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If Donald Trump is going to face assassination threats for the rest of his term—if the next three years will be intermittently interrupted by incidents like the one on Saturday, in which a gunman with a manifesto was apprehended outside the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner—it will not be because the revolution is here. That is what I found myself thinking after surveying the social media footprint of one Cole Tomas Allen, a teacher from California who allegedly attempted to kill the president and the rest of his Cabinet, and is now in federal custody.

Allen kept an active account on Bluesky, the social media hub preferred by #resistance-honed liberals, and when you scroll through his posts, Allen neatly fits their archetype. He seemed to enjoy the oeuvre of milquetoast Biden-boosting activist Will Stancil, as well as Bill Kristol, the longtime conservative commentator turned anti-Trump stalwart. We have reason to believe that Allen was familiar with the work of New York Times opinion columnist (and former Slate staffer) Jamelle Bouie, and one of the final things he signal-boosted, before taking a gun to the Hilton in Washington, D.C., was a post criticizing the Twitch streamer Hasan Piker and his socialist bona fides, which are anathema to establishment Democrats.

In other words, leaving aside the manifesto in which he lambasted Trump as a “pedophile, rapist, and traitor,” Allen’s public-facing words fall well within mainline Democratic boundaries. He referred to the president as a “sociopathic mob boss,” and said that by negotiating with Republicans, Democrats were engaging in “bipartisanship with Nazis.” That might’ve sounded extreme in 2013, but it doesn’t anymore because, quite........

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