Here’s a Better Idea Than Trying to Assassinate the President

Cole Allen squandered his life on a hopeless mission to change the course of history. Let’s learn from his mistakes.

Cole Allen, the 31-year-old California man who, by his own admission, armed himself and attempted to breach the security at this past weekend’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner, was officially charged this week with attempting to assassinate the president. The case—at least what’s been publicly disclosed—is still quite murky; questions remain about whether Allen even fired his gun in the bowels of the Washington Hilton Hotel. Still, the takeaway, to me at least, is clear: You should not try to assassinate the president.

I know, this is probably not something that you need to be told. Murder is, after all, inherently immoral and a criminal act to boot. Murdering the president of the United States also comes with a high degree of difficulty given his 24/7 protection by a posse of well-trained armed guards. In just about every conceivable scenario, you will likely fail and you will definitely not be able to go back to living your previous life. Still, there are some additional things to consider that are specific to the Trump era itself: whether killing the president won’t make matters much worse, and whether there is a better way to channel your discontent.

Allen is an unusual would-be assassin. There’s nothing about him that reminds me of any number of mass shooters of recent vintage. There’s no air of glory-seeking; no meme-sludge in his rhetoric. In his manifesto, he spends quite a bit of time apologizing to various people in his life for betraying their trust and takes no evident pleasure in the task he’s put himself to doing. (He also seems prematurely disdainful of the security measures that ultimately foiled his plot.) What’s most unique, and perhaps most troubling, is that his decision to try to take the president’s life is, as TNR contributor Elizabeth Spiers noted on Bluesky, rooted in a sense of moral injury.

The Huffington Post’s David Wood, who has written extensively about how soldiers often suffer from moral injury after their tours of duty have concluded, describes the condition as the “sense that [one’s] fundamental understanding of right and wrong has been violated, and the grief, numbness or guilt that often ensues.” In his manifesto, Allen wrote, “I am a citizen of the United States of America. What my representatives do reflects on me. And I am no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes.” For all intents and purposes, he is saying that he is implicated in Trump’s evident corruption and misrule. “Turning the other cheek when *someone else* is oppressed is not Christian behavior,” he wrote, “it is complicity in the oppressor’s crimes.”

This is perhaps the most worrying part of this story—that there might be others out there who feel this way, and who might be compelled to take the same action. These are the natural consequences of our current age of elite impunity, in which a corrupt president transforms the government into an instrument of self-dealing and revenge, and justice is perceived as slow in arriving, if it arrives at all. Allen spends a considerable amount of time in his manifesto building the moral scaffolding necessary to accommodate his decision to travel to Washington, D.C., to dole out a quick dose of accountability. Based on his writing, I think he works harder than most would-be mass shooters to illuminate a humane logic for his actions. I still think he draws all the wrong conclusions.

One thing that Allen gets badly wrong is the idea that killing Trump might have provided a short cut to putting things right. I think many people believe this about the efficacy of political violence, even if they would never engage in it themselves. But I’m unconvinced, at least as it pertains to Trump, because MAGA is something of a cult movement, steeped in its own byzantine mythology and awash in conspiratorial thinking. The one thing you probably don’t want to do if you want to bring the country back from the brink of this madness is to give this movement a martyr.

At the moment, MAGA is cracking up under the weight of the Trump administration’s many failings. As Greg Sargent noted about a recent Fox News poll, Trump’s coalition is contracting: “On both his general approval ratings and many major issues, his numbers among voter groups that have reliably supported him in the past are awful. They’re also terrible among the non-Trumpy groups that he pulled into the coalition in 2024.” It seems the worst possible thing anyone can do is interrupt this free fall. Don’t shoot a man who’s busy shooting himself in the foot.

Had Allen been successful in his attempt to kill Trump, he might have altered the thermostatic chemistry of the electorate, goosed Trump’s support, and brought back morally affronted fence sitters who were ready to leave Trump behind. It also might well have touched off a wave of political violence in the other direction—which was a thing he really should have considered before he acted. As it is, I worry that TNR contributor Ana Marie Cox is correct that Cole’s attempt will bond Trump and the White House press corps together in a shared trauma, further eroding the latter group’s already withered sense of duty in holding the administration accountable, thus exacerbating the original problem.

So, at the risk of stating the obvious, don’t attempt to—or even daydream about—assassinating the president. The best path to thwarting Trumpism lies in the deliberations of lawful democracy. This is not a path that favors quick fixes and instant gratification. We must organize in numbers to boot Trump and the GOP from power and install leaders who can command a majority to put things right, up to and including possible impeachment and putting people in jail.

On a more personal note, I was saddened to read that Allen felt alone in his grave misgivings. While he enumerated a community of people surrounding him—family, friends, work colleagues, his church—he separated himself from what sounds like a vibrant network of people rather than seeking them out. Had he done so, he might have found a better path to take that might have relieved his moral injury and contributed much more to the anti-Trump cause.

Around the same time Washingtonians were preparing for this weekend’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner, I was catching up with an acquaintance from Minneapolis, who was giving me an intimate view of what it’s like to participate in anti-ICE resistance in the Twin Cities. Her phone was a warren of group chats and text chains in which concentric orbits of organized citizens went about the daily business of protecting their neighbors and keeping watch over their neighborhoods. In Minneapolis and St. Paul, democracy is a well-oiled machine with regular training sessions from skilled political organizers.

One thing she mentioned about those trainings has stuck with me after the events of Saturday night. The trainers told the people they were organizing that sometimes they’d end up on the front lines of ICE violence—that they’d bear witness to some terrible sights, see things that would make them angry. The trainers, she said, made it clear that anyone who did not think they could handle these circumstances without succumbing to violent, retributive impulses needed to find some other role—that there were plenty of other ways they could help where their despair or anger wouldn’t get the better of them.

Given the success of this faction of Trump resistance, we’d do well to heed this advice. There are plenty of things we can do, right now, to fortify our communities and protect our neighbors—to materially impact the lives of others for good, find fellowship along the way, and absolve any sense of moral injury that may be creeping into our psyche. It’s more lethal to Trumpism long-term if we organize in opposition than it is to grab a gun and take a run at the president. I’m sorry that Allen couldn’t find his way to this realization. He might have done some good.

This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.

Trump and the White House Correspondents’ Dinner Deserve Each Other

People really seem worked up about the president ruining this weekend’s big party. But you can’t ruin something that’s already rotten to the core.

Make ready the orchestra of tiny violins, everyone! This weekend, Washington, D.C.’s greatest collection of reprobates and dweebs will gather at the Washington Hilton for the annual tribute to meretriciousness that is the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Alas, there is bad news to report: President Donald Trump will be ruining the affair by attending it, after several years of ruining it by not attending it. As a result, people are so upset that they’re calling for this weekend’s big party to be called off entirely.

It almost goes without saying that Trump’s personal opinions on free speech put him at odds with the theme that the White House Correspondents’ Association concocted for its annual bacchanal: a celebration of the First Amendment. A few weeks ago, Trump threatened to jail journalists over coverage of an Iranian airstrike on a U.S. fighter jet. Meanwhile, Paramount has decided to invite to its table Federal Communications Commission head Brendan Carr, who has spent the last year launching spurious probes into various news organizations for unfavorable coverage of the Trump administration.

As if that were not enough open hostility, The Daily Beast reported on Wednesday that Trump plans some sort of “revenge attack” speech against the press corps Saturday night, after which he intends to turn tail and run home. The WHCA’s response to these aggressions seems maximally ineffectual by design: Its members will wear “pocket squares or pins touting the importance of the First Amendment.”

But should we regard the journalists into whose punchbowl the president is pissing as worthy and capable guardians of those freedoms? Or, honestly, guardians of anything? It was at last year’s party that Axios reporter Alex Thompson, upon winning the Aldo Beckman Award for Overall Excellence, rode in on his high horse to perform a ritual admonishment of those in attendance for not properly covering the story of President Joe Biden’s advanced age. “Being truth tellers,” he chastised, “also means telling the truth about ourselves. We, myself included, missed a lot of this story and some people trust us less because of it. We bear some responsibility for faith in the media being at such lows.”

Well, since we once again have an infirm and mentally dysfunctional man running the country that few in the media seem worried about, it’s worth asking if anyone in the D.C. press corps actually learned anything. It’s also worth answering: not really. While The New York Times, notably, has gone long several times on Trump’s decline in recent months, good luck finding similar reporting from the likes of Axios.

I’m not the only one with knives out for the WHCD, though Washington Monthly’s Bill Scher has a decidedly different reason for calling for the dinner’s cancellation. “An event celebrating the free press should not spotlight Donald Trump, the biggest threat to the free press,” he writes. Scher is certainly right to criticize the WHCA for the way it has “reconfigured the event to make it more to Trump’s liking, chucking the comedian slot and, instead, naming as headliner Oz Pearlman, described by The New York Times as the ‘manosphere’s favorite magician.’” But the lion’s share of the piece—which begins with Scher’s “confession” that he’s a “fan” of the event—is devoted to making the chummy party seem aboveboard, for the purpose of suggesting that it’s Trump’s presence that, finally and at last, has created something truly odious.

Cue the self-serving justifications. “I always view such events as opportunities for source-building, vetting of coverage ideas and networking,” argues NPR’s Eric Deggans. “I may be having fun with my colleagues from NPR, but I’m also low-key working my beat.” I have heard variations on this idea from all sorts of reporters over the years. Maybe things are different when you’re on the media/celebrity beat, but I don’t find this argument compelling for political reporters. If you broke a story because you attended the dinner, tell your readers—they deserve to know that you’re not just there collecting selfies and canapés. Here’s a fun fact: President Barack Obama executed the hit on Osama bin Laden on White House Correspondents’ Dinner weekend, almost as if he knew the best time to run a secret special op was when every reporter would be nearby, basking in their own self-regard. (A better-sourced Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson famously scooped everyone on the bin Laden raid.)

At least The Atlantic’s Paul Farhi is willing to state up front that the fête was extremely tacky long before Trump became president. “Even in the best of times, the [dinner] is an awkward and ethically fraught affair,” he writes: “The evening is promoted as a celebration of journalism and the First Amendment, but it has always been a bit of an embarrassment.” It’s actually a little under-sung just how bad the dinner was during its supposed halcyon days of the Obama administration. As Meredith Shiner wrote in Rolling Stone back in 2022, it was during this period that the WHCA really rammed its head up its own ass by making “celebrity the end goal of public service” and setting the stage for the parade of horribles to come. As Shiner observes:

Of course, it also should be noted that [Trump’s] attendance at the dinner in 2011—and Obama’s joke about him during his set—helped fuel the hate fire for his own White House run. Nothing about the grossness of this one weekend of cocktail parties or Democrats wanting to be cool by association invalidates the much more significant grossness of how media and celebrity normalized Trump, helped him attain power, and profited off keeping him there.

Of course, it also should be noted that [Trump’s] attendance at the dinner in 2011—and Obama’s joke about him during his set—helped fuel the hate fire for his own White House run. Nothing about the grossness of this one weekend of cocktail parties or Democrats wanting to be cool by association invalidates the much more significant grossness of how media and celebrity normalized Trump, helped him attain power, and profited off keeping him there.

In this way, having Trump in attendance at this year’s dinner isn’t some troubling aberration. It’s really the logical end point of the whole affair; the apotheosis of Official Washington and its trashy pretentions. Far from canceling the dinner, let’s make it mandatory that Trump, his Cabinet, and all media elites attend, so we can bar the doors and force them to answer for their sins against our civic fabric.

This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.

The Media’s Groundbreaking Discovery: Anti-Corruption Is Good Politics

The chattering classes have belatedly stumbled upon a way to defeat authoritarianism. Now if they can only practice what they preach.

Good news has been something of a precious commodity of late, what with the Trump administration still engaged in its slop-conflict with Iran and the president himself taking to depicting himself as a messianic figure online. But in last weekend’s elections in Hungary, Péter Magyar and his Tisza party resoundingly defeated international fascist darling Viktor Orbán and his far-right Fidesz minions. Tisza did so well in these elections, in fact, that they will have the numbers to enact crucial constitutional reforms and undo at least some of the damage of 16 years of authoritarian rule. As a side note, Orbán’s defeat is a black eye for his stateside backers, including Vice President JD Vance, who had personally stumped for the defeated strongman in the waning days of the campaign.

This was, in other words, a good outcome for freedom-loving people everywhere and a result that will hopefully yield further fruit. But there is one by-product that’s truly been a puzzlement. Across the media landscape, the chattering class has assayed the election and made what is—to it, anyway—a fresh discovery: What if political corruption is bad? And what if campaigning against corruption is a winning........

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