From the attacks against Donald Trump, first in Butler and then in West Palm Beach, to the killing of Charlie Kirk and the shooting at the White House correspondents’ dinner: the trail of violence in the United States does not stop.
The episode at the Hilton Hotel in Washington, which could have turned into a massacre and in which a Secret Service agent was injured, represents only the last link in a chain that has affected political figures and symbolic places in recent years.
The attacks against Trump
In July 2024, Trump was shot while on stage at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. The president miraculously escaped.
A few months later, in September, a new assassination attempt against him, this time at his golf club in West Palm Beach. Trump was between the fifth and sixth hole when a Secret Service agent spotted the barrel of a rifle sticking out of the fence. The immediate intervention of the security men, who opened fire, put the gunman to flight, who was later captured.
In February 2026 another episode: a man managed to enter Mar-a-Lago at night with a rifle and a can of petrol. The Secret Service, with the support of the Palm Beach police, confronted him and, faced with resistance and refusal to lay down their weapons, shot him dead. Trump was not at the residence at the time.
The murder of Charlie Kirk
In September 2025, Charlie Kirk, a right-wing activist and Trump ally and a leading figure of the Maga movement, was killed. Hit by a bullet fired from dozens of meters away, he was killed while speaking to students at Utah Valley University.
An episode that profoundly shook American public opinion and which came back to mind during the White House correspondents’ dinner. Present at the evening was his widow, Erika Kirk, who after the shooting and the president’s evacuation was seen in tears as she asked to leave the place.
A sequence of events which, from the political arena to public spaces, highlights growing tension and a climate marked by ever closer episodes of violence.