In the chaotic swirl of events after President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, doctors feared that Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson had suffered a heart attack upon arrival at Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas. The signs were ominous: Johnson’s face was ashen, and he was clutching his chest. “There was the real possibility that the No. 3 in the line of succession would become president,” the historian Michael Beschloss told me.

The line “I experience rage thinking about everything this administration has done” could probably have been written in an email to friends by any number of the attendees at last night’s White House Correspondents’ Association dinner. But the line was apparently written by a man who showed up with a shotgun and pistol and was ready to kill “most everyone” there to get to Donald Trump and assassinate him and his Cabinet.

Except for what appears—thank God—to be only a minor injury to a Secret Service officer who was shot near a security checkpoint, no one was hurt at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner last night. News reports are reassembling the mosaic of the attacker’s movements; he apparently took a train and transported some weapons with him, checked into the hotel, and then made his run at the event.

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On one level, the system worked. The perimeter held. A would-be assassin was tackled in the hallway outside the White House Correspondents’ Association’s annual dinner. The one bullet that found a human target—a U.S. Secret Service agent—was halted, in part, by the officer’s phone and bulletproof vest, according to a law-enforcement summary report that we reviewed.

When an assassin murdered Charlie Kirk in September 2025, the MAGA movement seized the moment to demand a campaign of repression. Vice President Vance called for an ambitious program to “go after the NGO network that foments, facilitates, and engages in violence.” He named the Ford Foundation, Open Society Foundations, and The Nation magazine as examples of candidates for the retaliation he had in mind.