The next assassination attempt will be against the First Amendment.

In the wake of the Correspondent's dinner attack, expect Trump to ramp up his attacks on foes, facts, and free speech.

A deranged man attempted to attack the White House Correspondents’ Dinner this weekend. Now the president may be preparing to use the event — and the fear it generated — to stage an assault on his critics and our rights.

Before the chaos erupted Saturday night, there was an eerie omen.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt announced that “shots will be fired tonight” by the president at the dinner. She meant rhetorical ones, aimed squarely at the free press hosting the evening. But a lone gunman had other ideas, and Trump’s planned performance was interrupted before it could begin.

In the thirty-six hours since, the world has rightly focused on who the suspected shooter was and whom in the Trump administration he was targeting, including the president and members of the Cabinet. Those questions matter enormously. And we should universally condemn political violence as a scourge on our democracy.

But Donald Trump had a target that night, too. However figurative, he was preparing to open fire himself. The president seemed eager to stand in front of the assemblage of reporters and go after their profession, which he’s dubbed “the enemy of the people” — and against which he’s wielded federal powers in order to silence critics and curb constitutional protections. Now, with the horror of a genuine attack to exploit, he may well expand his arsenal.

I wrote a warning on social media as Trump’s motorcade was still rolling toward the White House Saturday night:

“The WHCD shooter will be used to justify things that have nothing to do with the WHCD shooter. Mark this moment.”

The president didn’t make me wait long. Minutes later, he stepped up to a podium and declared that the attack was precisely why America needs to get out of the way and accept his pet vanity project: a $400 million ballroom. That effort itself has become a symbol of alleged bribery and the naked corruption of executive power. Then, on Sunday, the Justice Department moved to steamroll legal challenges to the ballroom, citing the Correspondents’ Dinner attack as justification (ignoring the fact that the White House has no say in where the annual dinner is held).

The cynicism here is quite breathtaking, though not surprising. It’s also a preview of what’s to come. But first, to understand why the Correspondents’ Dinner was set to be a remarkable moment, you have to zoom back out to the extraordinary events that preceded it.

Donald Trump has leveled the gravest threats against the First Amendment in modern American history. In just over a year, he’s opened treason investigations against critics and threatened similar probes against his predecessors; issued executive orders against universities and law firms that might oppose him; decimated public media, cutting funding to NPR and PBS for producing journalism he dislikes; weaponized federal regulators to hand control of critical news institutions (like CBS and CNN) to allies committed to “reforming” them into obedience; wielded the threat of revoking broadcast licenses against other networks who report unfavorably on his actions; filed lawsuits against newspapers that have done investigative reporting on him and his administration; designated political opponents as domestic extremists using national security powers and opened probes against them; put in place the architecture to conduct IRS reviews of left-leaning nonprofits; brought criminal charges against civil society organizations — including the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) — that have taken anti-Trump positions; sent security forces into American cities and directed them to confront protesters; and killed American citizens in cold blood, only to falsely accuse them of being domestic terrorists.

And that barely scratches the surface.

Trump was apparently preparing to defend and expand upon his agenda — “shots will be fired,” his press secretary said — from the Correspondents’ Dinner podium. Then a gunman tried to get into the room. While the president wasted no time in redirecting Saturday’s near-miss tragedy toward his own purposes, including double down on his ballroom, the deeper concern that Trump will use this incident to further crack down on Americans engaged in entirely lawful, constitutionally protected dissent.

This is what he did after the assassination of Charlie Kirk. Trump signed National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7), directing federal counterterrorism teams to investigate “potential federal crimes relating to” groups involved in “recruiting or radicalizing” individuals for what it describes as “political violence, terrorism, or conspiracy against rights,” along with their funders and leadership. The order effectively characterized “anti-American,” “anti-Christian,” and “anti-capitalist” views as terrorism indicators. The language is staggeringly broad and could be used to reach virtually any organization the administration wishes to target.

The recent criminal charges against the SPLC are a proof of concept. The SPLC built its reputation investigating actual domestic extremist groups, including organizations with long histories of inspiring violence against Americans. Yet in an apparent effort to get revenge against them — the SPLC has been a harsh critic of Trump and his allies — the administration has accused them, grotesquely, of supporting the very movements the organization spent decades exposing. The case is a harbinger.

Trump and his lieutenants are expanding their dragnet to retaliate against political opponents. We don’t have to speculate about “if” that crackdown will continue. Only “how.” We’ve had more than a year to watch a sweeping, methodical assault on every institution that tries to keep him in check. Now, he’s poised to exploit another tragedy to consolidate power.

In the immediate term, we cannot cower or permit Donald Trump to paint millions of peaceful Americans as the shooter’s accomplices. He was laying the groundwork for that well before Saturday night’s event. In fact, before last year’s No Kings protests, Trump and his allies began widely characterizing the demonstrations as gathering organized by domestic extremists, implying that anyone who attended must hate America or was in cahoots with terrorist facilitators.

On Sunday night, in an interview with CBS’s Norah O’Donnell, Trump was asked about the Correspondents’ Dinner suspect. The exchange should be read carefully:

“He had attended a No Kings protest in California,” O’Donnell remarked.

“No Kings, yeah,” Trump replied. “The reason you have people like that is you have people doing ‘No Kings.’ I’m not a king. What I am — if I was a king, I wouldn’t be dealing with you.”

The headlines have already focused on the second part, i.e. Trump’s barely concealed resentment at having to engage with the press at all. “If I was a king, I wouldn’t be dealing with you.” That line is revealing enough. He also later called O’Donnell “a disgrace” for reading passages from the shooter’s manifesto.

Clearly, as he always does, Trump is squandering the opportunity to unify the country in opposition to political violence.

But the line before it is the one that should draw your focus. Trump just told the country that peaceful protests are what’s producing gunmen. “The reason you have people like [the shooter],” he said, “is you have people doing ‘No Kings.’” That sentence is a warning. The president is preparing to label us — and our exercise of dissent against him — as the real threat.

Shots fired, indeed.

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Your friend, in defiance,

Miles Taylor

P.S. Miss the most recent DEFIANCE Daily? Friday we spoke to veteran White House correspondent Brian Karem ahead of the WHCD. Also, don’t forget you can list to DEFIANCE Daily on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts!

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