Shortly after the White House Correspondents’ Association (WHCA) dinner began Saturday evening, a thirty-one-year-old man approached, running past a Secret Service security checkpoint. Guests heard shots outside the ballroom. President Trump said later that he initially thought a tray had been dropped on the floor, but his wife worried that it was more serious.
A moment later, the president was pulled off the stage by law enforcement officials, a huddle of agents forming around him as he was removed. Vice President JD Vance was ushered away in the opposite direction, and others on the stage were taken into the wings.
Agents spread out across the ballroom, standing on tables and holding weapons. Agents with long guns and helmets stationed themselves on the stage. Cabinet secretaries were rushed out of the room. Attendees hid under tables; wine spilled and serving trays clattered to the ground. People screamed and sobbed.
A waitress cried out in Spanish, “I don’t want to die here. I don’t want to die in this room.”
An assassination every other year
The suspect is expected to be arraigned in federal court today. He identified himself in a message sent to family members minutes before the attack as a “Friendly Federal Assassin.” Authorities uncovered what one official described as numerous anti-Trump social media posts. According to White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, the man was trying to “assassinate” President Trump.
This is tragically unsurprising; the list of United States presidential assassination attempts and plots includes every recent chief executive. Eight out of forty-five presidents, more than one in six, have died on the job, four by assassination.
This is by no means a uniquely American phenomenon. The list of heads of state and government across history who were assassinated or executed, beginning in 2270 BC and continuing to the present, is shockingly long. One study reported that, between 1875 and 2004, there were fifty-nine assassinations of primary national leaders, averaging approximately one every other year.
It’s hard to see how such attacks can be fully anticipated and thus prevented. The suspect in the shooting outside the WHCA dinner is a graduate of Caltech, one of the most academically rigorous schools in the country, and recently won a “teacher of the month” award. He appears to have legally purchased two guns he had on him Saturday.
Motives behind previous assassination attempts have been widely disparate. Among them:
- Ryan Routh attempted to shoot President Trump in September 2024, reportedly because he wanted to ensure that Mr. Trump would not be reelected that fall.
- John Hinckley Jr. shot President Ronald Reagan in 1981 to impress the actress Jodie Foster.
- Theodore Roosevelt was shot in 1912 by a man who said William McKinley visited him in a dream and told him to avenge his assassination by killing Mr. Roosevelt.
- James A. Garfield was shot and killed by a man who was angry at being passed over for appointment as Ambassador to France.
Nor are the rest of us immune from mortality. For example, five people were injured in a shooting early Sunday morning near Indiana University. The gunfire apparently resulted from a fight between two women at the event.
An American millionaire died on a hunting trip in Africa when he was charged by an elephant herd. A film portraying the life of Michael Jackson was on pace to collect more than $200 million in its opening weekend; the movie does not tell how he died of a drug overdose at the age of fifty.
“The safest road to hell is the gradual one”
And yet, there’s something in us that doesn’t want to admit that we could be next. Of course we know we are mortal, at least in a logical sense. None of us has any plausible hope that we will be the first humans to escape death forever.
But dying somehow doesn’t feel as real as all that.
Perhaps we’ve been desensitized by violence in movies and on television and by video games in which we die only to start another game. Hospitals and hospices, rather than homes and bedrooms, are often where people die these days. I’ve only witnessed the actual death of one person, an elderly man in my first pastorate who died in his bed as we prayed for him. My mother died while I was in her hospice room, but I did not see her last breath.
Even though we know someday will be our dying day (unless the Lord returns first), we don’t really believe it could be this day. We would have been shocked if President Trump had been killed Saturday night but not truly surprised, given the frequency of assassination attempts we’ve been discussing. But most of us would be both shocked and surprised if death were to meet us today.
In one sense, such denial is necessary to insulate us from anxiety that would otherwise paralyze us. Who could go through their day if they were in perpetual mortal fear of their pending demise?
In another, however, our unwillingness to admit our personal mortality is a ruse of the enemy intended to keep us from being ready when death comes. The chief tempter in C. S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters advises his understudy, “The safest road to hell is the gradual one—the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.”
“It’s closer to my house than to yours”
The antidote is to walk so closely with the living Lord Jesus that we are ready to step into his eternal presence today, secure in the knowledge that death is but the door to a life more blessed than we can possibly imagine (1 Corinthians 2:9).
The days when death is most disconcerting to me are the days when, quite frankly, I don’t feel prepared to stand before my holy Lord (2 Corinthians 5:10). They are also the days when I don’t think my work is yet done and grieve the separation from my loved ones that death would entail.
The days I’m truly walking with Jesus, by contrast, are days when I sense his grace and know I would be welcomed into his paradise. They are days when I know he will not call me home until my work is complete, so I can trust that his timing is perfect. And they are days when I feel deeply his love for those I love and know I can trust them into his omnipotent hands.
In Genesis 5 we read that “Enoch walked with God, and he was not, for God took him” (v. 24). A pastor preaching on this text imagined it this way: “As Enoch and God were walking along, the day drew to a close and the Lord said, ‘Enoch, it’s closer to my house than to yours. Come on home with me.’”
So it can be for any of us today.
This is the promise, and the invitation, of God.
Quote for the day:
“He whose head is in heaven need not fear to put his feet into the grave.” —Matthew Henry
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