The line “I get angry thinking about everything this administration has done” could probably have been written in an email to friends and any number of attendees at last night’s White House Correspondents’ Association dinner. But that line was apparently written by someone who showed up with a gun and a pistol and was ready to kill “most everyone” there to get to Donald Trump and kill him and his Cabinet. In a notice-like email he reportedly sent to the family minutes before the alleged shooting, Cole Thomas Allen wrote that the journalists who gathered with the killers “chose to attend the speech of a bully, rapist and traitor, and therefore participate.” Allen never got close to the president or the gala floor. A Secret Service agent was shot in the vest before Allen was confronted and arrested.
Random acts of violence by random people are unfortunately a feature of modern life. The scariest shooters aren’t the yahoos, but the smart ones—those who carefully plan, train, and choose their settings to do the most damage. Think of Anders Behring Breivik, who killed 69 teenagers at a left-wing summer camp in Norway, or the Islamic State commandos who killed 90 music fans at the Bataclan in Paris in 2015. An email attributed to Allen and the few biographical details known about him suggest he was capable of doing far more harm than he did. But something proved to be flawed in his plan or mind, and as a result, no one was killed.
Allen graduated from the California Institute of Technology in 2017 and apparently made a living as a test preparation tutor and college admissions consultant. Caltech is a kind of Valhalla, where bright and creative young people study and engage in corruption. Despite being in California, it is not a Maoist redoubt. Only free radicals are in chemistry labs. Twenty-six years ago, students took then-President Bill Clinton’s visit as a challenge, and outwitted the Secret Service by secretly stealing the flag to unfurl it at the wrong time. But mockery and corruption, not politics, was the point. The poster read IMPEACH NIXON.
Allen’s email suggests Trump’s fanaticism for murder and politics. Some people hate his policies, and say so, and yet they can eat among the architects of those policies they hate. Allen, a former member of Caltech’s Christian fellowship, accepted an unusual reading of Jesus’ command in the Sermon on the Mount to turn the other cheek. “Turning the other cheek is when you yourself are oppressed,” he wrote in his email. “Turning the other cheek when another person being bullied is not a Christian character; is to participate in the crime of the oppressor.” The wrongs he was thinking of included “a schoolboy who was bombed, or a child who starved, or a teenage girl who was abused.”
The excerpts that have been published from this email so far, in New York Post and The Wall Street Journaldon’t sound at all like the crazy words that show so many letters sent by attempted murderers before their deed. And Allen’s complaints, while too vague to evaluate personally, are actually the kind of things one can get a job on. He wrote that he needed to do “something.” Many at the Hilton last night thought something had to be done, but only one thought the sensible answer was to kill the architects of these policies and those who dined around them.
There are, of course, signs of unusual thinking, even in this email. Allen seemed to think he could shoot his way into the ballroom, past the Secret Service, with a gun. “To reduce casualties, I’ll also be using buckshot instead of slugs (small penetration through walls).” His understanding of ballistics is confused: Even buckshot will generally penetrate half of the interior walls. And the belief that he could cross so many hallways and yards of armed and trained men and women, without being taken out himself, speaks to a John Wick-like delusion that still manages to prove its origins. Photos of Allen confined to the floor of the Hilton show an unusually wrinkled man, his shoulders visible through the skin. Some people are just thin. Some have skin because they are unhealthy in other ways.
There is one point in his email that I must judge to be completely sane. He notes that it was a simple matter of finding a hotel room the night of the party, and bringing his guns inside. “If I were an Iranian agent,” he wrote, “I could bring a Ma Deuce (a .50-caliber rifle) here and nobody would see the dirt.” He went on to explain the concerns of the citizens. “This level of incompetence is insane, and I sincerely hope it will be fixed when this country gets better leadership again.”
When I first heard that shots were fired at the dinner, I assumed that the attack was related to Iran and was some sort of payback for the wave of US-Israeli assassinations of Iranian leaders during the ongoing war. The United States in particular has historically been cautious about using this capability, and Iran—although it enjoys killing—has controlled the use of this tool against Americans. The country has tried to assassinate US officials but has hired hard-headed and incompetent people because they are cheap and add a layer of deniability. Now that Iran’s enemies have aggressively targeted Iran’s leaders, Iran may decide that it has nothing to lose by jumping the gun and sending in its best assassins. Allen is right to note that a capable assassination squad would find the job easier than one might expect. Fortunately, he was wrong to think that he was such a force alone.
