Donald Trump Just Set A New Record For The Most Assassination Attempts On A President
And his record will probably get bigger
Cole Tomas Allen, a 31-year-old teacher from Torrance, California, tried to rush into the White House Correspondents Dinner last night to kill President Donald Trump. It is the third time a home-grown would-be assassin has made the attempt, surpassing the two attempts made on the life of President Gerald R. Ford.
Commentary today centers on the rhetoric of Democratic politicians, the gleeful behavior of Democratic rank-and-file, and the inattention of traditional media outlets towards left-wing violence. Most interesting to your humble reporter is the sheer amount of Pseudologia Fantastica, or pathological lying, in baseless conspiracy theories about a ‘staged’ attack.
Pathological lying is distinguished from ordinary lies in that it seems unconscious. The liar is constructing a ‘preferred reality’ rather than simply trying to get away with something. Pathological liars plan events, then rewrite the events, internalizing a false narrative to protect their ego from cognitive dissonance and avoid confronting their own conscience. While it is not a diagnosis, pathological lying is usually linked to conditions like narcissistic personality disorders and borderline personality.
Recall the days immediately after the 7 October attacks on Israel, when Hamas fans took to the streets and tore down posters of the kidnapping victims. These vandals were not in denial that Hamas had kidnapped anyone. Rather, they did not want to confront the immorality of kidnapping when their ‘side’ was at fault, so they tore down images that threatened their sense of themselves as ‘good people’ on the right side of history. They were protecting themselves, not Hamas.
This same psychology is behind the instant denials of what happened last night. Within moments of the story breaking, X and Bluesky saw the word “staged” trending as users who hate Trump declared their opinions in advance of any evidence. Most of these claims referenced the shooting in Butler, Pennsylvania in 2024, which has also been the subject of conspiracy theories since it happened.
Insane as these denials seem, they are rational — in fact, psychology calls them rationalizations. They are coming from people who approve of violence against Trump knowing that it is morally wrong. Confronted with the fantasy playing out in the real world, they deny their own immorality by projecting it on the victim.
It is inarguable that this mindset exists on the left, and that it is widespread. For while any human is capable of displaying this behavior, it is more pronounced on the left than the right. This is not my supposition, it is the message of cold, hard data. Mr. Allen is in the age group most correlated with this mindset.
“We identified three key variables that predict support for violence”, Zack Dulberg and Max Horder reported a year ago. They are “left-wing authoritarianism (characterized by a willingness to use coercion and punishment for progressive aims), external locus of control (the extent to which individuals feel powerless in their lives), and use of the left-wing social media platform Bluesky.” Events last night certainly validated the last point.
Dulberg and Horder are senior fellows at the Network Contagion Research Institute at Rutgers University. Their full paper, “How Burning Teslas and Killing Billionaires Became a Meme Aesthetic for Political Violence”. is available on the NCRI website.
“Over half of those who self-identified as left of center (56%) reported that if someone murdered Donald Trump, they would be at least somewhat justified”, including “14.1% who said this murder would be ‘Completely Justified.’”
Nearly as many survey respondents felt the same way about Elon Musk, who has faded into the background ever since the DOGE initiative was shut down. “Over ⅓ of all respondents believe it is at least somewhat acceptable to destroy Tesla dealerships to protest Elon Musk’s involvement in the Presidential administration.”
These attitudes are “part of a tightly interconnected belief system”, the authors explain. “Central to this belief system is Left-Wing Authoritarianism (LWA), characterized by moral absolutism, punitive attitudes toward ideological opponents, and a willingness to use coercion for progressive aims.” Bluesky is where this demographic has concentrated online.
The third factor they identified, an external locus of control, is produced by the ideology that assigns blame for all evils to outside forces. For example, the Hamasaboos who tore down posters of kidnapped children blame Israel for the condition of Gaza rather than Hamas, which actually governed Gaza for 18 years. Hasan Piker blames “billionaires” for the absence of single-payer health care in America rather than the structural impossibility of providing free health care to 340 million people.
Scratch the surface of a leftist, and you will find this external locus of control hiding under the thinnest of skins. The physical harms of ‘gender medicine’ are caused by transphobia instead of a blinkered ideology. The failures of communism are caused by ‘the bourgeoisie’ rather than the magical thinking of flat-earth economics, and so on. Fault is projected on the Other, justifying the violence they wish to inflict.
“Unless political and cultural leadership explicitly confronts and condemns this trend, NCRI assesses a growing probability of real-world escalation”, the report says. “Given the current economic volatility and institutional distrust, the online normalization of political violence may increasingly translate into offline action.” A random teacher in California might attempt to carry out their violent fantasy, for instance.
What the authors call “assassination culture” is a permission structure. Violence is permitted against Trump and Musk because of their crimes against ideology. Indeed, the ideological left is eager to ascribe ideology to both men — they are deemed “Nazis”, “-phobes”, and “-ists” — because neither of them has ever expressed a coherent ideology. The closest they have come is opposition to ‘woke’ ideology. Ideology has to be projected on them to justify (rationalize) the ideology of assassination.
Donald Trump is not even halfway through his second term, and more attempts on his life seem certain. Assassination culture is not going anywhere, and will likely intensify. Democrats want to make impeachment their midterm issue, though they have not decided what Trump’s crime is, just yet. While that might relieve some of the psychological tension in the next Cole Tomas Allen, we should brace ourselves for Trump to end up with a record number of assassination attempts that will never be exceeded as long as America has a president.
The one thing we should not expect is for Democrats to moderate their rhetoric. Bluesky will not moderate. Trump is their locus of control, and they cannot control him. As long as he is president, they will want him dead, and make excuses for every failed attempt.