Which country is a “hellhole”, Mr Trump? Is it India, China, or the United States of America?

The Washington Hilton, the sprawling, iconic 1960s-era hotel in Washington DC made infamous due to an assassination attempt on former US President Ronald Reagan in 1981, again became the scene of a similar unsavoury incident on Saturday night (US time) when Donald Trump, his wife Melania and senior officials of his administration had to be evacuated after shots were fired in the lobby just outside the room for the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, an annual gala hosted for journalists.

According to reports, 31-year-old suspect Cole Tomas Allen, a registered guest at the dinner, was armed with shotgun, a handgun and multiple knives. Taking advantage of lax security, a surprising oversight for such a big-ticket event, the gunman opened fire and injured a secret service agent before being overpowered and taken into custody. His motives are not known.

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It wasn’t immediately clear whom the assailant was targeting, but reports say the suspect was seen rushing towards the ballroom entrance even as secret service agents whisked the US president, the vice-president and others off the stage while attendees at the packed ballroom ducked for cover.

While Trump may or may not be a target, a fact to be ascertained by an investigation, the reality remains that a gunman again got uncomfortably close to a serving US president who was dining with senior members of his cabinet and a hall full of journalists and dignitaries. The videos clips that have emerged since paint a disturbing image of guests -- dressed for the occasion in tuxedos and evening gowns -- swept away by a tidal wave of disbelief, fear, panic, chaos and hurtling themselves towards the floor or crouching beneath the furniture in desperation.

Here’s the thing, though. Nobody in the US is really shocked that this could happen. Because this really wasn’t an isolated incident. The country is fighting wars and is simultaneously at war with itself, torn apart by hyper polarization in its polity and routinised, normalized violence. Polite conversations at a black-tie event getting interrupted by the staccato sound of bullets is still shocking, but in order of magnitude lesser than what it should be in the world’s richest and most powerful nation where gun violence remains a profound public health crisis and a persistent tear in the country’s social fabric.

The issue goes deeper. The White House Correspondents’ Dinner, the first Trump has attended as a president, was meant to be a tentative truce between an administration spiralling into unpopularity and a sceptical media. Instead, it became a microcosm of a nation that has moved past the point of disagreement and into a permanent, visceral state of war.

As the president’s security detail swarmed the dais and journalists took cover, this ‘state of war’ stopped being a metaphor. It is a manifestation of the dehumanization rampant in both sides of the political divide, and an inevitable march towards little and big internecine wars.

The suspect is not a history sheeter overcome by a fit of violence. Allen is a computer scientist, engineer and independent game developer who had donated to Kamala Harris’s campaign in 2024. He reportedly has an MS in computer science and represents the extreme edge of a sentiment now common across the American landscape: that the ‘other side’ is no longer a political opponent to be debated, but an existential threat to be neutralized.

The US has become such a broken democracy that half the electorate has elected twice an incompetent, corrupt, unstable, vindictive, egotistical degenerate primarily to spite the other half. Polarisation is no longer an abstract academic metric, but a lived psychotic condition that is shaping even basic perceptions of reality.

In his second term, Trump has exacerbated this divergence with his rhetoric and action to the extent that this discord has reached a level of crystalline purity. Take, for instance, the fatal shootings of Renée Good and Alex Pretti in January that became flashpoints for a clash bordering on civil war.

Both American citizens were killed by federal agents during the aggressive anti-immigration crackdown in Minneapolis. Good, a 37-year-old mother of three, was shot on January 7 while protesting the presence of federal ICE agents in her neighborhood. Her killing was followed just weeks later by the January 24 murder of Pretti, an ICU nurse who was shot during a large-scale demonstration against the ongoing immigration enforcement.

The murder of Pretti by federal agents needs recalling as the details provide a chilling reminder of the normalization of violence. While trying to assist a bystander waylaid by ICE agents, Pretti, according to blow-by-blow reports in New York Times and BBC, was pepper-sprayed in the face and tackled by a group of six federal agents.

While he was pinned to the ground, face down, agents disarmed him of his legally licensed revolver that Pretti was carrying in a holster. Despite being disarmed, surrounded and locked to the ground, agents pumped 10 rounds into Pretti’s back. Video evidence showed Pretti was holding his cell phone, and not a weapon, in the seconds leading up to his death.

Shortly after ICE agents killed Pretti, White House senior adviser Stephen Miller wrote on X: “A would-be assassin tried to murder federal law enforcement and the official Democrat account sides with the terrorists”, while Trump posted on Truth Social, his social media platform, “agitator and, perhaps, insurrectionist, Alex Pretti’s stock has gone way down with the just released video of him screaming and spitting in the face of a very calm and under control ICE Officer.” These statements were false.

The executive branch’s response expectedly escalated the national divide. Statistics now show that almost eight in ten Americans believe the two parties cannot even agree on basic reality. Trump’s leadership style, characterized by provocative rhetoric and a refusal to seek deescalation, acts as a centrifugal force, spinning the two halves of the country further apart.

If the attack on Saturday night is being seen as directed at Trump, and US officials at this stage believe it was, then this is the third time in three years that Trump has survived assassination attempts.

He survived a close call on the campaign trail ahead of his 2024 presidential win by the proverbial skin of teeth when a bullet grazed his ear at a rally in Butler. The sniper, who was immediately taken out, would have hit bullseye had Trump not swung his head to peer at a giant screen at the very last second. That opportune escape was followed by another attempt two months later when a man was arrested for attempting to assassinate Trump at his Florida golf course.

Trump’s survival of multiple assassination attempts is not a stray aberration, however. It reflects the internal turmoil in a society that has lost its capacity to tolerate dissent, replacing political opposition with tribalism so deep that it views the elimination of the ‘other’ as the only path to survival. In other words, Americans are not merely polarized; they are beginning to flirt with civil war. The country is still formally functional, but the emotional temperature is closer to warring tribes than to a modern, democratic republic.

New York Times points out that while Trump is the highest-profile target of political violence, “the threats for years have affected officeholders at local, state and federal levels” and violence has “taken the lives of members of both major political parties.”

Conservative activist Charlie Kirk, whose widow attended the gala dinner on Saturday night, was assassinated at a speaking event in Utah University last year. The violence targets not just conservatives, but also Democrats such as the “killings in Minnesota of a Democratic state lawmaker and her husband; the arson attack on the home of Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania; a hammer assault on the husband of former Speaker Nancy Pelosi; the shootings at a Kamala Harris campaign office in Arizona.”

The gunfire at the Washington Hilton is the inevitable overflow of a society that has, for decades, been conditioning itself to treat violence as acceptable collateral of personal or political expression than a moral collapse. But it points to an even more chilling conclusion. It reflects the reality already normalized in the hallways of American schools and colleges to the extent that schoolchildren are drilled in lessons on how to hide from gunmen as routinely as they learn mathematics, and parents buy bullet‑proof backpacks as school accessory.

In just the first few months of 2026, there have been nearly 100 mass shootings in the US, which indicates that violence has become repetitive, even predictable – an integral part of everyday life such as going to the mall, a theatre, restaurant, or school.

In the first three months of this year, the Gun Violence Archive recorded 94 ‘mass shootings’ in the US, a sharp increase from the 69 reported in the same period last year. Data from The Trace points out that all 50 American states experienced shooting-related deaths this year, and the “deadliest day was March 22, when a 16-year-old is alleged to have killed a 15-year-old boy in Richmond, Virginia; a woman was killed, allegedly by her boyfriend, in Kansas City, Missouri; and a father of three was shot in the head in Chicago while trying to track down a stolen truck. Those were just three of the 72 shooting deaths that day. No day in the first quarter had fewer than 18 deaths.”

Trump revels in abuse and inflammatory language. He recently called India and China “hellholes”. The American president is incapable of reflection or introspection, so it’s not worth pointing out to him the fallacy of his statement. India or China do not normalise the idea that one might be slaughtered while shopping, attending class, talking a walk, or praying, and that this risk is simply the price of “freedom”.

Trump’s caricature of India, specifically, perhaps taps into familiar images of poverty or chaos, and yet it is America that is facing a civilization-scale opioid crisis, with tens of thousands falling prey to prescription drugs such as fentanyl and other synthetic opioids. In 2023 alone, according to CDC figures, about 105,000 people in the US died from drug overdoses; nearly 80,000 of those deaths involved opioids (around 76%).

This is not a marginal phenomenon confined to a criminal underclass but a structural feature in many communities. Layer the epidemic of gun violence, recurring mass shootings, and the label “hellhole” begins to feel more accurate for America than for the countries it criticizes. Which country is a “hellhole”, Mr Trump?

(The views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.)