In The Wake Of Saturday’s Shooting, The White House Blames The Left — And The Media

President Donald Trump, standing at the White House briefing room podium in his tuxedo hours after the White House Correspondents’ Dinner shooting Saturday night, called for peace.

By Monday, the tone had changed.

Administration officials shifted to a more combative stance, insisting that the chaos that erupted at the dinner is a potent justification for a range of Trump initiatives — from his new White House ballroom, to the stalled fight over funding for the Department of Homeland Security and even the ouster of late night provocateur Jimmy Kimmel.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt accused Democrats of putting the president’s life in danger with inflammatory rhetoric.

“When you read that manifesto of this shooter, ask yourselves, how different is that rhetoric from this almost-assassin than what you read on social media and hear in various forms every single day? The answer, if you're being honest with yourself, is that there is no difference at all,” she told reporters at the White House briefing.

She argued that years of Democratic vitriol against the president had set the stage for the shooting, reading aloud statements from party leaders including House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, Sens. Adam Schiff and Elizabeth Warren, and Govs. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania and JB Pritzker of Illinois.

And it isn't just Democratic politicians. On Monday, Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, also suggested the media shares part of the blame. "They're just as guilty as a lot of people on X when you have — when you have reporters ... just being overly critical and calling the president horrible names for no reason and without evidence," Blanche said.

Leavitt drew a direct line from a joke that Kimmel told two days before the shooting — saying that First Lady Melania Trump had a “glow like an expectant widow” — and the gunman’s apparent attempt to storm the ballroom where the dinner was being held. The suspect, Cole Tomas Allen, was taken down by law enforcement officials before he reached the ballroom and was charged Monday with attempting to assassinate the president.

It was a stark contrast from the president’s remarks Saturday evening, when he called for “Republicans, Democrats, independents, conservatives, liberals, and progressives” to resolve their differences peacefully.In a room packed with journalists and high-ranking Cabinet officials, Trump observed Saturday, “there was a record-setting group of people, and there was a tremendous amount of love and coming together.”

“I watched and I was very, very impressed by that,” Trump said.

The White House did not respond to a request for further comment.

The shooting comes at a pivotal moment for the White House as Republicans look to advance multiple pieces of legislation this week. House Republicans are considering a reconciliation bill to fund immigration enforcement activities, which the president wants on his desk by June 1, with the rest of the Department of Homeland Security funded through the regular, bipartisan appropriations process.

Leavitt called the monthslong funding lapse “should be a national scandal” and used the shooting to urge Democrats to act. The Secret Service is one of DHS’s law enforcement agencies.

"If Republicans defunded DHS, and we saw another attempted assassination on a Democrat president, I would hope that the media coverage would be relentless and unforgiving," she said.

Leavitt continued to argue that the shooting means Trump’s stalled White House ballroom project must move forward, as the president did immediately in the aftermath of Saturday’s shooting. Trump reiterated those calls in an interview on “60 Minutes” Sunday evening.

“I’m building a safe ballroom, and one of the reasons I’m building it is exactly what happened last night,” he said. “And that ballroom’s being built on the safest piece of property in this country — probably one of the safest pieces of land in the world.”

The shooting is also giving some Republicans who have broken with the president over his deeply unpopular war in Iran an opening to close ranks around a common enemy.

“I’m super frustrated with Trump, especially about the war. But I definitely did think right away, as much as he frustrates me, the left is actively trying to kill this guy,” said one former Trump campaign adviser, granted anonymity to speak candidly. “I almost feel guilty ripping on this guy while he’s literally in the crosshairs of wacko leftists trying to kill him all the time.”

Others on the right, influential with MAGA’s war skeptical audience, went further. Jack Posobiec and Mike Davis took to former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon’s show Monday morning to decry the media, raise concerns about Secret Service’s handling of presidential security and lambast Democrats for their vitriol against the president.

“The assassination attempts against America’s political leaders — President Trump, Justice [Brett] Kavanaugh, [Rep.] Steve Scalise, Charlie Kirk — are all coming from one side: the Democrats,” Davis, a conservative legal activist and lawyer who is close to the White House, said in a text message to POLITICO. “They have created and promoted an assassination culture. This isn’t a ‘both sides’ problem.”

Josh Gerstein contributed to this report.