On Saturday’s Assassination Attempt
The ballroom was full of journalists in formal wear. The burrata salad with spring peas had just been served. A magician was demonstrating a feat of mind-reading to the President and those seated with him at the head table. Gunshots rang out. It took a moment to register with the attendees, who only reacted when Secret Service agents sprang into action. A look of shock came over the face of the First Lady. The President looked over at her as if he wanted her to be the last thing he saw before eternity.
Outside, in the corridor, the gunman was tackled. Officers stripped him to his shorts to search for weapons and wounds. The President quickly posted a photo of the gunman face down on the floor, hands tied behind his back. Then law enforcement wrapped him in a Mylar emergency blanket, and the picture of him in the foil went out on the wires.
Some time later, President Trump walked into the press briefing room at the White House, flanked by his Vice-President, Attorney General, Secretary of War, Secretary of State, and Director of the FBI. They had not changed their clothes, nor had the press in front of them. The room was simultaneously a state event and a costume drama. CNN anchor Kaitlan Collins, who has long played the adversarial interlocutor in her public interactions with the President, asked a question, for the first time anyone could remember, with genuine humanity. She looked beautiful, sitting in her gown in the front row.
The event has been processed as the most recent of several credible assassination attempts against President Trump, but Cole Tomas Allen’s manifesto, scheduled to be sent to his family at 8:40 that evening, had named administration officials in the plural as his targets. The image at the briefing room of the President flanked by his Men was therefore not that of a retinue around a prince but of a cohort, men who had survived the same battle, standing shoulder to shoulder in battle dress. It was a touch of poetry on the part of fate to have these men in black tie at the threshold moment.
The images from the briefing room capped what was already a series of glittering images from across the evening. Stephen Miller using his own body to shield his pregnant wife. Pete Hegseth moving around the perimeter of the room like a leopard stalking a gazelle. Marco Rubio and his wife waiting outside the West Wing. Michael Glantz remaining seated, continuing to eat his salad. Andy Harnik of Getty Images, calmly snapping photos with his camera in one hand and a bourbon in the other.
What the images caught was the entire pagan repertoire of male response to violence, performed in tuxedos, in real time, in front of a press class that has spent a generation denying the existence of such a thing. None of these men decided in the moment what they were going to be. Each of them under fire was the kind of man he had been all along.
As for Allen, he had wanted to be Brutus. He got to be a burrito.
II
Caltech 2013 to 2017. Mechanical engineering. The Christian Fellowship. The Nerf Club.
Allen is a recognizable American type, particularly at the better technical schools like Caltech. Gifted. Socially awkward. Intensely sincere. Not surprising that he landed an internship at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory or had a teaching assistantship at Caltech. But the assistantship ran out, and the JPL internship did not convert to a staff position. Like many men of his generation, a promising start petered out into a sort of listlessness.
By 2025, eight years out of Caltech, he had paid for and earned a master’s degree in computer science at Cal State Dominguez Hills, a working-class regional state school in the South Bay. A Caltech mechanical engineer who returns to Cal State for a CS master’s at thirty is a clear sign that something went wrong. His day job was working at C2 Education, a chain of strip-mall test prep centers, teaching the children of Los Angeles parents how to score the scores he had already scored, en route to the schools he had already attended, headed for the trajectory he had already failed to convert.
The gap between what he thought he would get and what arrived is the gap into which something else was free to enter. What entered was the church.
The man whose secular trajectory has visibly failed is the man for whom religious vocation becomes totalizing. The credentialing system promised significance and did not deliver. The corrupted social gospel offers significance that does not require institutional ratification.
He thought he was performing a sacrament. Instead, he was performing a banquet, the central social technology of human violence.
III
Washington runs on mimetic rivalry. Politicians, journalists, lobbyists, and staff all desire the same scarce resources to access, status, and proximity to power. The intensity of the rivalry is the entire reason the city exists. In archaic societies, this kind of unmanaged rivalry produces all-against-all violence. To prevent that, societies develop rituals.
The White House Correspondents’ Dinner is, anthropologically, a ritual container. It is a banquet at which the press and the executive eat together once a year and perform a roast—a ceremonial form of mockery that converts mimetic rivalry into theatrical entertainment. The roast is the ancient device by which the king is reminded that he is mortal and the courtiers are reminded that they are not above him. It is the safety valve by which the mimetic pressure of Washington is, in principle, allowed to discharge in ceremonial form rather than in actual violence.
This ritual stopped working some time ago. The President at the head table on Saturday night had not attended one of these dinners during his first term. The press corps had spent the intervening decade describing him in vocabulary that no roast could metabolize—authoritarian, Hitler, the most dangerous man in American history. What had been the safety valve had become, instead, an annual concentration of the hatred it was supposed to discharge. The pressure had to go somewhere. It went to Cole Allen, who picked it up from the press that had been generating it and brought it back, ironically, to their version of prom.
Girard’s most famous reading of a banquet that broke this way is the death of John the Baptist in the Gospel of Mark. Herod is hosting his court and makes a rash promise to a dancing girl in front of his assembled guests. The girl runs to her mother and asks what to demand. The mother tells her: the head of John the Baptist on a platter. The girl returns and hastens to ask immediately. (Mark’s Greek is emphatic about the speed). Herod, trapped by his oath in front of the court, kills the prophet to avoid losing face. The head is delivered at the feast. The crowd consumes the prophet symbolically, and the room is reconciled by his blood.
Girard’s point is that the girl is not the agent of the violence. She is the medium. The murderous desire belongs to the room. She absorbs it from her mother and accelerates it through herself onto Herod, who executes the act because the room demands it. The girl is a blank slate of desire. She has nothing of her own. She is the channel through which the banquet becomes violence.
Cole Tomas Allen was the dancing girl of the WHCA banquet. The crowd he absorbed the desire from was the broader crowd of liberal American discourse: the New York Times, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, MSNBC, Pod Save America, the Sunday programs, the prestige podcasts, the post-evangelical theological circuit, and the elected officials of the Democratic Party, who have spent the last decade hammering the proposition that the President is an aspiring dictator whose movement constitutes a threat to the soul of the nation. And, in the last several months, a growing portion of the President’s own former coalition has picked up similarly ominous lines of rhetoric, like Tucker Carlson, who a few weeks ago intimated that the President may be the Antichrist. Other former supporters now claim that the President is dangerous, engaged in war crimes, and must be stopped by extraordinary means.
These narratives were all absorbed by Allen, whose manifesto reproduces them verbatim: “the person raped in a detention camp, the fisherman executed without trial, the schoolkid blown up, the child starved, the teenage girl abused by the many criminals in this administration.” The archaic banquet consumes a victim. The community gathers around the corpse of the scapegoat and eats, symbolically or literally, to internalize their reconciliation. The peace is real and fraudulent, both at once. The room is reconciled by the blood. The blood was innocent. The room does not countenance this innocence and goes home satisfied.
IV
The Eucharist runs the mechanism backward. Christ offers himself willingly. The community does not consume a victim murdered by an angry mob. The community consumes the total refusal of violence, which is Christ. The Eucharistic banquet exposes the guilt of the persecuting crowd and the innocence of the victim. It breaks the spell.
Cole Allen was performing the archaic banquet in Christian drag. The catechism that taught him has spent 50 years progressively stripping the Eucharistic content from mainline Protestantism while preserving and intensifying the sacrificial impulse. The Christian moral life, in the version he absorbed, is no longer the imitation of Christ but the active intervention against oppression on behalf of the oppressed, by violence if necessary. The imitation on offer is the imitation of the executioner who serves the head at the feast and claims he has done it for the kingdom of God.
Read the manifesto with this distinction in mind, and the architecture becomes legible. Allen is offered the imitatio Christi, but he refuses it on the grounds that it does not apply to him. I am not the person raped in a detention camp. I am not the fisherman executed without trial. The Christian, in his catechism, is not bound to the martyr-in-the-coliseum posture of self-sacrifice because the Christian is not personally suffering. The Christian’s role is to act on behalf of those who are. The role available to the Christian in 2026, in this catechism, is therefore not the cross but the sword, deployed so that others will not have to bear the cross.
The pre-Christian polity organized itself around the sacrifice of victims for the good of the community, and the Christian revolution was the discovery that the victims were innocent and that the community’s reconciliation through their blood was a lie. The mainline denominations that catechized Allen retained the vocabulary of justice, oppression, complicity, and sacrifice, but lost the idea of the willing victim. What they produce now is what the archaic banquet has always produced: a community reconciled by the blood of someone they have decided is the obstacle.
Allen is what comes out the other end of the production line when the blood the catechism demands is the blood of the President of the United States. The pipeline that catechized him hands him a target and a vocation. Girard understood that the modern world’s most dangerous form of religious feeling was the form that had retained the moral seriousness of Christianity while abandoning the willing-victim revelation that gave Christianity its content. He called this the persecution of the innocent under the cover of justice. It is the pre-Christian sacrificial mechanism returned in Christian costume, with Allen being its American instance.
V
In his manifesto, after the political grievances, scriptural reasoning, and apologies to family, colleagues, and students, Allen pivots to a long, detailed complaint about security at the Hilton. He had expected metal detectors, surveillance, and agents at every bend. He encountered nothing, a fact he is furious about.
He concludes with the line: “If I were an Iranian agent, instead of an American citizen, I could have brought a damn Ma Deuce in here and no one would have noticed.” The complaint is presented as a semi-patriotic concern about Secret Service incompetence. But what it really is is the complaint that the world failed to notice him even at the moment he was preparing to force their noticing at gunpoint.
The aspiring assassin does not only want to be witnessed by the act, but for the witnessing to be adequate to his significance. He wants the security he had to defeat to have been worthy of what he is. The fact that he walked through with a shotgun, a pistol, and multiple knives, unchallenged by hotel staff, and made it to the metal detector at the top of the staircase is a final cosmic insult. The system did not even take him seriously enough to try to stop him.
His bondage is total. His recognition is denied even as he is trying to seize it.
VI
The American republic has, in the last sixty years, run through four mimetic manifestations of mass violence and is now starting the fifth.
The first ran from Dallas through Memphis, Los Angeles, the Weather Underground bombings, and Squeaky Fromme misfiring at Gerald Ford. Political assassins. Revolutionary cells. It ended at this same Hilton on March 30, 1981, when Hinckley shot Reagan to impress the actress Jodie Foster, who he became obsessed with after watching the movie Taxi Driver 15 times in the summer of 1976. Hinckley was the form’s ultimate degeneration. The country read it as the final act of that chapter. But in 1986, a postal worker named Patrick Sherrill walked into a sorting facility in Edmond, Oklahoma, and shot fourteen of his coworkers.
A new chapter began.
Mark Ames’s Going Postal, published in 2005, is the indispensable text on what happened next. Its central argument is that the postal massacres and the school shootings that followed are structurally identical to the slave revolts of the antebellum South. Each phase of public terror corresponded to which institution had most recently been stripped of its rituals. Politics in the sixties and seventies. The workplace in the age of downsizing, offshoring, deindustrialization, and McKinsey-led hollowing out of the middle managerial labor categories. The school in the Columbine generation. The public square under the platform economy of the 2010s. And now, with Allen at the Hilton, the credential pipeline itself.
VII
There is a way Saturday’s assassination attempt differs from Butler’s and Utah Valley’s that has not yet been clearly stated.
Butler did not freak out the prestige press. Utah Valley freaked them out a little, but they soon reverted to form. The murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson produced, in some quarters, open celebration. The attitude was that political violence directed against the Right was, if regrettable, understandable. Inglourious Basterds, One Battle After Another—these are the imagined moral analogs to the kind of violence that is being pre-justified and fantasized about.
When Trump was shot in Butler, the press pivoted within forty-eight hours to what about the rhetoric on the right. When Charlie Kirk was killed, the coverage was characterized by a notable absence of the sustained moral attention the press devotes to deaths it considers genuinely tragic. The frame absorbed each of these events by treating violence against the right as intelligible and explicable in a way that violence against the press itself would not be.
Saturday should have fit the frame. Cole Tomas Allen was perfect for it. Educated, religious, motivated by humanitarian concerns about detention camps, starved children, and abused girls. He was reasoning, by his own lights, exactly as Hollywood, media, and the Democratic Party said the morally serious citizen ought to reason. He was the ideal protagonist of every editorial that had been written about resistance, conscience, complicity, and the demands of the moment.
Violence against the Right could be absorbed when it was happening at right-wing events. That is to say, elsewhere. It cannot be absorbed when the violence is happening at the Washington press corps version of prom. Allen had taken the moral framework the press had been generating seriously enough to apply it consistently. Consistent application of Trump is Hitler and the people enabling him are collaborators puts the press class itself in scope. The press was not eating dinner across town from the people they had been calling collaborators. They were eating dinner with them. They had voted for the Leopards Eating Faces Party, and then a leopard appeared in the hallway of their prom.
The press class in that ballroom was, for the duration of the threat, physically bound to the men they had long demonized. Cabinet officials and reporters were under the same tables. The political opposition between the two groups was suspended for the length of the attempt by the simple physical fact that both groups were inside the kill radius of the gunman. The physical fact of having been under the same tables, in the same costume, surviving the same attempt, is going to influence the next several years of Washington politics in interesting ways.
***
On the Monday afternoon after the assassination attempt, on the South Lawn, at the beehive the White House keeps, the President opened his hand and held a bee in his bare palm. The King of England leaned in to see. The Queen watched from beside him. The First Lady pressed her hand flat against her chest. The bee sat in the center of the President’s palm.
It did not sting him.
The composure that preternaturally turns to miss the bullet is the composure that holds the bee. They are the same composure.
Ben Braddock is the Editor-in-Chief at IM—1776. He can be followed @GraduatedBen.
