Cole Tomas Allen, who was arrested during an attempt to storm the White House Correspondents\u2019 Association dinner on Saturday, may be America\u2019s first normie liberal terrorist.<\/p>\n
The right, naturally, sees Allen as part of a pattern, lumping him in with figures like Thomas Matthew Crooks, who fired on Donald Trump in 2024, grazing his ear; Ryan Wesley Routh, who carried a semiautomatic rifle to one of Trump\u2019s golf courses a few months later; or Tyler Robinson, charged in the killing of Charlie Kirk last year. But all those men had weird or heterogenous politics. Crooks was a nihilistic Republican misfit. Routh had a history of violence and a delusional<\/a> fixation on Ukraine, where he reportedly tried to join the war effort. Robinson seems to have cooked his brain in online fetish subcultures.<\/p>\n But Allen, who on Monday was charged with attempting to assassinate the president, seemed to be a man with remarkably ordinary political opinions. Social media posts that appear to come from him suggest that he despised ICE, cared a lot about Ukraine, and, like the majority<\/a> of Americans, wanted to see Trump impeached. Far from a radical leftist, he reposted criticisms of pro-Palestine protesters and the left-wing streamer Hasan Piker. He wasn\u2019t exactly a standard Democrat \u2014 he was registered to no political party, and at least at one point was an evangelical Christian \u2014 but from what we know so far, before he showed up at the Washington Hilton, he had fairly mainstream beliefs.<\/p>\n This makes Allen\u2019s apparent attempt at political martyrdom particularly convenient for conservatives who want to stigmatize Democratic denunciations of the president. National Review blamed<\/a> \u201cthe feverish opposition to Trump\u201d for allowing \u201csundry fanatics and losers to resort to political violence.\u201d The Wall Street Journal\u2019s editorial board tied<\/a> Saturday\u2019s attack to a political culture in which Trump\u2019s opponents have lost \u201call judgment and proportion.\u201d Some nonpartisan journalists have parroted this framing. On CNN, Dana Bash asked Representative Jamie Raskin whether he\u2019s thinking twice about \u201cheated rhetoric\u201d against the president, such as calling him \u201cterrible for this country.\u201d<\/p>\n I can\u2019t really blame Republicans for exploiting the attack; Allen has provided them with an irresistible rhetorical cudgel. The problem, of course, is that Trump is indeed terrible for this country. The fact that people have tried to kill him can\u2019t be a reason to eschew frankness about his depravity. Rather, it\u2019s a reason to reiterate that even depravity doesn\u2019t justify political violence, which is morally abhorrent, socially corrosive and counterproductive.<\/p>\n It\u2019s true that the manifesto attributed to Allen contains exaggerated accusations. \u201cI am no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes,\u201d the manifesto declares. There is no convincing evidence that Trump has ever abused children; all the women who\u2019ve credibly accused him of sexual assault have been adults. Calling Trump a \u201cpedophile\u201d has become a too-common way to describe the president\u2019s intimate relationship with Jeffrey Epstein and coverup of the Epstein files. The manifesto is a reminder that all of us should be more precise in our language. To describe Trump accurately, however, will always sound to some like incitement.<\/p>\n There\u2019s a fierce argument in America about whether the right or the left is more violent. Until very recently, there was no contest: The right was. (A 2024 study<\/a> using National Institute of Justice data found that in the United States since 1990, \u201cfar-right extremists have committed far more ideologically motivated homicides than far-left or radical Islamist extremists.\u201d) In recent years, however, there\u2019s been an uptick in left-wing terrorist attacks and plots.<\/p>\n A report<\/a> on this phenomenon from the Center for Strategic and International Studies suggests that there\u2019s a ratchet at work. It noted that both Republicans and Democrats overestimate their foes\u2019 approval of violence, and said, \u201cWidespread polarization and misperceptions that the other side is far more violent than it actually is creates a dangerous environment where extremists can more easily rationalize using violence.\u201d Each act of political violence further frays our threadbare social fabric, laying the foundation for authoritarianism.<\/p>\n After any act of political terror, conspiracists will often make \u201cfalse flag\u201d accusations, and Saturday was no different; as The New York Times reported<\/a>, uses of the word \u201cstaged\u201d soared on X. There is, of course, no defense for spreading disinformation or indulging in ideological self-delusion. Still, we can recognize that people start such rumors because they correctly intuit that violence often discredits the causes that inspire it. The left-wing terrorism rampant in the 1970s helped usher in Ronald Reagan, not socialist revolution. The 1995 Oklahoma City bombing ended up being a boon<\/a> to Bill Clinton\u2019s political fortunes. By attempting to kill Trump in 2024, Crooks helped to elect him. Violence isn\u2019t just ethically reprehensible; it\u2019s strategically stupid.<\/p>\n At least one person at the White House correspondents\u2019 dinner was elated by the chaos the shooter caused. Describing agents running into the room with guns amid screaming and flipping tables, Dana White, the Trump-supporting head of Ultimate Fighting Championship, said<\/a> it was \u201cawesome \u2014 I literally took every minute of it in.\u201d Perhaps he understood that the attack had given his movement a gift. Whatever evil the would-be assassin thought he was fighting, all he did was feed it.<\/p>\n