The April 25, 2026 attack at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner was the fifth documented attempt against President Donald Trump in less than a decade. The first, largely forgotten by the media, came in 2016, when Michael Steven Sandford attempted to seize an officer’s weapon at a Trump rally in Las Vegas.
The most widely remembered was Thomas Matthew Crooks opening fire at the Butler, Pennsylvania rally on July 13, 2024, killing one rallygoer and grazing Trump’s ear, producing the iconic photograph of Trump raising his fist and shouting “Fight, fight, fight.” Between the fourth and fifth attempts on the president’s life, conservative Christian commentator Charlie Kirk was assassinated while engaging students in open dialogue on a university campus.
The media enabled violence against both men through sustained false framing. Trump was portrayed for years as a Russian asset and a threat to democracy. Using out-of-context quotes and selective framing, the media painted Kirk as a racist and a homophobe. Some on the left called for the deaths of both men and celebrated when Kirk was killed.
The media campaign against Trump began before his first election. On September 23, 2016, reports surfaced that U.S. authorities were investigating Trump campaign figure Carter Page for possible ties to Russian influence operations. This was the first public story directly linking a Trump associate to Russia. Fusion GPS, the opposition-research firm hired by the Clinton campaign, had directed Christopher Steele to share his findings with the media as early as mid-September 2016, weeks before the election.
On October 7, 2016, DHS and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper issued a public statement attributing the hacking of Democratic officials and the WikiLeaks releases to Russian intelligence acting to benefit Trump. On January 10, 2017, BuzzFeed published the Steele dossier in full, the same day Jeff Sessions’s confirmation hearing began, triggering wall-to-wall media saturation of the Russia narrative. The FBI’s own investigation, Crossfire Hurricane, had been formally opened on July 31, 2016, though the Durham Report later concluded it lacked an adequate factual basis.
The Russia narrative, the claim that Trump was a foreign-installed puppet being blackmailed by Vladimir Putin, ran for Trump’s entire first term and shaped two impeachment proceedings. The Mueller Report found no evidence of criminal conspiracy. The Durham Report concluded the FBI launched its investigation without an adequate factual basis and applied a double standard not applied to the Clinton campaign. The narrative collapsed only after nearly three years of continuous coverage built on material that, as Durham confirmed, lacked a factual foundation from the start.
Despite Russiagate collapsing, the media still runs with it from time to time, ostensibly on slow news days. However, Trump’s second term has been more acutely shaped by media framing him as a tyrant and a threat to democracy. The Intercept ran a 2024 piece arguing Trump “represents an existential threat to democracy” and that the warning “must be repeated, over and over again.” NPR aired a segment in which a political scientist argued the press had an “obligation” to cover Trump as a threat to democracy in the same way it covers climate change, with no opposing view presented.
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