Blame game erupts over Trump assassination attempt

What happened

A California man accused of trying to storm the White House Correspondents’ Dinner with an arsenal of guns and knives was charged last week with attempting to assassinate President Trump, as investigators dug through writings and social media posts that showed his increasing fury at the administration. Cole Tomas Allen, a 31-year-old high school tutor from Torrance, checked in to the Washington Hilton ahead of the black-tie dinner there. As waiters cleared salad plates in the ballroom—packed with more than 2,000 journalists and Beltway insiders—Allen sprinted past a security checkpoint carrying a shotgun and .38-caliber handgun. One federal agent opened fire and another in a bulletproof vest was shot in the chest but was unharmed; ballistics experts are investigating whether he was shot by Allen or by the other officer. Allen tripped and was jumped on by agents, who stripped him of his weapons. In the ballroom, attendees crouched under dinner tables as the president and first lady Melania Trump were rushed out along with Vice President JD Vance and Cabinet members. “It scared all of us,” said CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer. “We had no idea what was going on.”

Before the attempted attack, Allen wrote a note detailing his plan to target Trump administration officials “prioritized from highest-ranking to lowest.” He referenced abuse in ICE detention camps, the U.S. bombing of a girls’ school in Iran, and the Jeffrey Epstein scandal. “I am no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes,” he wrote, in apparent reference to Trump. Neighbors and acquaintances described Allen, a leader of his college’s Christian Fellowship, as quiet and respectful. But on social media he raged against Trump. “Everyone already knows trump is a f---ing awful person in multiple dimensions and no one has done shit,” read one April 2025 post on the Bluesky platform.

Trump called for unity at a press conference following the incident. But the tone soon shifted, as White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt blamed the assassination attempt on the “deranged lies” of Democrats who “falsely label and slander the president as a fascist and threat to democracy.” Trump, who has survived two previous assassination attempts, called this one a marker of his success. “The most impactful people,” he said, “are the ones they go after.”

What the columnists said

This was a “security fiasco,” said Hugh Dougherty in the Daily Beast. How was Allen able to stroll into the Hilton with a shotgun in his luggage, check into a room, and roam freely? After I checked in, I was never asked for ID, and I walked into the dinner with a ticket that could easily “have been a photo-copy.” Actually, the Secret Service did its job, said Garrett Graff in his Substack newsletter. Securing a hotel with some 1,100 rooms isn’t their responsibility, nor is it “to prevent any incident at a high-profile event.” Their task is to set up a security perimeter and keep the president safe—which is exactly what they did.

Allen presents a puzzle, said Odette Yousef in NPR.org. A well-liked young man with a master’s degree in computer science, he was incensed by Trump administration policies. But his online history displays none of the extremist or conspiratorial views that typically drive would-be political assassins. His writings express “pretty moderate left-wing” views, said extremism researcher Jared Holt. It’s left him and other experts unclear as to what tipped Allen over the edge.

There’s no mystery here, said Jeffrey Blehar in National Review. Allen hung out on lefty-dominated Bluesky, and “seems to have been radicalized into committing violence by the panic and apocalypticism common in such spaces.” In his “manifesto,” he accused Trump of being a pedophile—a “wild, reckless lie” that is commonly bandied about by Trump haters, and one that “is intended to inflame.” Now “we see where that line of rhetoric can lead.”

The Right’s attempt to pin this attack on Democrats is cynical and bogus, said Peter Hamby in Puck. But progressives can’t shy away from the fact that “a rising miasma of conspiratorial thinking, dangerous fact-denying, and dehumanizing language has taken hold on the American left.” Before a trans-rights supporter shot dead conservative activist Charlie Kirk and Luigi Mangione allegedly murdered a health-care CEO “in a fit of anti-corporate rage,” it was easier for liberals to claim “the nutjobs and wackos were mostly on the other side.” That’s no longer the case.

Trump is the primary cause of our “culture of political violence,” said Jonathan V. Last in The Bulwark. At the start of his political project in 2016, he urged his supporters to punch people they disliked. Since then, Trump has unleashed a mob on the U.S. Capitol, referred to anti-ICE protesters “murdered by his regime as ‘domestic terrorists,’” called his political opponents “enemies of the people,” and cheered the deaths of his critics. Now he and his supporters are shocked that the violent world he willed into being is coming for him.

We’re watching “the best democracy on earth destroyed by madness,” said Will Bunch in The Philadelphia Inquirer. In a nation where firearms outnumber people, we’ve reached the stage where attempted assassination sites are “getting recycled”—President Ronald Reagan was shot and wounded outside the same Hilton in 1981. Last month, we collectively shrugged when a disturbed father killed eight children in Shreveport, La., and a mall in Baton Rouge “erupted in a Wild West shoot-out.” We’ll no doubt soon move on from this latest grim spectacle, in an “unserious America” where “appalling forms of violence” feel increasingly like business as usual.