Shoshana Ungerleider, MD, is an internal medicine physician in San Francisco, host of TED Health and the founder of endwellproject.org.
When President Biden and Vice President Harris spoke about fighting an epidemic from the White House Rose Garden last week, it wasn’t a virus they were talking about. "Guns are the number one killer of children in America, more than car accidents, more than cancer, more than other diseases,” President Biden said, announcing the creation of the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention.
The choice of words, loaded with healthcare analogies, is no accident. For years, the government has been funding research studying gun violence as a public health epidemic, and the new office is designed to coordinate a public health approach to the emergency with more resources and support for survivors, families, and communities.
As the new office goes to battle against the gun violence epidemic, hospitals and clinics will be a key battleground — and it isn’t just because healthcare workers are on the front lines providing support for survivors. The healthcare profession has the unfortunate distinction of being one of America's most violent fields.
Health care workers are five times as likely to experience workplace violence as other workers, accounting for 73 percent of non-fatal injuries from violence in government data from 2018, the most recent year for which numbers are available. And it has only been getting worse: in a 2022 survey from National Nurses United, 48 percent of hospital nurses said they'd seen violence increase over the previous year.
In August, a man shot and killed a security guard in a hospital in Portland, Oregon. In May, a man opened fire in a medical center waiting room in Atlanta, killing one woman and injuring four other women. Last October, a man killed two workers in the maternity ward of a Dallas hospital. And in June 2022, a man shot and killed four people in a Tulsa, Oklahoma, medical office, including a surgeon he blamed for pain after back surgery.
The fallout is severe. Poor working conditions and rising incidents of workplace violence are leading to unprecedented burnout and attrition in the healthcare field, which is a direct threat to patient care. In 2022, the Surgeon General warned of a looming crisis in the nation’s health infrastructure with a projected shortage of three million healthcare workers in the next five years. In a January 2023 survey of over 18,000 nurses, 30% said they're looking to quit their career, with 63% of them seeking a safer working environment.
It's alarming that American healthcare workers now face more non-fatal injuries from workplace violence than even law enforcement officers. But there are efforts underway to create a safer working environment, which the Office of Gun Violence Prevention should help speed up to ensure that healthcare workers can be the powerful allies they need to be in the fight against the gun violence epidemic.
The American Hospital Association's Hospitals Against Violence (HAV) initiative has been developing programs on the national, state and local levels to prevent workplace violence and help hospital employees cope with the impact of violence. In September, Senators Joe Manchin and Marco Rubio introduced the bipartisan Safety from Violence for Healthcare Employees (SAVE) Act which would make attacking healthcare workers a crime under federal law, similar to the protections in place for flight crews and airport workers. A similar bill was introduced in the House in April by Representatives Larry Bucshon and Madeleine Dean.
Every day, healthcare workers put on their scrubs and face an unpredictable world, hoping to make a difference, to save a life. They shouldn’t have to fear for their own in the process. If we want to save lives, we have to prioritize saving our healthcare system.
A golden tray sits on the Resolute Desk as President Donald Trump speaks during an announcement on American nuclear innovation in the Oval Office at the White House on July 24, 2026, in Washington, D.C. Trump is signing multiple executive orders targeting the nuclear energy sector and easing rules for new reactors and nuclear fuel supply chains.
Trump’s hubris rivals the fallen heroes of ancient Greek mythology
In January, the New York Times asked President Donald Trump if there were any limits on his global powers.
“Yeah,” the president responded, “there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
That was eight months ago, but fortunately Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster adaptation of “The Odyssey” has made ancient Greek literature newly relevant. Before that window closes, I’d like to talk about hubris.
Today, the term mostly means excessive pride or arrogance. That’s part of what the Greeks meant by it too, but the meaning was a bit richer and more specific. Hubris was an insolent or outrageous act that offended the gods, often because the transgressor was claiming abilities or authorities that solely belonged to supreme beings.
Nolan renamed and slightly modified the concept of xenia for the film, calling it “Zeus’ law.” In the director’s telling, mortals should follow the rules laid out by the gods, specifically the requirement to treat strangers with respect lest they be gods in disguise.
In a sense, hubris is the opposite, or at least the rejection, of xenia. The hubris of the suitors, and at times Odysseus himself, invites punishment by the gods and their mortal instruments.
Which brings me back to Donald Trump. His claim that there are no constraints on his personal power to dictate events on the global stage was one of the greatest expressions of hubris ever uttered by a political leader.
Trump’s claim was obviously false when he made it.
He vowed that he could end the Russia-Ukraine war in 24 hours. He’s proved powerless to make that happen. If he had divine powers to work his will, why would he have balked at implementing his tariffs so often that Wall Street adopted the “TACO trade” term for his deals? “TACO” stands for “Trump always chickens out.”
And why would Trump have made so many embarrassing concessions to China — from rescinding tariffs on Chinese goods to allowing them to buy crucial and incredibly valuable computer chips?
But Trump saw his success at capturing Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro as proof of his ability to launch missiles to the same effect as Zeus’ lightning bolts. Trump believed he was the most powerful man who ever lived.
This is no exaggeration. In March, when the Iran invasion seemed successful, Trump gave a document penned by“Presidential Historian David King” to New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan purporting to prove that Trump was “the most powerful person to have EVER walked this planet.” King was, in fact, a businessman and occasional caddy for legendary golfer Gary Player.
King compared Trump favorably to many of history’s most powerful, and often heinous, figures: Alexander the Great, Attila the Hun, William the Conqueror, Napoleon Bonaparte, Joseph Stalin, Genghis Khan, Mao Tse Tung, Adolf Hitler and Vladimir Lenin. Many of these men thought they were the most powerful person in the world, too. And many were defeated precisely because they believed it.
At least Napoleon and Hitler had a string of truly impressive victories before they learned the folly of hubris. The limits on Trump’s power have been exposed by far less august forces than the combined might of the allies in World War II or the fearsome Russian winter.
Iran is a comparatively middling power. But the regime’s ability to absorb punishment while imposing its will on the Strait of Hormuz has proved to be a greater constraint on Trump’s power than his morality or mind. We should note that, at least rhetorically, his morality has not proved much of a constraint. He has repeatedly promised to destroy Iranian “civilization” if the regime refuses to capitulate.
But they haven’t — and won’t anytime soon — because the regime’s tolerance for pain far outstrips Trump’s. The combined fear of skyrocketing oil prices, outrage of Gulf state potentates, diminishing weapon supplies and domestic unpopularity is doing the work that international law, congressional oversight and the collective opinion of foreign policy experts can’t or won’t do.
If I considered Trump more heroic than reason and facts could allow, I would say his Sisyphean predicament has the whiff of Greek tragedy to it. Trump is vexed by the fact that the Iranians won’t honor deals or ratify his countless premature claims of victory — giving new meaning to his vow that his presidency would make people tired of winning. It’s almost like they’re out-Trumping Trump.
Things might have gone better if he’d heeded that great Greek tragedian Sophocles: “For Zeus utterly abhors the boasts of a proud tongue.”
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Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.