An Assassination Attempt and a Royal Visit to Washington

0:00If you're a fan of the Political Scene podcast from The New Yorker, I hope you'll join us for a live taping of the show at 92 NY in Manhattan. We're going to be talking about Donald Trump's falling approval numbers, the prospects of a comeback for the Democratic Party in the midterms. And let's just say the potential threats to the integrity of the election that are coming from the president. I hope you'll join me, Evan Osnos, and my colleagues Susan Glasser and Jane Mayer on June 4th at 7 p.m. Ticket information is at 92ny.org.

0:44It's almost become cliche to say that it was a surreal week in Washington. But this week, I think we can actually say it. There was a shooting attempt at the White House Correspondents' Dinner, which cast a shadow over what's usually one of the Capitol's more lighthearted rituals. And then, a couple days later, came the pageantry, a state visit from King Charles III and Queen Camilla, complete with the king gifting Trump a British World War II relic with his name on it, a bell from the HMS Trump. All of this, of course, while relations between the U.S. and the U.K. are dismal, to say the least.

1:18Today I'm talking with Antonia Hitchens, a staff writer for The New Yorker who lives in D.C. and covers politics, to try and make sense of a week that was both theatrical and genuinely frightening, all while being oddly revealing about power, perception, and the strange rhythms of political life during the second Trump era. This is The Political Scene. I'm Tyler Foggett, and I'm a senior editor at The New Yorker.

1:43Hi, Antonia. Hi, Tyler. Thanks for having me. Yeah, thanks so much for being here. So you were covering the White House Correspondents' Dinner, and you were in the room during the assassination attempt, which was also the third attempt on Trump's life in three years. Can you just walk us through what your experience was like and sort of what happened? So every year, the New Yorker and the New York Times, and I think possibly a few other outlets, they don't buy tables to sit at the official dinner. And so they've always, I think, for the past number of years, sat it out. But I still was curious to see Trump attending this dinner for the first time as president.

2:24He had never wanted to go in the past. He'd always declined the invitation. But this year he finally said, you know, I'm coming. I'm going to be, I guess, mocked by a mentalist or whatever a mentalist does to you in place of a comedian. And wait, is that why he decided to come? Because it was a mentalist instead of a comedian? None of that was ever made directly clear. I think there've been issues for a number of different presidents with, you know, a comedian they'll pick will have made an offensive remark about something and then will have to be disinvited. So it might be a Trump sensitivity.

2:56It might also have just been the committee deciding this will be somehow less painful for us on the front end. But so I still wanted to see it and to see kind of the ridiculous ceremony of it all and to watch Trump give what was meant to be one of his meanest speeches to the press. He'd been working all week with comedians to punch up jokes at our expense. And so I signed up with The New York Times to be in the press pool for that evening, which means that you basically go anywhere the president goes. And so we enter the ballroom and we watch as a few pleasantries unfold, the Marine Band plays.

3:32The president of the Correspondents Association gives her opening remarks. And then the pool is whisked out during the kind of appetizer course to set up our laptops. And if you're, you know, an AP reporter filing a story or you're uploading photos. So we're in kind of a holding area outside the ballroom where we have a choice of kind of boxed Hilton lunches to eat. We're organizing our chairs. And that's when we heard what sounded like gunfire coming down the stairs suddenly, which I honestly thought was just someone dropping plates or like a caterer fainting maybe and falling. But then, you know, what happened next?

4:10What happened for the rest of the night afterward? I mean, I think we all saw the videos of Trump and Vance in the cabinet kind of being evacuated from the scene and running. But just I know that there was a press conference that night. And I guess, like, how did all of it get absorbed by the press and by Trump himself in the immediate aftermath? Sure. I mean, it's worth noting that you've gathered almost every reporter in Washington into the same space where then they're all going to be reporting on this unfolding crisis with the president whom they cover and also his entire cabinet, his vice president, almost the entire line of succession.

4:48And so as soon as this event unfolded in the ballroom where people had gathered under tables to hide from what they thought might be gunfire, people immediately were live streaming. They were doing kind of the moral equivalent of like a reporter stand up, but on their cell phone from under a table. So there was definitely a kind of evolving media strategy from underneath Hilton tables. As far as the pool went, we had been outside where kind of much closer to where the shooter was neutralized, as they say. So we had kind of a blackout on news because we didn't have Wi-Fi. We heard lots of noise.

5:29There was, you know, when the security state around the president suddenly unleashes the kind of code red, suddenly like just endless men and tactical gear and guns. and they were all in plain clothes, a lot of them. So, you know, various guys in tuxes and women in cool dresses are suddenly heavily armed, kind of sprinting. So it was a scene of kind of mass confusion and hysteria because no one knew what had taken place. There were rumors circulating that the shooter was killed. I saw RFK Jr. stumble by me just because he was being pulled so quickly by his Secret Service. It was kind of a massive event of uncertainty and live streaming.

6:09And then the president was taken to hold in a secure area where he started posting on Truth Social about what was going on and insisted that the show would go on and that he would come back. And so we actually were taken back into the ballroom and do a scene of kind of burrata on the ground. People had taken off their shoes and sprinted through burrata. There were spilled wine bottles. Just kind of a strange scene of just not the mood that you would imagine restarting an event. and a lot of people there had been at Butler. And so I think there was sort of a reluctance to continue the event in that huge room with the entire cabinet and president and every reporter.

6:48And so Trump eventually kind of conceded to taking his Secret Service details advice and just evacuating. So we, you know, as soon as we set back up to keep covering the event, they say, you know, the motorcade is rolling as we sprint back to the vans. And as the pooler next to me noted, it was the fastest motorcade he'd ever been in. So we arrived back at the White House, which was being heavily re-secured. And Marco Rubio was getting there in his tux with his wife, kind of knocking on the door of the West Wing to go in. So kind of all the cabinet secretaries and the president converged there in their motorcades, the first lady, the press secretary, to have a press conference where many of the other reporters from the Hilton kind of either took out like a lime scooter or city bikes or ran down to the White House.

7:39so they could all be there for this kind of surreal press briefing in black tie after an assassination attempt where nobody was wounded. So there was almost kind of a feeling of humor and unity amidst all of the weirdness. And so it kind of had almost a cinematic ending to an event about, you know, covering the White House. You bring everyone back to the briefing room to stay up late filing stories. and Trump at that point said that he would end up, I think, revising his speech because to make all these jokes at the expense of the press, he then felt was indecorous. Although, of course, he went on in the next few days to continue making the kind of jobs that he liked.

8:23So I'm curious to see what was in that speech. I think we all want to get a copy of that. Yeah, no, he mentioned that he was going to go really hard and was super excited about it. And And so, yeah, it is curious to see if we'll ever hear a version of the original speech. After something like this happens, an actual or, you know, like potential security breach with shots fired, how quickly does the machinery of Washington just kind of like snap back into place and like go back to normalcy? Well, I think in this case, there were so many kind of online pundits saying, you know, their bit about whether or not the security had failed.

9:01But one of those perspectives was just that security functioned pretty much as it should have. A guy tried to walk into a building with a gun and was swiftly stopped and then an event disbanded. I think if there had been injuries or, you know, in some ways this seemed like a little surprising at first to me getting, you know, the email saying the parties are, you know, come here and gather. And you kind of imagine that they've already they've spent an incredible amount of money and infrastructure setting these things up. And so they'd rather go ahead with them. But I also think some people told me that after a stressful night and a kind of emotional valence and then filing on deadline, they were actually really glad to, on their way out of there, have a place to go and kind of mingle with people that had been in the same scenario.

9:51But it was certainly a kind of funny split screen of, you know, there's the abandoned Hilton Ballroom with 3 ,000 lobster tails and steaks that, you know, are briefly part of a crime scene and are now, I think, some of them were freeze dried and donated to shelters. so they say. The coat check became part of a crime scene as well, so you couldn't collect your jacket if you checked one in. And then you have a bunch of reporters and black tie glam kind of grimly at these very opulent parties where there's like an empty dance floor playing top 40. I think everyone kind of was able to observe that strangeness and then kind of almost move on by the next day.

10:31I want to talk about another split screen now, which is like the split screen of this kind of terrible, scary thing that happened at the White House Correspondents' Dinner, and then this state visit from the king and the queen. So we're going to take a quick break. This is the political scene from The New Yorker.

10:53We are in uncharted territory. Staff writer Evan Osnos on The New Yorker Radio Hour. I think all of us right now are trying to make sense of an avalanche of news every day. And there aren't very many places where you can go and understand how something looks in the grand scope of history and context. That's what I come to The New Yorker for. I'm David Remnick, and each week my colleagues and I try to make sense of what's happening in this chaotic world. And I hope you'll join us for The New Yorker Radio Hour.

11:30So we go from these crazy photos of Trump and his cabinet being evacuated from the White House Correspondents' Dinner to this picture of Trump holding a bee in the palm of his hand and showing it off to Melania and King Charles and Queen Camilla, who are in the middle of their first state visit to the U.S. I know these visits don't happen that frequently. And so I'm wondering how like the vibe has shifted in Washington since the weekend. Was there any talk of whether that visit would no longer happen? This visit had been so many months and years in the making and carried such a significance that I think it would have been so dispiriting to each side to put it off when you think of the kind of infrastructure and transporting the king and queen to America.

12:18to participate in these activities. And so on Sunday, when I was at a White House correspondence brunch at the British Embassy, the talk was, you know, part of people swapping stories about the previous night. Where were you? Were you under a table? Did you leave? Did a protester yell at you? I found that by the later afternoon, people were mostly focused on, can we get invitations to come back here tomorrow for the much more exclusive party, which is the welcome garden tea for the king upon his arrival, where there's the kind of receiving line for guests of the embassy. So it was sort of on to the next thing fairly quickly, although I know there were concerns about, obviously, the security involved in that visit, especially after this kind of breach.

13:05And the king himself had, in 1994, had an assassination attempt where someone shot at him and he basically kept talking and was adjusting the cuff of his jacket while his security responded. And so I think he, like Trump, is very much committed to the idea of, as he would put it, keep calm and carry on and kind of not be deterred by the many threats to people in their positions. And so, yeah, by Monday afternoon, it was a lovely scene in the gardens. And he was being moved around all different parts of the embassy gardens to meet a number of different people. Trump's cabinet was there to receive him.

13:44And then he visited the White House where these new beehives were unveiled. And you mentioned that photo, which I think during the fact checking even was flagged as, hang on, is this AI? Because there's something so surreal and serene about the kind of inherent drama within Trump's personality always, but as embodied in these almost poignant moments of a bee is in his palm and his wife is clutching her heart, staring at it. And then the king and queen are kind of looking on adoringly at this small bee on the president's palm and everything else falls away in that moment. So I think there was a tendency to not look back too much on the on the Hilton Ballroom and just kind of look forward to these events, which are, yeah, as you say, very it's very uncommon to have a monarch in the halls of Congress giving a 30 minute address to a full house of, you know, very.

14:38I think I'd never had a more jovial experience being in the chamber. It's often, you know, as a reporter, you're the only person there. And there's, you know, one person making an impassioned speech on the floor to you and a C-SPAN camera, or for something like the State of the Union, where it's, you know, who's going to clap, who's going to stand, who's against what. This had a much more kind of feeling of like a collective release and getting to really like a monarch and have fun listening to a speech for 30 minutes and then kind of going back to the reality of the Hill, which is, I think, very different from that mood.

15:16I mean, what did you make of the King's address? Because I feel like there was a lot of, I mean, no one really thought that he was going to, you know, just like go in on Trump or something like that. But there is this like strained dynamic between the U.S. and the U.K., which I feel like sort of cast a shadow over the visit, at least before the visit began, just thinking about like the disagreements over the wars in Iran and Ukraine, Trump's tariffs, Trump's threats to seize Greenland, Trump being openly critical of UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer. And so I guess, how did that play into things at all?

15:51And how did that affect the speech that King Charles eventually gave, if at all? In Trump's speech that morning from the White House, he spoke about, you know, on television when he was a young child, his mother always having on any of the oral proceedings on the television and saying, you know, Prince Charles at that point, he's so cute and this whole thing is so wonderful. And I think we heard from the president what we hear from more Americans than I would have realized, which is kind of a real monarchy obsession. And they like the covers with the royals on them. And I think as a result of that, the tone was immediately much more friendly.

16:29Trump was really delighted to be hosting the king. He wanted to kind of show the king the grandness that he felt he'd been shown when he spent the night in Windsor Castle in September. And so it almost kind of stepped away from the, you know, talk of the war in Iran. I think even in Trump's speech, he didn't reference the name of the country with which he has gone to war. He kind of showed a subtlety that doesn't normally interest him when he was speaking with the king and trying to be a wonderful host, almost as though, you know, I developed this new White House. The ballroom's not done yet, but it's going to be really nice.

17:10And kind of there was a mutual desire to keep it on that wavelength more than I think the way that things could devolve quickly, as we've seen with, you know, world leaders in the Oval Office. The king was a different story for him. So it's a very, I think, shrewd move in some sense from the government, but of course was also planned given the anniversary being celebrated this year. So they might not have realized how dire the straits would be for the relationship at the time of the visit, but it was, I think, actually quite well-timed in that sense to diffuse some of the tension that's been building.

17:42Although, of course, there were a few funny moments, you know, like the new ambassador who's replaced, Peter Mandelson, there was a leaked recording of him earlier this week saying, you know, the real special relationship is with Israel. And, you know, there were all these kind of if you look away from the beautiful flowers and bees and pomp and circumstance and bands, all of those issues remain. But I think it was almost a pleasant distraction for Trump during the time of the visit to just be very preoccupied with hosting the royals, not so much in old fashioned diplomacy. So is it safe to say that the special relationship, and by that I mean the special relationship between the U.S.

18:22and the U.K. is safely intact for now? As Charles said in his toast to Trump, the story of Britain and America is one of reconciliation. He was looking out at the kind of, I think he called the readjustment to the East Wing, which, you know, it's rubble essentially with a big crane over it. And he said, you know, we British, of course, made our own attempt at real estate redevelopment of the White House in 1814. In other words, when they, the British set it on fire. And so there've obviously been worse moments for the relationship. And it's kind of the celebration of this visit was acknowledging the long winding road of the two nations, but coming out the other side and kind of celebrating a shared desire to, as Trump put it in his speech, which I think was notable because people were really drawn to this language, which they hadn't heard from their own prime minister or from their own king, was Trump's kind of more robust language of nationalism, of, you know, Anglo-Saxon blood and, you know, shared heritage being the real thing more than values that bind the two nations together, which I think is of a piece with some of his broader kind of positions in this term, or at least as articulated by his speechwriters.

19:36Whereas the king took a much more measured note and spoke about Ukraine and NATO and preservation of the environment. And I know some have read that as kind of a very soft critique of Trump. But I think he wanted to take it out of the kind of being just about Donald John Trump tendency that we have, especially in Washington. he was speaking much more to the different kind of transatlantic partnerships that have been significant over the course of his life as he's observed these relationships change and develop. And, you know, calling back to when the two nations were wartime allies for each other.

20:15And I think, you know, trying to infuse a note of hopefulness into what's been, you know, a lot of Trump just trashing his prime minister. But I think to him, the relationship is more profound than those kind of soundbites we get about those tabloid blowups and has a much longer future than just, you know, the next screw up with Trump and Keir. Yeah, no, it's interesting to think about it that way, kind of like the long view as opposed to the very short term view that I feel like we're sometimes incentivized to have when we are reporting on just like the daily happenings of the Trump administration.

20:50I mean, on that note, I want to take a break, but then when we come back, I'd love to talk more with you about your just broader experience covering the second Trump term and the different themes that you've been kind of watching and that you've been surprised by. This is the political scene from The New Yorker.

21:15We are in uncharted territory. Staff writer Evan Osnos on the New Yorker Radio Hour. I think all of us right now are trying to make sense of an avalanche of news every day. And there aren't very many places where you can go and understand how something looks in the grand scope of history and context. That's what I come to The New Yorker for. I'm David Remnick, and each week, my colleagues and I try to make sense of what's happening in this chaotic world. And I hope you'll join us for the New Yorker Radio Hour.

21:52I was thinking about how one of the last times you came on the podcast was actually to talk about your experience reporting on the RNC, which happened not long after the assassination attempt on Donald Trump that actually got quite close to killing him. This was the one that where he got shot in the ear and he then appeared on stage at the RNC wearing the bandage. And I remember during our conversation, you were talking about how it was almost like Trump had a new lease on life or something. Just like the way that he carried himself and sort of spoke about having had a religious experience, feeling like he had been saved by God.

22:30and it seemed like there was almost something similar that happened after this most recent attempt where when Trump was talking about the shooting, kind of what he was thinking and what was going through his head at the time, he said something like, I wasn't worried, I understand life, we live in a crazy world. And so it's like this picture of serenity and then it seems like it doesn't last that long because then a couple of days later, he immediately goes back to being the same old Trump. And so I'm wondering what it's like being a reporter and watching a president or, in the case of the RNC, a political candidate, a former president, have a spiritual kind of psychological experience, like, in real time after these, like, life-threatening events?

23:14I do think the RNC now, I mean, it's even if possibly quite contrived moment of unity, so quickly shattered and so profoundly that I think now with the way that even the base is kind of siloed in different online spaces. People are paid to post things which they possibly don't think and can feel like this kind of proxy war to define what Trumpism is or what the administration is meant to be doing. And at least in that moment, really briefly at the RNC after the Butler attempt, it did seem like the base cohered around Trump as a figure in a way that now I think if If you go to CPAC or something where he used to go every year and everyone had sparkles on and it was a whole kind of ridiculous production, I think if you went this year, that feeling is harder and harder to find.

24:07And it might just be that the kind of reaction to this figure who is so concerned with his own image making continues to evolve and to take on different forms. But I do think even if you think of this visit that he had with the king that was, you know, very picturesque and lovely in these various different gardens, looming in the background, of course, is, you know, what happens if the midterms don't go the way that his administration hopes they will. And suddenly I think they're in a very different position and a very different kind of positioning in terms of how they can narrate the story of what it is that they're doing to change the country once, you know, people are being subpoenaed and they're going to have hearings.

24:47And so I think there's always kind of that feeling of all of this is about to change and be different because this can't go on forever. And Trump, especially as he gets older, kind of will have these moments of musing on those things, almost like stepping outside of the fact that he's the leader. And we see it in person. We see it on social media. as you say, in the briefing room after the shooting Saturday, already kind of comparing himself to Lincoln and thinking about how only someone important could experience this moment. I mean, you see why people are driven mad by deciding to react and analyze and, you know, take offense and develop kind of positions to all of those musings, which, you know, at a different time also, the president wouldn't have been tweeting memes at 3.30 in the morning that everyone had to weigh in on.

25:39So I think it's just changed that fabric so profoundly. It's, I think, hard to imagine sometimes when people talk about the next president, because you see Vance trying to emulate some of what Trump does, and it just doesn't really land. So I've been thinking about the ballroom project, sort of like this idea that he's trying to kind of ensure his legacy, whether it be kind of like massive construction projects like the ballroom and like the Trump arch or like these specialty passports for the 250th anniversary of America that have Trump's face on them. He's like grappling with his legacy in real time and kind of using that as an explanation for why he's been targeted so much.

26:20And then that also then being used to justify the creation of this ballroom. Yeah. And I do think it can sometimes strike, you know, Americans don't, for the most part, I think the first time Trump posted like a meme of himself as a king, Americans actually aren't usually enticed by the idea of their president becoming a monarch. And so sometimes these things he does, whether it's wanting his face on the money, or as you say, the passport, the tone initially seems so bizarre that doesn't seem real, but eventually there's enough kind of, it's like merchandise populating the world that I think, you know, the president has been able to do business deals and real estate deals that he would not have been able to do without the office that he occupies.