Cole Tomas Allen, the gunman who tried to murder President Donald Trump and other senior officials at the White House Correspondents' Association Dinner on Saturday, is the latest would-be assassin whose radicalization owes less to the juvenile rantings of left-wing influencers than to the everyday rhetoric of mainstream Democrats and media figures.
Many have pointed out that just days before the failed assassination, the New York Times hosted a roundtable discussion in which radical left-wing pundits Hasan Piker and Jia Tolentino endorsed shoplifting and other crimes while expressing sympathy for Luigi Mangione, the gunman accused of murdering UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.
Piker is a beefcake moron who hates America and routinely justifies Islamic terrorism and other forms of political violence, but he does not appear to have inspired Allen to take a shot at Trump. On April 22, Allen promoted a post on his Bluesky account (@coldforce) criticizing Piker's defense of petty crime. "I've spent a lot of time in countries where graft and grifting are the norm and I assure you it is worth a truly immense cost to prevent that from taking hold in our society," wrote Bluesky user @machete.gay. "You do not want to live in that kind of society." The same user went on to describe Piker as a "fucking idiot."
Allen seems to have agreed with that assessment. On April 11, he promoted a Bluesky post from Sam Deutsch, the Jeopardy! National College Championship champion turned liberal policy wonk, who wrote, "I do not listen to any streamers because streamers are dumb."
A review of Allen's archived posts on Bluesky—his account is currently suspended, for obvious reasons—suggests that the alleged gunman was primarily drawn to mainstream "resistance" figures. Allen's favorite accounts included Democratic activist Will Stancil, Princeton history professor Kevin Kruse, Democratic propagandist Aaron Rupar, New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie, and Sarah Jeong, the former Times editorial board member who kept her job in 2018 after social media users discovered her racist tweets from years past.
Last week, Allen promoted Bouie's post on Bluesky denouncing Elon Musk as a "vicious white supremacist who thinks poor [A]frican children ought to die, so that the world can be whiter." On the X platform, Allen promoted several posts in 2024 from then-Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin comparing Trump to Adolf Hitler. He would presumably agree with Lincoln Project cofounder Steve Schmidt, who in the immediate aftermath of the assassination attempt condemned Trump as a "vile and disgusting man."
Allen, who donated to Kamala Harris in 2024, appears to have been particularly outraged about the Trump administration's lack of support for Ukraine and NATO, a popular sentiment among #Resistance Democrats and #NeverTrump former Republicans. He promoted a post criticizing Mehdi Hasan after the former MSNBC anchor attacked Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky for being insufficiently pro-Iran. Ryan Wesley Routh, the failed gunman who plotted to assassinate Trump at Mar-a-Lago in 2024, was also extremely distraught over the Ukrainian conflict and Trump's decision to withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal. Routh's manifesto contained rhetoric that echoed the anti-Trump tirades of Ben Rhodes and other former Democratic officials.
Allen expressed disdain for Israel, obviously—but that hardly makes him a leftist radical. Earlier this month, he promoted a post from Ken White, a.k.a. "Popehat," the prominent attorney and political commentator, denouncing Israel for "bombing the shit out of Lebanese civilians like there are Palestinian toddlers hiding there." White authored a Substack post earlier this year in which he argued there was a "plausible argument that it is morally permissible, and even morally necessary, to use political violence against the Trump Administration and its agents and supporters under the current circumstances in America." He is a graduate of Harvard Law School.
In the manifesto he wrote before the attempted shooting, Allen said he was "no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes"—language that would not be out of place on CNN or MS NOW, at a "No Kings" protest, or on a mainstream Democrat's social media feed. Hollywood actor and Democratic activist Mark Ruffalo called Trump a "pedophile," a "convicted rapist," and "the worst human being" on the Golden Globes red carpet earlier this year. Jasmine Crockett, the Democratic congresswoman and former candidate for U.S. Senate, said during a November 2025 appearance on CNN that Trump "may be a pedophile." In June 2025, the official Democratic Party X account described Republicans as the "Pedophile Protection Party." Bouie, the Times columnist, has also insinuated that Trump is a pedophile who participated in Jeffrey Epstein's "massive child sex trafficking ring."
Allen was particularly fond of mainstream Democrats and media figures who attacked Trump's mental fitness and called for his expulsion from the White House. Earlier this month, he promoted two Bluesky posts from Sen. Ron Wyden (D., Ore.), the ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee, in which Wyden vowed to prosecute Trump at "Nuremberg 2.0" for "covering up for pedophiles" and called the president a "deranged" war criminal who "must be impeached and removed from office." He promoted Rupar's post attacking Trump as a "demented old man who takes pleasure in torturing and killing people and is committing crimes with impunity."
On April 12, Allen promoted Stancil's post arguing that Trump "absolutely cannot [be] allowed to continue" because he, along with "the entire Republican Party," is "destroying" the country. Replace the word "continue" with "win the election," and you have Democratic Party's closing message from 2024. Trump was repeatedly denounced as a "fascist" who posed an "existential threat" to American democracy. Democrats lost the election, but their voters didn't forget the hysterical warnings. Several months into Trump's second term, Axios reported that Democratic lawmakers were hearing from panicked constituents who insisted that "civility isn't working" and urged them to prepare for "violence … to fight to protect our democracy."
It's not yet known whether Allen was a fan of Jimmy Kimmel, the former comedian turned ABC News late night host. Kimmel, who is also a prolific Democratic fundraiser, was briefly suspended in 2025 for falsely suggesting that Tyler Robinson, the alleged gunman who killed conservative activist Charlie Kirk, was a Trump supporter. Last week, a mere 48 hours before Allen made his mad dash for the Washington Hilton ballroom, Kimmel aired a monologue in which he joked that Melania Trump had a "glow like an expectant widow."
Ha ha.
