The Destabilization of Truth may be the epitaph of the American republic.
A good friend of mine and I were talking yesterday about the shooting incident that terminated the 2026 White House Correspondents’ Dinner in Washington, DC. No one died in the incident. The shooter is in custody. His “manifesto” is being studied by the appropriate law enforcement entities. One officer was shot in the chest, but fortunately, he was wearing a bulletproof vest. He will be fine.
Poor Wolf Blitzer of CNN blundered into the shooting scene and was wrestled to the ground by law enforcement agents to protect him from harm. Blitzer, a veteran journalistic hero of many war zones, who rose to national prominence in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, World Trade Center attacks, was so shaken up by the Correspondents’ Dinner incident that he had a hard time maintaining his characteristic journalistic stoicism in the hours that followed. In the course of the endless live coverage, Blitzer told CNN and the world so often that he was scared, that it was a very frightening thing, that it was a really terrifying experience, that I found myself saying, out loud, “Time to retire, Wolf. You’ve earned it.” He looked like a stricken old man. He is 78 years old, and he looked as if he had aged 10 years in five minutes.
As I watched the coverage, my mind flashed to October 6, 1981, when Egyptian president Anwar Sadat was gunned down sitting on a dais in front of a large crowd in Cairo. And Malcolm X, who was gunned down on February 21, 1965, while preparing to speak at the Audubon Ballroom in the neighborhood of Washington Heights in New York. A dais is sitting duck land.
Imagine if Saturday’s gunman, Cole Tomas Allen, had managed to burst through the door of the ballroom at the Washington Hilton and start shooting at the worthies at the head table: the president and first lady, Vice President J.D. Vance, Stephen Miller, press secretary Karoline Leavitt, and mentalist Oz Pearlman, with hundreds of others in his line of sight. That he got that close is appalling. And now poor Oz Pearlman has to spend the rest of his life hearing everyone taunt him: “didn’t see that coming, did you?”
A little hesitantly, my friend asked me if I had heard the rumor that the Correspondents’ Dinner shooting was an act of political theater staged to get the American people to support President Trump’s big beautiful ballroom, which has been held up in court battles and doesn’t yet have widespread support outside Trump’s most ardent supporters. It is true that President Trump, safely back at the White House on Saturday night, brought up the ballroom — a little sheepishly, I thought — as a place where security would be adequate to any public or private event, a place where something like this couldn’t happen.
So the question was, could this incident have been political theater?
My sense was no. So, too, my friend. Things are crazy in America in 2026, we agreed, but they are not that crazy … are they … surely not … is it possible … could it be … no … certainly not.
But the fact that we had this conversation, the fact that we had to have this conversation, is a sad barometric reading of where we now are as a nation. You cannot rule out that the whole thing was planned (no one killed) to give the president another opportunity to look brave in the face of danger, to promote the high-security ballroom he has been obsessing about for the past few months, and perhaps even to allow his most ardent supporters to declare that he must really want to be the savior of this country if he is willing repeatedly to face such unprecedented danger. I remember meeting a woman in Idaho after the Butler, Pennsylvania, assassination attempt (July 13, 2024) who gushed about the saintly character of Mr. Trump. “After all we have put him thorough, the fake Russia investigation, the baseless impeachments, and now this, it’s a wonder that he is even willing to face such threats — assassinations and character assassinations — when he could just be golfing and enjoying his wealth in his final years. He’s doing this to save America. He’s fulfilling a divine plan, and God is sparing him so he can make us great again.”
As my friend and I mused about all of this, I said, “Think of how far we have fallen. Fake news, a media that is regarded by millions as “the enemy of the people,” “alternative facts,” tens of thousands of palpable lies, and an unprecedented descent into various acts of political theater, have so destabilized our sense of reality that we now have no choice but to ask such questions, even when we are sure (are we sure?) they are baseless. You cannot utterly rule out that what happened on Saturday night was a carefully planned moment of political gamesmanship.
How Did It Ever Come to This?
And then we went deeper.
My friend asked if any part of me wonders whether the assassination attempt in Butler was staged to help re-elect Donald Trump. On a scale of one to 100, where 100 signifies it was certainly a stunt, where do I find myself, he asked. I paused for half a minute to think about this proposition and then said, “I’d give it 5-10 on a scale of 100. In other words, I think it was a genuine assassination attempt. To think otherwise is to lose all touch with reality.”
“But what about his ear?,” said my friend. “We’ve all seen the post-shooting photographs, and his ear seems just fine, and that sort of cartilage does not grow back. And why has Mr. Trump been so nonchalant about the incident, where his life was spared by a millimeter or two? You would think he’d be haunted by it, or humbled by it, or something. Transformed somehow.”
We agreed that the fact that a random man in the crowd, 50-year-old Corey Comperatore, was killed in the Butler incident was a strong indication that this was not a political stunt. Surely no fake assassination would end the life of an innocent bystander! That’s insane, right? But (we both asked as we looked at each other), what if that’s exactly what happened, because that would add deep credibility to the “incident.” What if some really dark conspiracy was directing the incident, and the conspirators who planned and executed the shooting convinced themselves that the killing (sacrifice) of a bystander would seal the deal, would make everyone believe this was a genuine and random assassination attempt by the usual Oswaldian nutjob? Are we willing to say with certainty that the darkest forces representing the richest and most powerful people in the world (the oil barons, the Illuminati, Opus Dei, the international banking conspiracy, rogue Rotarians!) would shy away from killing an innocent man to consolidate their control of the planet, with trillions and gazillions of dollars at stake? In our skepticism, are we sane, or are we fundamentally naïve?
As I wrote these words just now, I actually had to get up out of my chair because I am not susceptible to conspiracy theories. I find the notion that Mr. Comperatore had to die to re-elect Donald Trump preposterous. But that’s the point, right?
It’s not as if there is no evidence for such things. The Frank Church Senate Hearings of 1975 forced the American people to face the fact that the CIA and other (darker) entities of the government of the United States precipitated and paid for coups d’etat in Central and South America; that agents of the U.S. government destabilized and sometimes coordinated the assassinations of other nations’ leaders; that we tried to eliminate Cuba’s Fidel Castro by way of exploding cigars, infected diving suits, and LSD ruffies.
In November 1964, FBI director (and cross-dresser) J. Edgar Hoover sent an anonymous letter (enclosing a doctored audio tape) to Martin Luther King, Jr., urging him to commit suicide before the full extent of his womanizing came to light. How did Hoover know about King’s private life? Illegal wiretaps authorized by U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy.
What Is Possible? What Is Not Possible?
What do you not rule out? Or rather, is there anything you categorically rule out?
I had dinner with William Webster (1924-2025) in Williamsburg long ago. He had been director of the CIA and FBI. I leaned across the table and asked him, “If I knew what you know, would I be able to sleep tonight?” He looked at me for a moment, smiled, and said, “Of course.” But I thought I saw a wink in there somewhere.
For the record, I believe that Thomas Crooks was the lone gunman at Butler, Penn. (which puts the Secret Service in a pretty bad light). For the record, I believe that Cole Tomas Allen was the lone gunman (and an inept one — a shotgun to decapitate the government of the United States?) at the Correspondents’ Dinner last week. For the record, I believe that lone gunman Tyler Robinson killed Charlie Kirk in Utah on September 10, 2025. For the record, I believe that Stephen Paddock was the lone gunman in the 2017 Harvest festival shooting in Las Vegas that killed 60 and injured hundreds more.
And for the record, I feel 80% sure that there was at least one second gunman when John F. Kennedy was killed in Dallas on November 22, 1963. And from that toxic seed — from the failure of the Warren Commission report — a sad garden of conspiracy theories has taken root over the last 60 years.
But what bothers me most is that Truth has been so destabilized — so systematically destabilized — in the last 20 years, that we have no choice now but to at least ponder the possibility that the world has become a much murkier place than our common sense is willing to believe.
The Destabilization of Truth may be the epitaph of the American republic.