In the early hours of Sunday, I awoke to check the time on my phone and learned that there had been a shooting – apparently, an assassination attempt – at this year’s White House correspondents’ dinner, an event held annually to honor the journalists who cover presidential politics.

I stayed awake just long enough to read that the attack had been thwarted and that no one had been killed, and then I went back to sleep.

By morning, my social media accounts and email inbox was filled with entries that began with some version of the phrase, “I’m not a conspiracy theorist but … ” Even as they distanced themselves from crackpot takes on current history, some Americans were suggesting that the assault had been orchestrated to distract us from the war in Iran, the struggling economy, the Epstein files.

Several news sites reported that the word “staged” had appeared in more than 300,000 posts on Tiwtter/X.

This new attack, people were claiming, was no more credible than the 2024 shooting from which Donald Trump emerged with a wounded – and almost miraculously undamaged – ear.

And, many across the nation wondered, didn’t it seemed suspicious that the president seemed so unruffled by this new eruption of violence that he pivoted almost immediately to explaining why this event demonstrated the urgent need for the ultra-high-security White House ballroom that he has been so passionately planning to construct?

Within a few hours, we learned that the shooter had been caught and identified as a 31-year-old Californian with an engineering degree who had allegedly sent his family members a “manifesto” expressing his anger at the president and the members of his administration.

But his capture did little to neutralize the fears that, it seems to me, the story has inspired.

The first and most obvious of these concerns is that many Americans, including myself, have grown so accustomed to being deceived that we no longer know precisely whom we can trust and what we can believe. As a consequence, we’ve become inclined to doubt everything the government tells us.

Again and again, our political leaders and cultural figures have been caught in lies ranging from the trivial to the catastrophic, exposed for misrepresenting the truth in ways intended to conceal previous misrepresentations.

Most of us know that we are not hearing the full story about the war in Iran and that the true villains in the Epstein scandal have remained unindicted. We’ve watched present and former cabinet members – Pam Bondi, Kristi Noem, Robert F Kennedy Jr and others – refusing to answer direct questions during congressional hearings, inquiries that would have led to the exposure of a wide range of purposely orchestrated and deeply disturbing cover-ups and distortions.

We’ve seen high-ranking officials deny behaviors that we can plainly observe on our phones. Given the near-daily barrage of falsehoods to which we have been exposed, surely the average American can be forgiven for harboring some healthy skepticism about what transpired at the White House correspondents’ dinners – and why precisely it occurred.

What’s equally disturbing is how this latest incident illustrates the horrifying degree to which violence in general and political violence in particular have been normalized. Massacres and school shootings rarely make the headlines unless the body count is exceptionally high.

On this most recent occasion, some commentators appeared less concerned by the danger that had been posed to the president than by the question of why he had been invited to address a gathering of journalists, quite a few of whom he had personally insulted or worked diligently to silence.

I was a senior in high school when JFK was assassinated, a senior in college when Robert F Kennedy and Martin Luther King were killed, and I remember how shocking and profoundly traumatic these events were, for the entire nation.

I can recall exactly where I was – waiting to meet an out-of-town-friend in a hotel lobby – on 30 March 1981 when John Hinckley Jr attempted to kill Ronald Reagan, ironically outside the same hotel, the Washington Hilton, where this year’s White House correspondents’ dinner was held. My friend and I went to the hotel bar to watch the unfolding events on TV, and though Reagan was by no means our favorite president, we were deeply shaken and on the edge of tears.

Things are very different now, when one murder follows another so rapidly that we hardly have time to mourn one victim when another is tragically lost. The killings have occurred across the entire political spectrum.

Charlie Kirk was murdered in cold blood in September 2025. Having done nothing wrong, Renee Good and Alex Pretti were shot to death by Ice agents just four months later. And we will never learn the names of the thousands and thousands of men, women and children who, in a relatively brief time, have been killed in Gaza, in Lebanon, in Iran.

As a nation, as a culture, we have become so overwhelmed by the sheer number and the rapid succession of brutal and unnecessary deaths that we simply can’t process the horror and the grief. We have no idea whom we can believe and what we should sensibly doubt.

Inevitably, periods of outrage will alternate with times of exhaustion and numbness; bursts of clarity will be interrupted by moments of confusion and bewilderment. It’s no longer possible but probable that people who pride themselves on retaining some vestiges of conscience, people who are still capable of being shocked, will now find themselves awakening to the latest report of some fresh calamity, some new disaster, and will be able – as I was on Sunday morning – to fall right back asleep.

• Francine Prose is a former president of PEN American Center and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences