NEW ANALYSIS: The President Who Cried Wolf

The shooting at the WHCD has the hallmarks of a staged event. It is also the gravest national security threat the Republic has faced.

Three armed men tried to kill Donald Trump in twenty-one months. Thomas Crooks fired eight rounds from a Pennsylvania rooftop and grazed Trump’s right ear on July 13, 2024. Ryan Routh waited in a sniper’s hide at the Palm Beach golf course on September 15, 2024. Cole Tomas Allen charged the magnetometer line at the Washington Hilton on Saturday night, fired, and put a round into a Secret Service agent’s bullet-resistant vest. Three armed attempts on one man inside twenty-one months.

Statistically speaking that’s a 1-in-60 year phenomenon repeating itself 3 times in less than two years.

The only president to come close in the two hundred and thirty-seven years of American presidency was during the Civil War. Lincoln faced the Baltimore Plot in February 1861, a sniper’s round through his hat at the Soldiers’ Home in August 1864, John Wilkes Booth’s kidnapping plot in March 1865, and Booth’s bullet at Ford’s Theatre on April 14, 1865 — but Lincoln’s attempts unfolded across more than four years of presidency inside an active civil war. Gerald Ford came closest to Trump’s compression — Lynette Fromme on September 5, 1975, and Sara Jane Moore on September 22, 1975 — and then no more, ever. Four sitting presidents have been killed across those two hundred and thirty-seven years.

Trump told the country Saturday night it was “a dangerous profession.” He compared himself to Lincoln. Booth shot Lincoln over the Civil War and abolition. Charles Guiteau shot Garfield in 1881. Leon Czolgosz shot McKinley in 1901. Lee Harvey Oswald shot Kennedy in 1963 in disputed circumstances. The Lincoln comparison the President drew is the closest match in the historical record — and Lincoln’s attempts spread across four years of war. Donald Trump’s three have come in twenty-one months of peacetime, by three different men, in three different states.

This president’s chaotic tenure may echo the tumult of the Civil War, but it is in no way as bloody, and considering the advancement in our security posture, the compression is unprecedented. It begs the question: why would anyone attempt such a foolhardy assassination that would likely end in the assailant’s death well before he got anywhere near his target?

Saturday night just after 8:30 Eastern, Allen carried a shotgun, a handgun, and multiple knives into the Washington Hilton. He assembled a long gun in an unsecured back room. He fired. Officers tackled him at the magnetometer line and took him into custody. Donald Trump and Melania Trump left the stage with their detail. Vice President JD Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Education Secretary Linda McMahon left the room with theirs. Allen wounded only the agent who wore a vest. Doctors expected him to recover. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche promised federal charges within hours. None of those facts are in dispute. Within hours a manifesto “surfaces,” although it is only partially released, claiming the attack was inspired by claims the president is a pedophile as alleged in the FBI’s publicly released Epstein files.

Donald Trump entered Saturday night with the lowest favorability rating of either of his terms. His approval rating had fallen to thirty-three percent in the AP-NORC poll. His net approval had collapsed to negative eighteen — the lowest of his two terms. Sixty-seven percent of Americans disapproved of his handling of inflation. Trump walked into the Hilton on Saturday holding the worst political hand of his presidency.

Administrations under that kind of poll pressure had pulled rally-round-the-flag moves before.

As is often the case, it’s Trump’s over-reaction to the events. His desire to paint himself as the central hero of every narrative makes those of us who spend all our time analyzing the Trump presidency see the whole night as if it was fabricated in a darkened room in a long-forgotten Kremlin hallway that has never been reached by daylight, or the truth.

This president claims he ordered Secret Service to slow down so he could observe the room, he issued two Truth Social posts which painted an unrealistic picture of his command, and then returned to the podium at the White House drawing a direct link to the night’s events and his own desire to build a fancy ballroom for his presidential fetes. That’s not what happens when a real president or vice president faces an actual physical threat. Mike Pence was scurried away to a secure location on Capitol Hill and then shunted quietly off the scene in what was by all accounts a terrifying sequence. He didn’t show up on national TV at the VP’s residence within an hour demanding an election recount.

The fact that Pence was targeted by a mob inspired by the president is not lost on me. How many presidents stage the lynching of their VP, and are also themselves the targets of 3 assassination attempts? What are the odds of that?

Trump, whose poker game is notoriously poor, revealed his own hand on national TV when he described what he saw as an outcome of the day’s events. A scenario so far from the truth, it could make you laugh out loud, if it weren’t so serious. Trump told the country he saw a room “totally unified.” He said he saw “a tremendous amount of love and coming together.” He must have been in shock because neither of those assessments cuts close to any truth.

Then he spent two minutes on his East Wing ballroom — the $300 million boondoggle of an homage to Hitler which is also a not-so-secret privately funded construction of an uber-bunker from which Bibi Netanyahu’s friend Larry Ellison can control the world by monitoring your every move. He’s been pushing this crusade for months and the courts have been halting his efforts.

Here’s Trump’s reasoning, hours from coming within 50 feet of mortal danger. He told the country the Hilton was “not a particularly secure building” — true because it’s a publicly accessible hotel — but his ballroom would be more secure — also true, as no one can book a room at the White House using their Hilton rewards card. He rattled on about drones and a bulletproof roof which is completely irrelevant to the night’s events which feature a lone gunman on an apparent suicide mission. “Secret Service and the military are demanding it, for 250 years,” he said.

The Secret Service was founded in 1865 to fight counterfeit currency, and did not protect presidents until 1901 — 125 years, not 150. The Secret Service does not lobby for White House construction projects, and never has.

Within hours, the President’s social echo chamber began chanting in unison about the ballroom. Rudy Giuliani told his followers, “Maybe the haters can begin by supporting the WH much larger and more secure ballroom.” Jack Posobiec wrote, “Thank God President Trump is building a ballroom at the White House.” GOP lawmakers repeated the line. The MAGA media universe lined up behind one talking point — we need the ballroom — predictable. Like clockwork. Nothing about the president’s alleged pedophilia, ties to Epstein, or the tanking economy, all of which gives the entire sleaziest of presidencies a Marie Antoinette vibe.

Trump’s eagerness to steal the limelight showed itself in another oft-questioned assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania. He raised a bloody-eared fist on stage seconds after Crooks fell. Three days later he raised that same fist at the Republican National Convention. Trump had constructed a narrative so unlikely it can’t be true, well before a shot was fired.

Trump’s Norma Desmond-like desire to be the star doesn’t seem in touch with a world where independent media outlets like this one are calling balls and strikes about Trump’s truths in real-time. Even before his late-night tuxedoed press conference, I warned Narativ’s viewers to question what they were about to hear. “We must be skeptical,” I said. The times — no, this presidency — demands it.

Saturday night, Trump told reporters he had heard “either a tray or a bullet.” He said the noise was “quite far away.” He said his wife Melania had been “very cognizant” it was a shooting. Allen fired a shotgun at the magnetometer line — thirty to fifty feet from the lectern. A shotgun fired inside a hotel ballroom does not sound far away. It does not sound like a tray. Anyone who has fired a shotgun knows the difference. Trump has fired guns publicly. The “tray or bullet” anecdote covered the multiple seconds his detail took to move him.

By Sunday afternoon, on 60 Minutes, Trump had a different account.

Cole Tomas Allen did not match the profile of a man who runs at a presidential perimeter with a knife collection and no plan. He earned a Bachelor of Science in mechanical engineering from Caltech in 2017. He held a Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in 2014. He earned a master’s in computer science from California State University, Dominguez Hills, in 2025. C2 Education in Torrance named him Teacher of the Month in December 2024. This doesn’t sound like a man who wouldn’t plan for any possibility, let alone one that would normally lead to almost certain death — most likely, his own.

If you want to know what assassination attempts at public events look like, consider Charlie Kirk.

Lee Harvey Oswald shot John F. Kennedy from a sixth-floor sniper’s perch he had spent days selecting. Cole Tomas Allen ran at a magnetometer line where Secret Service stood with rifles between him and the President. He had no upstairs window. No line of sight. No escape route. A Caltech engineer with a NASA JPL fellowship calculates risk and reward for a living. Saturday’s run did not look like a calculation. The probability of Allen’s survival is almost as absurd as the night’s preposterous ballroom subtext.

Allen fired five rounds. None hit Donald Trump. The only round that connected with anyone struck a Secret Service agent in his bullet-resistant vest at the magnetometer line. Trump was inside the ballroom, behind a wall, on a stage. Allen had no line of sight to the lectern. Five rounds discharged inside the building, none landed on the man the administration is calling the target. They landed on the perimeter — where the agent was.

Then came the predictable narrative shifts. Allen told investigators after his arrest he wanted to shoot "administration officials" — a motive framed as "administration officials, as a class." By Sunday, officials had adjusted the talking point, claiming Trump was the intended target all along.

A man who travels to Washington with a shotgun, a handgun, and multiple knives, and assembles a long gun in a back room, is not a man who intended to shoot a president. The night’s events prove how foolhardy an exploit that would be. He intended to do what he did: run a magnetometer and not die doing it. No one died. That’s not miraculous; that reeks of planning.

The Secret Service reactions did not match either. Vance’s detail had the Vice President out of the room within a micro-second. Vance’s team behaved like professionals who knew their principal was a target. Trump’s team sauntered in seconds later, chatting with agents while they tried to move him.

Trump told CBS correspondent Norah O’Donnell why. He said he had not been worried during the shooting. He said he had not made it easy for the Secret Service to move him. He told her he had asked the agents to “wait a minute” so he could “see what was going on.” Trump’s detail had moved slowly because, by Trump’s own Sunday account, Trump had made them.

Saturday Trump heard “either a tray or a bullet” from “quite far away.” Sunday Trump was unworried and resisting evacuation in real time to “see what was going on.”

Anyone who has ever been near the Secret Service knows they do not ask for permission if they perceive a real risk to their target. They do their job, and they get their protectee to safety.

So why create such an outlandish spectacle no one can believe? The regime needs a way to escape Jeffrey Epstein’s ghost who looms over every move the president makes. Epstein was conveniently the main reason Allen used to justify his public act of near suicide. This was the exact framing the regime would need to justify a crackdown on the broader political opposition.

His appearance on the captured CBS News investigative series 60 Minutes underlined Trump’s personal preoccupation with his former best friends and their shared proclivities for young girls.

O’Donnell read from Cole Tomas Allen’s manifesto. She read first: “administration officials, they are target.” Then she read: “I’m no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes.”

Trump’s reaction was prepared. “I was waiting for you to read that because I knew you would because you’re horrible people,” he told her. “Horrible people.” He confirmed the words. “Yeah. He did write that.” He defended. “I’m not a rapist. I didn’t rape anybody.” O’Donnell asked if Allen had been referring to him. “Me? Excuse me. I’m not a pedophile. You read that crap from some sick person.” He admitted he had read the manifesto already. “I read the manifesto, you know, he is a sick person.” His Epstein deflection arrived in the same breath. “Your friends on the other side of the plate are the ones that were involved with, let’s say Epstein or other things.”

The faux outrage at O’Donnell, who is currently being held in captivity by Bibi Netanyahu’s friend Larry Ellison and his son David, reveals itself. If it were real, CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss would not have aired the clip. You can just hear the architects of this so-called assassination attempt congratulating themselves on this two-for-one attempt at a brand clean-up. They must have believed they could bury Epstein’s ghost and save CBS News’ disastrous ratings plunge in a single weekend.

Trump knew the question was coming. He had read the manifesto. He had a prepared answer for the question, a prepared deflection on Epstein, and a prepared insult for O’Donnell — horrible people — ready before she finished the sentence.

Within hours of Allen’s arrest, partisan platforms had a finished suspect frame: “left-wing teacher,” “Harris donor,” “lefty terrorist whackjob.” Mainstream outlets had not yet confirmed the name. Real reporting took longer than the political characterization. A suspect identity that arrived ready-made was the kind a crackdown on opponent groups required.

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