An assassination attempt and the American way
By Denny Burke - Posted at World:
Published April 27, 2026
We have a problem within the souls of our people that politics cannot fixIt has been difficult to look away from the assassination attempt at the White House Correspondent’s Dinner on Saturday in Washington, D.C., where a left-wing radical named Cole Tomas Allen ran through a security check point toward the ballroom where President Trump and the first lady had already been seated. Allen was armed with a shotgun, a handgun, and some knives as he shot a federal officer at the checkpoint but was apprehended before becoming a threat to dignitaries and guests gathered in the ballroom.
Before his failed attempt to kill officials from the Trump administration, Allen sent a manifesto to family members explaining and defending what he was about to do. He wrote, “I am no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes.” Allen says he had ranked Trump administration officials from highest to lowest and expressed his intention to kill as many as he could. He also explained which security personnel and bystanders he would be willing to kill or maim if they got in his way. He rationalized that anyone he might kill is “complicit” in Trump’s crimes simply because he or she “chose to attend a speech by a pedophile, rapist, and traitor.”
The manifesto reads like the ravings of a madman. And yet how mad is he? Maybe he is simply someone radicalized by what has become standard fare accusations about the president from those on the left—that he is guilty of rape, pedophilia, treason, or worse.
President Trump is not above critique. I have publicly criticized him for a number of moral and political failures, including undermining longstanding political and moral norms. Nevertheless, President Trump has never been charged with or convicted of rape, pedophilia, or treason. How unhinged does one have to be to commit a terrorist act on the basis of claims that are so contested? Yet that is what Allen did. He will likely have the rest of his life to think about whether it was worth it. Ten or twenty years from now, Trump and his administration will be a fading memory, but Allen will still be rightfully rotting in prison. Madness.
This is at least the third time that there has been an attempt to assassinate Donald Trump. The hatred for the man has reached an irrational and undemocratic boiling point, and it is activating fringe elements on the left to political violence. What is going on in our nation right now that political violence is becoming more and more common—and that more and more people seem to think it justified? Or at least plausible?
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