The media elites are traumatized by the events at the White House Correspondents Dinner, and they will not stop talking about it. The problem is that they were never in any real danger, unlike people in the United States who experience real gun violence in cities, towns, schools, churches, restaurants, grocery stores, movie theaters, concerts, dance clubs, neighborhoods, and their own homes every single day all across the country.
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It has been less than a day since a gunman tried to enter the White House Correspondents Dinner, and even though, according to administration officials, the gunman’s manifesto said that he wanted to kill administration officials, the American people aren’t interested in the story.
If you spend five minutes on any form of social media, you’ll soon learn that the consensus reaction is people claiming the gunman was staged, MAGAs who think a White House ballroom will solve everything, and some version of the sentiment that the American people have already seen this movie twice before, and they are bored.
The disinterest in the story has shocked some media elites.
Dylan Byers of Puck News posted a long story on X about how a bar in Washington, DC wouldn’t turn on Trump’s press conference last night:
We asked a bartender to change the channel to CNN so we could watch the president’s briefing with captions, which they did. But then, a few minutes later, the bartender said he’d been informed by the manager that the bar had a policy against showing political content, and he’d have to go back to sports.
I tried to imagine what this bar might have looked like on March 30, 1981, an hour or so after Hinckley fired shots at Reagan at the very same hotel. I imagine every television would have been on CNN or the wall-to-wall special coverage on the broadcast networks, and that passers by would have come in to watch, as well. The media is giving this the ample coverage it deserves.
But it’s unnerving how desensitized so many people have become—to shootings, obviously, but also to political violence and the abnormality of the moment. Maybe I’m wrong, maybe we just picked the wrong bar. But I doubt it. Pew Research recently reported that attention to news in the U.S. has declined across all age groups since 2016, and that young adults (ages 18 to 29) have consistently had the lowest levels. Even as the news itself intensifies—in politics, geopolitics, technology, etc—more and more people seem to be tuning it out.
And I suppose this is how you find yourself in a bar in the nation’s capital, an hour after crouching behind a chair as secret service members evacuate the President of the United States from the room, being told that you’ll have to watch Penguins vs. Flyers.
People care deeply about the crisis of mass shootings and gun violence in the country. They don’t care about a president who treats them badly, shows contempt for most Americans, and makes their lives worse.
The American people don’t care because media elites who earn six, seven, or eight figures a year put themselves in this situation by choosing to hang out with Donald Trump for an evening, and they were never in any danger.
Big media is siding with Trump. They are not on the side of the people, and that is why most Americans don’t care about their trauma or a potential third attempt on Trump.
It is all just an endless loop of drama that doesn’t lower prices, reduce costs, or keep our families safe.
Do you care about this latest gunman coming after Trump? Share your thoughts in the comments below.