The latest Trump assassin wasn’t a radical. He was a Democrat.
There was nothing radical about Cole Tomas Allen: the attempted White House Correspondents’ Dinner assassin. Allen’s manifesto reads a lot like that of the previous three-named assassin Ryan Wesley Routh who was stalking President Trump at a golf game.Apart from the explicit murder plots, there is nothing in Routh’s ‘Dear World’ letter and Allen’s manifesto that you wouldn’t find in the Washington Post, a Jimmy Kimmel or Stephen Colbert monologue or a rant by a Democrat member of Congress. Routh was obsessed with Iran and Ukraine, sounding like Thomas Friedman when he complained that Trump had “ended relations with Iran like a child and now the Middle East has unraveled.”
Allen offered even more generic foreign policy criticisms that seemed plucked from network newscasts and fake news coverage of Trump’s campaign against illegal alien criminals, drug cartels, Islamic terrorists in Iran and the cutoff of funds to USAID, ranting about being (“raped in a detention camp”, “fisherman executed without trial” “schoolkid blown up” or “a child starved”).
Did Allen really care about events in Iran or Latin America? Could he even tell them apart?
There’s a vagueness to the litany that suggests Allen had a weak grip on where these supposed things were even happening and what the connection to it was beyond justifying his attack.
Rather than Marxism, Routh and Allen offered tepid shopworn liberalism as their justification for murder, “U.S presidents must at bare minimum embody the moral fabric that is America and be kind, caring and selfless and always stand for humanity” and “the United States of America are ruled by the law, not by any one or several people. In so far as representatives and judges do not follow the law, no one is required to yield them anything so unlawfully ordered.”
This is the stuff of a Ken Burns op-ed and it shows that both men were more influenced by liberal Trump Derangement Syndrome media products than by Antifa or radical groups.
Allen slurs President Trump as a “pedophile, rapist and traitor”. This line is so commonplace in liberal circles that you can find it all across Bluesky, where the attempted assassin had an account, sold on t-shirts and popping up in op-eds. Social media personalities, talk show hosts and members of Congress have used similar rhetoric to refer to the 47th president.
There’s not much of a political critique. Just a grab bag of lines from MSNBC.
The truly revealing moment comes at the end of Routh’s manifesto. “I experience rage thinking about everything this administration has done.” That is a common enough symptom from liberals who doomscroll daily through social media rants about Trump until they get more blackpilled. Trump Derangement Syndrome isn’t a punch line. Much like any social media obsession, it is a social contagion that genuinely makes people dangerous and deranged.
But even while people are talking about Cole Tomas Allen becoming ‘radicalized’, there’s no evidence that he was ideologically radicalized. And it’s important for us to understand this.
Unlike Thomas Crooks, the Butler assassin, Allen wasn’t quoting Mao about power coming from the barrel of a gun. Unlike Austin Tucker Martin, who was shot and killed while breaking into Mar-a-Lago while armed with a shotgun back in March (notably there are so many attempts to kill Trump that they quickly vanish from the media coverage) he didn’t go down a social media conspiracy rabbit hole (Martin was obsessed with conspiracies tying Trump to Epstein.)
Allen and Routh’s views were generally those of mainstream liberal Democrats. They were no more extreme than your average MSNBC viewer. Probably even a smidgen more moderate.
And they were probably no more radical than the average committed Democrat.
The only difference between the two assassins and the rest of their political movement was that they didn’t just buy t-shirts calling for Trump’s murder (Amazon has a Google search result ‘Trump Dead Shirt’ to cash in on this trend) or put up ‘Is He Dead Yet’ signs on their lawns or confine themselves to fulminating on social media… they did something about it.
That doesn’t make them more radical than the average Democrat. Just more serious.
There are two distinct but related things going on with the Democrats. One is that the party is rapidly moving ideologically leftward and embracing previously inconceivable positions ranging from socialism to treason and the other is that much of the party is not ideologically radicalizing so much as it’s driven by a violently fervent hatred of Trump and a conviction that he’s Hitler. --->READ MORE HERE
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