It was supposed to be the night Richard Simmons died—a quiet night with quiet news. The kind of humdrum night that is dominated by stories of theft and violence and disaster. There would be stories about burning homes and shootings and predatory teachers. And yes, there would be tributes to Simmons, paeans that commemorated his idiosyncratic and reclusive ways. It was supposed to be a quiet night.
At my desk, I was writing about the remarks Kevin McCarthy had made on Bill Maher’s show. In his appearance, McCarthy had unequivocally said that Donald Trump should pick Virginia Governor Glen Youngkin as his running mate. McCarthy said something like if Trump wants to win this thing, he should pick Youngkin. Because that was the news at that point. Who would Trump pick as his VP?
With headphones over my ears, I listened to McCarthy sermonize the studio audience, the ousted Speaker confident in his own wisdom, his voice reedy and pompous.
Above me, there was a TV showing coverage of Trump’s rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. The volume was off. Every few moments, I glanced up and watched the former president silently address the crowd. And when Trump is muted, one becomes aware of how restless is hands really are. They are always moving, always cutting through the air, always making some gesture to punctuate his point. And so, when Trump was addressing the crowd in Butler, Pennsylvania, I was watching his hands.
I looked at my computer and wrote about McCarthy and Trump and Youngkin, who probably never was a serious contender for vice president. At this point, I remember reading that Trump had compared the selection process to The Apprentice. And I thought about The Apprentice and about reality television and about how the distinction between reality television and reality itself is smaller than we realize.
I looked up at the TV. From the subtitles, I learned that Trump was on some harangue about immigration. I looked back down at my computer.
A moment passed.
When I looked up, Secret Service agents had already swarmed the stage. Amid the press of their dark suits, Trump was nowhere to be seen. He was on the ground. The former president had been shot.
As my brain tried to process this information—tried to find the words that fit what I was seeing—a picture editor picked up the remote and turned on the volume.
Cries of horror. A woman’s shriek.
The president was on his feet. He was pale. His hair was mussed. For a moment, I thought the former president was dead. The agents started conducting him off the stage. In front of the staircase, Trump paused and looked at the crowd and pumped his fist.
“Is he bleeding?” somebody in the newsroom asked.
No one answered.
At the rally, the crowd was a welter of noise and emotions. Chants of “USA” boomed. But cries and shrieks and lamentations of horror persisted.
Trump was escorted to his motorcade and whisked away from the scene.
And just like that, it was no longer the night that Richard Simmons, the eccentric and reclusive fitness instructor, died. And just like that, speculation over who Trump would pick as his VP was as relevant as the Zimmerman Cable.
In the span of ten minutes, I’d watched the old world recede and vanish and witnessed a new one being born.
The rest of the night was one long and furious and sometimes fruitful race to gather as much information as possible about what had just happened. Initially, the story developed slowly. Things were chaotic. Information was uncertain. But soon the story gathered momentum. And then the story developed fast and each moment yielded some new development, some dramatic update that further yanked the incident down out of the speculative world and into the real one.
The night began with outrage. Dignitaries and tycoons and influential people of all political leanings came out and condemned the violence in no uncertain terms. Governors, senators, former presidents, and prime ministers all denounced the deed.
But was Trump shot? Was he bleeding? If he was bleeding, was it it from a shard of glass from the teleprompter or was it from a bullet? These questions were unclear in the beginning. In the beginning, it was chaos.
Then Trump posted on TruthSocial that he was shot. The story adapted to the new information and continued to develop.
Biden hadn’t been briefed. Then he was briefed. Then he gave a press conference.
It all happened at a breakneck pace. If you so much as blinked, you were liable to miss something important, something critical, something that might enable you to explicate the inexplicable.
Aware of the gravity of the event, senior editors and political reporters dropped whatever they were doing in the outside world and piled into the newsroom. At this point, it was around nine o’clock. Some of them looked like they had been sleeping. Some of them looked like they had been enjoying a quiet night, a slow and relaxing evening in which the major story was that Richard Simmons, eccentric, reclusive fitness instructor, was dead. But they weren’t going to miss this. They knew they couldn’t miss this. It was an all-hands-on-deck affair.
Was it an assassination attempt? One moment, there wasn’t a consensus. And the next moment, there was. The FBI would be investigating the attempted assassination of the former president. The story adapted and the story developed.
How many shots were fired? Five? Was anyone killed or injured. That tragic news trickled in, too.
There was the update that an AR-style rifle was recovered from the scene. And there were the accounts of attendees who saw the shooter on top of the building before the violence took place. On Twitter, pictures of the limp, dead body of the shooter started circulating. But who was the shooter?
Around midnight, the editors ordered burgers and fries for everyone in the room. With heads down, people ate burgers quickly and unceremoniously and continued to work.
The special agent in charge of the FBI’s Pittsburgh field office held a press conference, at which representatives of the Secret Service were noticeably absent. He said that they had the suspect identified but they wanted to confirm the identification before they made this information public.
This kind of tease wouldn’t do for the press. The press wouldn't stand on ceremony.
At once, The New York Post revealed the identity of the shooter. And once the identity of the hopeful assassin had been released, the internet became deranged.
In a moment, fake Instagram and Twitter accounts sprang up under the shooter’s name. They proliferated. Social media was awash with accounts purporting to be the 20-year-old. I tried to wade through it all, weathering the distasteful posts and the despicable comments in the hopes that I might uncover something.
I didn’t.
Shortly after 2 in the morning, I stood up from my desk to leave. Until that point, I’d felt like I was plugged into something—history. Yes, I felt like I was plugged into history. From the rarified vantage point of the newsroom, I was watching it unfold, and I was racing along, trying to keep abreast of each new scene, each new development in the story.
I had watched the world change.
I got in the elevator and wiped my palms dry on my pants. I was sweating. My heart was beating furiously. I got out of the elevator, walked through the lobby, and stepped outside.
And I saw drunk young men and women in their twenties staggering and reeling and boisterous. I saw ruddy-faced people complain about train times and about how much their Ubers cost. I saw a man lean against a building and retch. And I saw homeless people asleep on park benches.
As it turned out, this was the final development in the story. The new world and the old one were indistinguishable.
Shaking my head, I thought about Richard Simmons, got in my Uber, and went home.
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