friends and allies are broadcasting public statements of support, but their private debates around US reliability and predictability will continue: how long can they bank on American security guarantees when (say) DC is so consumed with its own drama?
Now, nobody’s going to ditch an alliance over this, but with allied publics already voicing doubts, it’ll add weight to those abroad already quietly arguing for a careful, pragmatic hedge: think more defence spending, and more strategic autonomy.
Intrigue’s Take
Maybe the deeper long-term risk here isn’t so much that one of these attempts ever succeeds, so much as that all the political violence and apocalyptic rhetoric gets normalised as some kind of US background radiation. That’s how you end up a banana republic with fearful and disconnected leaders atop a cynical public no longer believing differences even can — let alone must — be resolved via the ballot box.
Yet buried in the same facts is a tiny kernel of hope: this is all fundamentally an American problem, so you can still add it to the list of other problems this republic has tamed over the centuries: human flight, World Wars, the Great Depression, polio, the Moon. It’s a democracy that’s regenerated and reconciled after far darker chapters than this.
So Intriguers, go take a walk, catch a fish, eat a burger, help a neighbour, then figure it out.