The attack at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on April 25, 2026, is not an isolated incident. It is the latest episode in a sequence that has lasted for over a decade and forces us to confront an uncomfortable question: are we witnessing a contingent pathology, or a structural crisis of liberal democracies in the digital age?
America’s Long Exposure to Political Violence. The United States is the advanced democracy most exposed to political violence against its leaders. This is not a contingency, but a constant: four presidents assassinated while in office—Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, Kennedy—and dozens of failed attempts over two centuries of republican history.
- Donald Trump has multiplied this pattern in an unprecedented way: struck in Butler in July 2024, narrowly missed in West Palm Beach in September of the same year, targeted by an operation by the Iranian Pasdaran thwarted by the FBI the day before the Butler attack, and again in February 2026 at Mar-a-Lago. No modern president has faced a comparable sequence of threats.
From Political Competition to Existential Conflict. The roots of this anomaly lie in frontier culture, in the cult of weapons, in an extreme individualism that mythologizes the solitary act as the ultimate political gesture. But above all, they lie in a social polarization that transforms political dialectics into existential warfare.
- When the opponent is no longer a fellow citizen with different ideas but an enemy to be eliminated, the step toward violence becomes dramatically shorter. And this is no longer an exclusively American feature: it is the advanced paradigm of a pathology spreading across Western democracies according to the same underlying logic. The difference with Europe remains quantitative, not qualitative.
The Architecture of Digital Polarization. Web 2.0 is not a neutral public square: it is a system designed to maximize engagement, feeding on primary and tribal emotions. Filter bubbles construct around each user a tailored informational universe, where pre-existing opinions are continuously reinforced.
- Echo chambers complete the picture: not only does one fail to encounter difference, but one ceases to imagine it as a legitimate interlocutor. The result is a double fracture—epistemic and affective—in which violence becomes the predictable outcome of a process of progressive dehumanization that unfolds every day, one post at a time, across millions of simultaneous feeds.
Authoritarian Powers as Force Multipliers. On this endogenous vulnerability, authoritarian powers deliberately operate, having made the disintegration of Western democracies a strategic priority. Russia, China, and Iran do not merely observe polarization: they cultivate it and monetize it geopolitically.
- Russia through “active measures” rooted in Soviet doctrine, updated for the digital age and systematically deployed in the U.S. elections of 2016, 2020, and 2024. Iran through sophisticated campaigns such as “Storm-2035,” designed to fuel divisions across the entire American political spectrum.
- China through an integrated doctrine—the “three warfares”: public opinion, legal, and psychological—that considers the human mind the decisive battlefield of the 21st century. These three powers do not form an explicit alliance, but rather an opportunistic convergence: they share a common adversary and mutually amplify their respective operations, each focusing on its comparative advantages.
The Self-Reinforcing Loop. The most insidious node is the interaction between these two levels. Foreign disinformation does not create social fractures out of nothing: it exploits them, amplifies them, deepens them. Filter bubbles become amplification infrastructures for external influence operations. The result is a self-reinforcing loop in which internal polarization and external cognitive warfare strengthen each other.
Politics as an Accelerator. Closing—and worsening—this loop is the response of politics. Faced with a systemic threat that would require strategic vision and institutional courage, contemporary leadership almost always chooses the opposite path: accommodating polarization rather than countering it, because polarization pays off in the very short term. It generates visibility, mobilization, immediate consensus.
- The enemy to fight is worth more than any concrete proposal. Those in power are fully aware that certain narratives dehumanize the opponent, that echo chambers radicalize, that the language of hatred lowers the threshold of violence. Yet they instrumentalize it, speculating on a provisional electoral dividend and working, knowingly or not, in the same direction as their strategic adversaries.
A Teleological Crisis of Democracy.- This is the real crisis of representative democracy: not institutional in the formal sense, but teleological. A politics devoid of long-term thinking—without a vision of society, without medium- and long-term planning—is not equipped to recognize the risks facing the democratic model, nor to act with the necessary coherence to counter them.
- It is reduced to chasing the news cycle, responding to the moods of digital sentiment, building partisan identities rather than shared visions. And a democracy in which half the population considers the other half an irredeemable enemy has already lost its substance, retaining only its formal shell.
What Needs to Change. What is needed is an act of lucid responsibility: to recognize that digital polarization and foreign cognitive warfare constitute a systemic threat and to act accordingly—with serious media literacy policies, intelligent platform regulation, investments in countering foreign influence, and above all a political language that ceases to treat hatred as a strategic resource.
- Polarization, climate change, demographic crisis, geopolitical tensions cannot be solved with a slogan or by pointing to an enemy: they require vision, planning, and the ability to build consensus over time.
- The attacks against Trump are a shock. But shocks, if they do not produce reflection, produce only more pain. In the age of cognitive warfare, that pain is precisely the raw material our adversaries are waiting to harvest.
Alberto Pagani is a lecturer at the Alma Mater Studiorum University of Bologna and a security advisor. He served as a member of Parliament from 2013 to 2022, including roles in the Transport and Telecommunications Committee, as group leader in the Defence Committee, and as a delegate to the NATO Parliamentary Assembly.
