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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 frankly, I can find the exact same sentiment in the comments of my mom’s Facebook page. If Allen possesses a cogent political philosophy, it appears to be that of by-the-book mainstream liberalism. From what I can tell, there isn’t much daylight between him and the shared consensus of the MS NOW commentariat, who have never been afraid to draw comparisons between Democratic socialism and Trump’s nativist tide.
After all, mainstream liberals are quick to declare MAGA evil, or assert that Trump is destroying America. Allen, from what I can tell, was not advocating for social revolution, or a total inversion of the market economy, or the consecration of a Marxist state. No, he just really hated Trump, and, in a fit of madness, decided to infuse that hate with terroristic purpose. It is there, and only there, where he breaks with the tenor of a #NoKings rally. Lately, as I survey this recent vintage of political violence, I find myself wondering if that mutinous impulse has become more common than we realize. Rarely has brutality been so casually evoked from the highest echelons of political society—our president arbitrarily vows to erase civilizations from the planet, unaccountable ICE agents take the lives of Alex Pretti and Renee Good, and as a whole, MAGAdom, on principle, refuses to apologize for any of it. If anything, during Trump’s second term, its coalition has opted to press its slim advantage, through raw coercion, gumming up the electoral landscape with freshly drawn congressional maps—all but guaranteeing our sclerotic status quo.
Here is how the rest of us seem to be grappling with this: It is no longer a fringe belief that everything is bad and getting worse, and that the systems in place are incapable of generating anything better. It is all terrible, all the time. And we’re all learning, in real time, what happens when the resulting fury is internalized at a mass scale.
Allen is in good company with the unlikely assassins who have attempted to kill the president over the last two years. The most mysterious of those figures remains Thomas Crooks, the 20-year-old who nearly blew Trump’s head off at a Pennsylvania rally. We still don’t know much about him, though it seems from the known evidence that he was politically amorphous, happy picking off either Trump or Biden. Allen probably has more in common with Ryan Routh, who famously infiltrated Trump International Golf Course in a harebrained scheme to take down the then–Republican presidential nominee. Routh would later be revealed to be an unhinged man singularly consumed with defending Ukraine, a category of person that most closely overlaps with libbed-up boomer dads, not exactly Antifa insurrectionists.
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In that sense, the person Allen reminds me the most of is, by far, Luigi Mangione, the shooter who allegedly gunned down UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson on the streets of New York. In the aftermath of the crime, newly minted fans of Mangione quickly fitted the man with revolutionary trappings, enshrining him as an avenger of working-class power. (He did allegedly murder a champion of the healthcare cartel, after all.) But that never matched up with reality. The more we learn about Mangione, the more it becomes clear that he has normie taste. He logged mass-market self-help books on his Goodreads: Malcolm Gladwell, James Clear, you name it. He adored the work of conservative hustle influencer Patrick Bet-David, so much so that he sent him a letter from prison. On X, he followed both Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Mangione, like Allen, recalls a character that has become increasingly common in American society—an adrift young man, angry at everything, who grows steadily more unhinged and unwell without any prodding from an ideologically bound terror network. It turns out that in 2026, you don’t need the indoctrination of the Weathermen to find yourself eager to shoot a president.
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This leaves me with only one logical conclusion about the state of the union. Amid the decline of the American quality of life—to say nothing of the phantasmal, reality-blinkering disruptions of the modern internet, and the collective understanding that, within this political gridlock, nothing, on principle, can ever get better—I find myself wondering if people we once perceived as “normal” are, in fact, considerably more strange than they ever were before. That is the only way I can make sense of a Bluesky Lib going postal, or a podcast bro opening fire on West 54th Street. I think of the unfazed reaction the world at large had to this most recent Trump assassination attempt, how everyone quickly settled back into Wolves vs. Nuggets, or more grimly, instinctually asserted that the whole situation was a false-flag psyop. More to the point, I think about how I know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that a huge swath of solid-blue mainstream liberals—those same wine moms at the rally—wish that Allen had found a better vantage point to mount his rifle. This is the status quo we are left with after 10 long years of MAGA, our norms and institutions chipped down to the bone. The man in the chair has foreclosed the future itself, and millions of Americans, passively or otherwise, want him dead for it.
