A selfie taken by Cole Allen showing all of the weapons he carried into the White House Correspondents Association Dinner

There have been, according to Wikipedia (I know, but it’s surprisingly the most thorough source on the topic I could find), eighteen serious or less than serious attempts or at least plans developed to assassinate President Donald Trump, more than any other president. Barack Obama comes in second at thirteen.

Assassins have various motives for killing the president. John Wilkes Booth, of course, hoped to inspire the South to continue the Civil War, to reignite the then smoldering remains of the Confederate States of America. The opposite occurred. Lincoln’s death took the last breath out of a country that was already over-weary of a war that had taken so many lives. Charles Guiteau provided minor assistance to James Garfield’s presidential campaign, then somehow convinced himself that this merited a position in Garfield’s administration. When none was given, he felt unjustly slighted and killed President Garfield in hopes that Chester Arthur would rise to the presidency and secure him the position he so desired and believed he deserved. Leon Czolgosz was an anarchist who genuinely wanted to disrupt the regular functioning of government when he shot and killed President William McKinley. Finally, the motives Lee Harvey Oswald had for assassinating President John F. Kennedy are murky and have been debated for decades. Unfortunately (or was it by design?) Jack Ruby killed Oswald two days after Oswald killed Kennedy, thus silencing the assassin and any hope of learning a certain motive. Some have speculated that Oswald being a Communist and Kennedy being an anti-Communist was enough to motivate Oswald. Others have speculated that ideology and policy had nothing to do with it, and that Oswald’s goal was not to kill John Kennedy. Rather, his goal was to kill the President of the United States. Anyone who was in that office would have been his target.

It seems we can’t say the same for those who have attempted to assassinate Trump. Rightly or wrongly in what they think Trump’s policies are or have been, the consensus seems to be that Trump is one of the most hated presidents in American history. Of course, you could also make the case that he is one of the most beloved, or at least that those who love him have been particularly loyal to him. When it comes to Trump, it’s easy to make a distinction between the man himself and his policies. There are many of his policies I like, for instance. But the man himself strikes me as a buffoon, an arrogant, self-centered man who plans to get as much out of the presidency as he gives to it, at least in terms of historical significance which, for Trump, always seem to come down to his being the greatest, the biggest, the most powerful, the most important, the most successful, etc… In his policies, Trump really does seem to want to make America first. In his personal ambitions, there is no question who comes first in Trump’s mind.

So, okay, Trump is an easy guy to not like. But to kill? At least five times in the last two years, someone has committed themselves to the effort of killing Donald Trump. Not only that, but there is this weird sense of comfort and social justification among so many in expressing their disappointment that the attempted assassins failed. I have never witnessed such a thing in American politics, of which I’ve been a pretty close observer for many decades now. When Ronald Reagan was shot and seriously injured (we didn’t learn until well after his death how close he came to dying that day), there were no communications on radio or TV or on stage or wherever expressing disappointment that John Hinkley had failed to carry out his mission. There was near universal empathy for Reagan and congratulations poured in from all political sides for having survived being shot and badly injured.

But when Trump is shot, or even threatened, there are plenty of people who seem comfortable expressing their disappointment that the assassin failed, with the obvious expectation that they will suffer no consequences. Happily, that has not been the case, at least not always. A social media manager lost her job at UnitedHealthcare, a Wisconsin high school teacher was put on leave, and an Ohio daycare worker was fired, all for using social media to express their disappointment that Trump was not assassinated. And they’re not the only ones. The Minocqua Brewing Company of Wisconsin, owned by former Democrat state Assembly candidate Kirk Bangstad, wrote on its Facebook page: “Well, we almost got #freebeerday. Either a brother or sister in the Resistance needs to work on their marksmanship or [Trump] faked another assassination to get a positive news cycle. We’ll never know. Regardless, we stand at the ready to pour free beer the day it happens.” The brewery has a long-running promotion advertising free beer to all on the day Trump dies. Indeed, a poll conducted by the Network Contagion Research Institute this year found that 67% of left-leaning Americans agreed that it was at least somewhat justified to assassinate President Trump. That number is up from 56% last year.

What is going on here? I agree, again, that Trump is an easy guy to not like. He says ridiculous things. He says inappropriate things. His braggadocio is through the roof. Trump even claimed that Pope Leo XIV would not have been elected pope if he had not been president, as if the College of Cardinals went into the conclave asking themselves who would be best to compliment or counter Trump, and came up with a Chicago native who had spent the last more than two decades in Peru!

Even still, the rhetoric against Trump has been disgusting and over the top. Critics regularly compare him to Hitler, regularly describe him as a “threat to democracy,” regularly defame him as a racist, a misogynist, an anti-Semite, a rapist, and a pedophile. The criticism of his policies is as hyberbolic as is Trump’s bragging about his policies. His policies are ruining the economy, ruining the nation, threatening the vote for blacks and other minorities, threatening the rights of the LGBT community, and threatening the rights of women. Never has a president in my lifetime suffered such slings and arrows, not even Nixon during the Watergate scandal. It really does seem that whatever Trump supports the Democrats will oppose, for no other reason than that Trump supports it. The rhetoric, certainly, can be pretty heated on both sides, and Trump usually gives as well as he gets. But the truth is, conservative Trump supporters aren’t targeting political opponents for assassination.

I sincerely wish that Trump had retired after losing the White House in 2020. Then again, I wish Joe Biden had never run for the presidency, that he hadn’t picked Kamala Harris as VP, and that the country would be far better off if people like Harris, Nancy Pelosi, Mitch McConnell, Church Schumer, and so many others would decide that they had done enough to serve their country and would slip away to a nice retirement, all on the taxpayer’s dime, of course.

But is it any wonder that people become enflamed with the negative rhetoric toward Trump, and some of those people decide to take matters into their own hands. It’s of no significance, in their minds, that Trump was duly elected president by the Electoral College and that he won the popular vote. Cole Thomas Allen knows better than all those people, and he was determined to steal their election victory away from them. He was not going to allow the man who won the 2024 election for president fairly and squarely to continue to serve as president, the voice of the people be damned! Assassination is the ultimate threat to democracy, because it robs the people of their chosen president. Assassination is an act that tells the nation, “You blew it! You could have elected the right candidate, the candidate that I supported. Instead, you elected the wrong candidate, the candidate I told you not to elect. As such, I’m going to have fo fix your mistake and take matters into my own hands, making sure your choice for president is unable to continue his duties.”

Cole Allen, it seems, is not a stupid man. He is not an insane or mentally unstable man. He is a highly recognized member of his chosen profession, educating youth, who decided that, since the American people had made such a horrible mistake in electing Trump, he was going to take it upon himself to correct that mistake. And how did he come about deciding that the American people had made such a horrible mistake? Could it be because he listened to and took to heart the apoplectic anti-Trump rhetoric spewed forth by Trump’s political critics ever day – nay, every hour of every day?

Democrats and other Trump critics will, of course, say no to such a charge. I’m not so sure they have a leg to stand on. When the Southern Poverty Law Center identified the Family Research Council as a hate group, a gunman used their hate map to locate the FRC office and shot it up. Not long after the SPLC identified Turning Point USA as a hate group in 2025, a lone gunman shot its founder, Charlie Kirk, at a Turning Point rally, killing him. Words have power. Words influence people. We know this, or we wouldn’t be trying to persuade or dissuade others with our words. Clearly, some people have decided that words are not enough, and they have “graduated” to the level of taking violent action against the targets of this hyperbolic rhetoric. It may be that these people could not have been stopped except by a bullet, or an arrest. But it seems to me that we could begin our efforts to diffuse the violence by better choosing our words.

Be Christ for all. Bring Christ to all. See Christ in all.