The White House Is the New Green Zone
· The Atlantic
Across from the White House sits a museum called The People’s House: A White House Experience. Inside is a replica of the Oval Office, and interactive exhibits on what it’s like to attend a State Dinner or sit in on a Cabinet meeting. It’s about as close to the White House as you can get without actually being there, a wholesome reminder of how democracy is supposed to work.
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But early last Saturday evening, two bullets shattered the glass between displays of Christmas ornaments and dining plates. A 21-year-old gunman had opened fire on Secret Service agents who then returned fire, killing him.
It was the latest reminder of how our democracy is actually working, how omnipresent political violence can feel, how inaccessible public buildings are becoming to the public. Three times in four weeks, gunfire has broken out as federal agents were protecting the president and vice president in the vicinity of the White House. Three months ago, a man was shot and killed after entering the Mar-a-Lago security perimeter with a shotgun and fuel can. Three months before that, two National Guard members were shot just blocks from the White House. The Secret Service, which says it has protections all around the building—some visible, some not—has a division that over the past year has been studying the rise in violent rhetoric and action to get at the question: What is driving the attacks—and can they be headed off in advance?
The Secret Service has investigated 40 percent more cases this year than it did during the comparable period in 2025, the agency told me. It’s had seven times more cases involving people with mental-health issues over that same time period. The surge is putting the Secret Service in what longtime agents say is an unprecedented threat environment.
“In the past, there have been some peak periods where we had maybe a really large uptick for a month or two,” Matthew Quinn, the deputy director of the Secret Service, told me. “But for us right now, it’s not a linear increase anymore. It’s really gone exponential.”
With the growing threat has come greater fortification—so much so that the White House complex can be thought of as the new Green Zone. The 18-acre site is laced with fencing, sensors, jammers, cameras, armed guards, bunkers, drone interceptors, and surface-to-air missiles—all of which speak to how we now protect, and isolate, our leaders. Tourists can no longer approach the 13-foot fence that rings the compound. Additional fencing went up in January around Lafayette Square, which remains under construction, and prevents access from the north. The perimeter to the south extends near Independence Avenue; the area around the Ellipse was closed last month. It’s impossible to enter from the east, through the barriers and construction where the East Wing once stood. And a battery of security vehicles, police on bikes, and Secret Service agents stand guard from the west.
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Quinn was recently delivering a graduation speech, reflecting on some of the shifts he’s seen during his time at the Secret Service. Twenty years ago, he said, the questions he’d get were about how he stayed vigilant given that agents rarely had to draw their weapons. “Well,” he said, “we don’t have to explain it to anybody anymore.”
In 1801, Thomas Jefferson built the first fence around the White House, a wooden structure that was designed to keep animals away from the gardens. As for the people, they were largely able to roam freely on a property that had little security. “Early presidents would have had, more or less, their household staff doubling as their security force,” Matthew Costello, the chief education officer of the White House Historical Association, told me.
Franklin Pierce was the first president to have a full-time bodyguard. Abraham Lincoln posted guards outside, but inside they were dressed in civilian clothes and hid their firearms. In 1893, the grounds were closed to try to protect Grover Cleveland’s young daughter after tourists tried to cut off some of her hair. In the early 1900s, after the assassination of William McKinley, the Secret Service was tasked with presidential protection and two men were assigned to a full-time detail for Theodore Roosevelt. “The secret service men are a very small but very necessary thorn in the flesh,” Roosevelt wrote in 1906, reflecting the centuries-long struggle between presidential protection and public accessibility.
During World War I, the White House grounds were closed. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, security was enhanced once more: Bulletproof glass was added to the Oval Office windows and air-raid shelters were installed belowground. (Franklin D. Roosevelt rejected proposals from the Secret Service to line the property with 15-foot-high piles of sandbags and to repaint the White House in camouflage.) After the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, the section of Pennsylvania Avenue that goes by the White House was closed to vehicles. At the time, it seemed like a significant infringement on traditional American freedoms.
“Pennsylvania Avenue has been routinely open to traffic for the entire history of our Republic,” Bill Clinton said in his weekly radio address announcing the decision. “Through four Presidential assassinations and eight unsuccessful attempts on the lives of Presidents, it’s been open. Through a civil war, two world wars, and the Gulf war, it was open. But now it must be closed.”
After the September 11 attacks, the perimeter was widened again; vehicular traffic was shut down along E Street, on the south side. Airspace was more tightly restricted. To push the security perimeter any farther, the government would need to take over the Hay-Adams hotel or occupy the coffee shops (Peet’s, Starbucks, Swing’s) that sit on the blocks nearest the West Wing entrance and help fuel the staffers who enter it. Without the ability to go farther out, the security barriers must go higher up.
Former Secret Service agent Keith Wojcieszek told me that during his 16 years on the job, people routinely climbed over the 6-foot-6-inch perimeter fence. In one particularly embarrassing incident for the agency, a man not only jumped the fence but got to the front door of the White House and entered before being apprehended. Seven years ago, work began on a new fence—long requested by the Secret Service—of nearly double the height. But it is still not impenetrable: At least twice, toddlers have slipped through the fence, only to be retrieved by agents and returned to their parents.
Now, under protocols implemented this year, neither toddlers nor anyone else can get that close. Meanwhile, the park across Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House, Lafayette Square, is closed for renovations that the National Park Service told me it wants to complete before July 4. After the park reopens, the Secret Service wants to install a gating system to quickly secure the area if needed. The area in and around the park was for many years the scene of protests, demonstrators’ chants echoing within the halls of the White House. But not now. Among the protests was an anti-war vigil that had been continuously operating since 1981. It was partially dismantled earlier this year, after Donald Trump deemed it an eyesore.
In wartime Baghdad and Kabul, 30-foot-high blast walls shielded sensitive government sites. The White House still has a modicum of openness. But that’s possible only because of all the security protections that a visiting tourist can’t necessarily see.
Beyond the perimeter, plainclothes and uniformed officers roam the streets. Snipers patrol the roof. Drones hover nearby. K9 attack dogs are ready to pounce. The system operates in layers, with different agents monitoring different distances and threat levels. “It’s the Secret Service’s protective methodology,” the former agent Donald Mihalek, who retired in 2019 after 21 years, told me. “If you don’t catch it in the outer ring, you catch it in the inner ring. You want those overlapping rings of protection.”
The weaponry has been upgraded over time, to rifles that can easily cover the 290 yards from the White House to the fence line on the southern side. The White House snipers on the roof can see 1,000 yards in every direction. “It really is not just 360 degrees of a linear circle,” the retired Secret Service agent Jeffrey James, who served 22 years, told me. “It’s almost a sphere around them by the time you add the people on the ground, the assets above us.”
One of the trickiest parts for the Secret Service is trying to anticipate the lone wolf who might suddenly show up at an event, or approach the White House gates. Cole Tomas Allen was a 31-year-old mechanical engineer from Torrance, California, who traveled to Washington, wrote a manifesto, and bolted through security at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Michael Marx was a 45-year-old from Midland, Texas, who allegedly shot at Secret Service agents as they approached him near the Washington Monument around the time that Vice President Vance’s motorcade was passing nearby. Nasire Best was a 21-year-old from Dundalk, Maryland, who had previously been arrested for claiming that he was Jesus Christ and trying to gain access to the White House; he was fatally shot last weekend after firing at a security checkpoint.
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About a year ago, the Secret Service launched what it calls the Advanced Threat Interdiction Unit, which is designed to stop threats before someone shows up at an event or at the White House. “We don’t want to have a shootout on 15th Street,” Quinn told me. “If we know of a known-threat case and they’re on a record with us, we want to be able to intercept them, say, at Key Bridge or on 395 and not at the White House.” Quinn and others told me it's difficult to pinpoint any one cause for the rise in threats, but they named a few factors, including the proliferation of social media, a polarized political climate, and global unrest.
The president is not the only one who’s been targeted with violence. Governors, members of Congress, state legislators, and municipal judges have all been victims—or intended victims—of attacks. The U.S. Capitol Police, which protects members of Congress and their families and staff, investigated nearly 15,000 threats and actions in 2025, an increase of almost 60 percent over the previous year. Josh Shapiro’s family was asleep in the Pennsylvania governor’s mansion last year when the house was set ablaze by an arsonist, and Minnesota State Representative Melissa Hortman, who led the House Democratic caucus, was shot and killed in her home. At least a half dozen members of Trump’s Cabinet and White House staff have moved into military housing, spaces that help shield them from political violence, as well as protest.
One of the criticisms of the Green Zone in Iraq was that it created a false sense of tranquility. The Americans, protected by their security—not to mention the air-conditioned facilities, swimming pools, and buffet-style dining—were detached from the realities of war taking place on the other side of the gate. The zone was derisively nicknamed “the Bubble.”
The White House has long risked being its own kind of bubble. Harry Truman called it the “great white jail.” Joe Biden described it as a “gilded cage” and spent many of his weekends in Wilmington, Delaware. Barack Obama made a habit of reading 10 letters selected from the thousands sent to the White House each day. Trump uses his phone to reach those beyond his bubble, but his response to growing threats has been to try to further fortify the White House; at the same time, he’s cut back on travel, except to his golf clubs. Although his aides insist that he can maintain a connection with ordinary Americans, he has dismissed the economic hardships that many are facing as prices have risen since the start of the Iran war. Rather than talk about bringing down costs, he often focuses on his pet projects: the large cage going up on the White House lawn for a UFC fight that will be staged on his 80th birthday, for instance, or the ballroom he is determined to build.
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When in mid-May he invited a group of reporters to tour the construction site where the East Wing once stood, he spoke of the ballroom in militaristic terms. The roof, he said, will not only have a “barrier” and a “shield” so strong that “if a drone hits it, it bounces off,” but it will also contain a drone base of sorts. (He’s described it as a “drone empire,” a “drone gallery,” and a “drone port” that will house “unlimited drones” to protect all of Washington.) The side walls will contain “impenetrable steel” and the windows will be “four inches thick.” He bragged about the previously installed fencing surrounding the complex—made of titanium (“the strongest of all the metals”)—and said it goes deep into the ground and can’t be toppled by a tractor or a bulldozer.
His response in the immediate aftermath of the attempted assasination at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner was to call for the ballroom construction to go ahead. The day after the shooting at the White House gates last weekend, his lawyers submitted a new filing in the lawsuit that has blocked him from continuing. “When completed, this highly knitted, integrated, and unified Project, which is a singular and vital National Security facility, will provide a ‘SAFE HAVEN’ from attackers such as the one last night, and on April 25th,” it read.
Inside the Cabinet Room on Wednesday, Trump was asked about the Saturday-night incident, when he was at the White House working as shots rang out nearby. Trump said he pushes such thoughts from his mind. “If I thought about it a lot, you know, I wouldn’t be a very good president. I wouldn’t be here, probably. I’d be up in some room with a locked door,” he said. Outside, the ceaseless roar of jackhammering and bulldozing went on as the ballroom, challenged by lawsuits and protected by that titanium fencing, took shape.