I Found Out About the WHCD Shooting From My Twenty Four Year Old Son. Here's What I've Been Thinking All Day.
Cole Tomas Allen called himself a “Friendly Federal Assassin.” He didn’t pull the trigger in a vacuum.
I spent Saturday evening completely unplugged. No news. No social media. I slept in today.
When I came downstairs, my son Noah looked up at me from his phone and said, “So, did you hear that Trump almost got shot at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner?”
My response was literally, “No f’ing way.”
I have spent the rest of the day reading about Cole Tomas Allen, the 31-year-old man from Torrance, California, who charged through a security checkpoint at the Washington Hilton on Saturday night with a shotgun, a handgun, and several knives. I left my wife and son watching One Day on Netflix and came up to my office to dig into this horrible story.
Here is what I keep landing on. The country we are living in did not end up here by accident. And I do not think the man in the room with the loudest microphone gets to act surprised about any of this.
What actually happened
According to NBC News, Allen rushed the security checkpoint outside the ballroom around 8:36 p.m. Eastern. He fired multiple rounds. He struck one Secret Service agent in a bullet-resistant vest. The vest held. The agent is recovering.
CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer was a few feet away when the firing started. He says Allen got off at least six rounds before being tackled. President Trump, the First Lady, the Vice President, and most of the Cabinet were rushed off the head table to safety. The dinner was canceled.
Allen survived the takedown. He was not shot. He was taken to a hospital for evaluation.
He is, on paper, an unlikely shooter. He earned a degree in mechanical engineering from Caltech. He once interned at NASA. He had a master’s in computer science from Cal State Dominguez Hills. He worked part-time as a teacher and developed video games on the side. A former high-school volleyball teammate told NBC he had been a “borderline genius” and “super stable” in earlier years.
He had attended a No Kings protest in California. He had donated $25 to ActBlue in support of the Kamala Harris campaign in 2024.
Then, ten minutes before charging the Washington Hilton, he sent his family an email.
The “Friendly Federal Assassin”
CBS News reviewed the email. I have been reading their summary all afternoon, and I want to walk you through what is in it. Allen’s own words are the clearest window into how a man like this gets here.
He opened with a chilling kind of cheerfulness:
“Hello everybody! So I may have given a lot of people a surprise today.”
He apologized to his parents for telling them his trip was for a job interview without specifying that the interview was for the FBI’s Most Wanted list. He apologized to colleagues and students for the cover story he had given them. He referred to any wounds he was about to suffer as “self-inflicted status.”
He named his targets. Officials of the Trump administration, ranked by priority. He excluded FBI Director Kash Patel by name. He said he would not target Secret Service, Capitol Police, or National Guard troops except when forced to.
He wrote, “In order to minimize casualties, I will also be using buckshot rather than slugs (less penetration through walls).”
Elsewhere in his writings, per NewsNation and the New York Post, he gave himself the title “Friendly Federal Assassin.”
The most haunting part of the email is the structure of his self-justification. He addressed an imagined reader. He raised hypothetical objections. He answered them.
“As a half-black, half-white person, you shouldn’t be the one doing this. Rebuttal: I don’t see anyone else picking up the slack.”
“As a Christian, you should turn the other cheek. Rebuttal: Turning the other cheek is for when you yourself are oppressed.”
He went on to list anonymous people, hypothetical victims, whose hardship he attributed to administration policy. He did not want, he said, to let the “crimes” of the administration “coat” his hands. He closed:
“I don’t expect forgiveness, but if I could have seen any other way to get this close, I would have taken it.”
I read those lines out loud to myself this afternoon. Slowly.
This is not the writing of a man who lost his marbles. This is the writing of a man who built an internal moral case, point by point, that violence was a debt he owed to people he had never met. It is wrong. It is morally insane.
It is, in its own way, lucid. And lucid is the part I cannot stop thinking about. The grievances he names did not come from nowhere.
What the research has been telling us for years
There is a concept in extremism research called stochastic terrorism. Steven Hassan summarized it in Psychology Today last September, after Charlie Kirk was assassinated. The idea is simple. When a leader spends years vilifying a target group, somewhere out in an audience of millions, an unstable person decides that violence is justified. The math is probabilistic, not deterministic. You cannot predict which person will act. You can predict that someone will, eventually.
There is a related concept called dehumanization. Decades of social-psychology research show that representing an out-group as less than fully human loosens the moral restraints that ordinarily prevent violence. When you call other Americans vermin, when you call migrants poison, you do not have to consciously believe those words yourself. The associations move into ordinary cognition. The targets become, as Nick Haslam puts it, “lesser beings.”
There is a newer frame called grievance-fueled violence. It treats political ideology, personal injury, and psychiatric distress not as competing explanations for lone-actor violence but as overlapping ones. Real perpetrators almost never fit cleanly into one box.
Cole Allen is a textbook case of all three.
The vocabulary that put us here
Let me put this plainly. Donald Trump has been using the metaphors of contagion and infestation against his political opponents for years. This is not in dispute. It is on tape.
On Veterans Day in November 2023, he pledged to “root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.”
One month later, in New Hampshire, he said undocumented immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country.”
The Anti-Defamation League and the League of United Latin American Citizens both compared the language to fascist propaganda of the twentieth century. The comparison was not metaphorical. It was historical. The vermin trope has a documented track record in propaganda preceding mass violence in twentieth-century Europe and in Rwanda.
He did not retreat from those words. He repeated them. He refined them. He built a campaign around them. He won.
When you call your political opposition vermin and poison for two years, you are not having a policy debate. You are training a country to think of one another as a contamination problem.
That training does not stay neatly inside the political team that ordered it.
