Relatable Terrorism

 

Saw a Bluesky post yesterday morning alleging that the "exchange of fire" at the Washington Hilton Saturday night between the Secret Service and Metro Police and whoever and the Californian wouldbe assassin was all from one side, with the one Secret Service officer saved from serious injury by his bullet-proof vest having been hit by friendly fire when another of the cops was pulling his gun from its holster and it misfired.

Can't find the post any more, and it may have been deleted, possibly with good reason, because that bit about the misfiring doesn't sound right at all—but it's remarkably difficult to find reporting that contradicts the basic outline, that there was no actual exchange, in spite of most of the newspapers using the word, the gunman (Cole Allen, 31, of Torrance) never having gotten a shot off or even tried, as he was too busy running, presumably to get into the ballroom, but maybe at this point wanting to escape, so that the friendly fire story is mostly true; and a couple of the sources basically say so, delicately: Reuters

Closed-circuit TV footage released by Trump on Truth Social showed the suspect running rapidly through a security checkpoint, momentarily catching security personnel off-guard before they drew their weapons.

No shots were fired at the gunman who got through two checkpoints before being brought down.

"You know, he charged from 50 yards away, so he was very far away from the room. He was ​moving. He was really moving," Trump said after the gala ​dinner was canceled.

And VINNews ("VIN" short for "Vos Iz Neias" or "What's New" in Yiddish)

A volunteer at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner said a gunman appeared to prepare a weapon in a service area before gunfire broke out near the ballroom entrance, according to media reports.

The witness described the suspect moving from a little-monitored area toward the event space moments before shots were fired, triggering panic as guests and staff fled. The witness said numerous shots rang out, though that account has not been independently verified.

So he readied his shotgun in the service area and then tried to run right though the checkpoint and magnetometers, with no time to shoot, which makes some sense; the security forces shot (ineffectively, wounding one of their own but not badly), then caught up with him, tackled him, apparently stripping off his shirt (I suppose looking for additional weapons) and tying his hands behind his back, and left him on his belly while they moved on to emptying the ballroom of the dignitaries and other partygoers.

But Trump and police chief Carroll and other authorities didn't tell the story that way, avoiding the friendly fire aspect because it didn't look good for the home team (I'd like to go on the record saying I think guys on the ground, at least, if not leadership, handled the whole thing pretty well, probably sticking as close as possible to their training, and it's a fantastic thing that nobody was seriously hurt, and saying they may have made one mistake isn't the same as saying they are bad--they stopped him without killing him well before he got close to the venue!), and the press didn't challenge that.

Leading, I think, to a persistent sense of mystery among the public—the story we're getting just doesn't sound complete or coherent, and we don't know what we're missing (to me, as I'm saying, it's simply who shot the Secret Service guy, which they're unnecessarily hiding, but that's because I've been working on it, as nobody else, particularly in the press, has been).

As a result of which the false-flag theorists are out in force in the social media, once again, trying to spread the idea that this was a staged assassination attempt, not a real one, in the hope of goosing Trump's collapsing poll numbers with the terror and pity of a narrowly averted tragedy, or even in a couple of hypotheses to persuade the public that the goddamned ballroom is a good idea because it would be more secure than the Washington Hilton (and I'm sure, come to think of it, it would be attractive to Trump to have the entire White House Correspondents' Association as his personal guests and in debt to his hospitality). I had a bit of that idea myself as the news began coming out, partly because I'd been interested in the Russian FSB proposal before the election in Hungary to stage an assassination attempt on Viktor Orbán (which I wrote about a month ago) and think I've been noticing renewed interaction between the Trump and Putin regimes in recent months, with Steve Witkoff as the enigmatic go-between, and the immense profits Putin is reaping from the way the Trumpery is conducting the Iran war (removing sanctions on Russian oil and pushing the price up), and shouldn't Trump be getting something out of it too?

But in the end I really don't think so, for the usual reasons—a conspiracy like that has too many frail assumptions and too many working parts to succeed: even if miraculously nobody among the participants that would need to be recruited from the Secret Service, the FBI, the Metropolitan Police, the Hilton management, the WHCA gets caught, will it really suddenly change everybody's mind about Trump? And it didn't work that way in Pennsylvania in 2024 (Trump did ultimately win, but the assassination attempt was an evanescent joke, ear bandages and all, and now his former most fanatical supporters are the ones who believe hardest in the conspiracy).

The other thing is the "Friendly Federal Assassin", as he called himself in his "manifesto", who gives me an opportunity to make some points that didn't come up in the earlier attempts, not least because of the manifesto, which seems to make it clear that this isn't at all the kind of "stochastic violence" I've been writing about, driven by the coincidence of time and place, a certain kind of anomie, and the availability of a weapon, typically of the AR-15 type. Cole Allen does not seem to be one of those "lone wolves", according to reporting, though he may have had some trouble working himself into the current job market for a master's in computer science.

More important, he traveled thousands of miles, coast to coast, by train because he thought that would make him less noticeable, and booked himself into the Washington Hilton the day before the WHCD (he had the money), so he could get his weapons, a shotgun (loadable with buckshot, to minimize the chances of hurting somebody, a semiautomatic pistol, and a knife, into the building, and scope out the physical situation; he was extremely intentional, the opposite of stochastic. 

Which isn't to say his idea wasn't stupid; it was totally stupid. But it was also totally relatable, , at least to you and me, even to his religiously oriented father:

“Turning the other cheek is for when you yourself are oppressed,” he wrote. Allen would proceed to list off some of the actions from the Trump administration that allegedly drove him to open fire.

“I’m not the person raped in a detention camp. I’m not the fisherman executed without trial,” he said. “I’m not a schoolkid blown up, or a child starved, or a teenage girl abused by the many criminals in this administration. Turning the other cheek when *someone else* is oppressed is not Christian behavior; it is complicity in the oppressor’s crimes.”

Ready to check his privilege even if it kills him, as he was evidently thinking it probably would. He's wrong, but with a genuine moral instinct you have to acknowledge.

BASH: You and your fellow Democrats have used some heated rhetoric against the president. Do you think twice about that when something like that happens? RASKIN: What rhetoric do you have in mind? BASH: That he's terrible for this country and so on and so forth

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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) April 26, 2026 at 9:55 AM

When CNN's Bash brings up "rhetoric", I think it might be better to speak of sophistry, after the ancient Greek school of rhetoricians criticized both by Plato and Aristotle for teaching the manipulative use of language to aspiring politicians—rhetoric in and of itself isn't a bad thing. In her self-imposed political neutrality, Bash can't entertain the possibility that some politicians might be telling the truth in a way others aren't, even when the others in question are liars as notorious as Donald Trump, and she can't allow herself to understand that there's nothing sophistical about Raskin's rhetoric. 

But that's how it is: Trump and his people really are criminals, I mean thieves, swindlers, and murderers, often sex offenders as well, office sellers and dealers in pardons, and undercover agents of foreign interests, and it's not just their immediate victims that suffer, but all of us, by their continual subversion of the constitutional order establishing what we're beginning to call a "prerogative state" (gift link to The Atlantic) alongside the normative state bequeathed to us in the First and Second Foundings and increasingly dominating it. And nobody can do anything to prevent it, because those with the constitutional responsibility—Supreme Court and congressional majorities—don't want to or feel that they can't.

 It's a truly terrible situation even for those of us who know where to look for hope, in state governments, and federal courts working in areas SCOTUS is too lazy to supervise, in elections, and street demonstrations, and you shouldn't be surprised when somebody, not just lone wolves but people of ostensibly good character decide the only thing they can do is try to kill somebody. Though it certainly won't change anything for the better. The only way to stop that is to stop the criminals and restore the state.