Third would-be Trump assassin disrupts White House Correspondents’ Dinner

By James J. Devine

A man intent on doing serious damage to American democracy was at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, where a California teacher may have gone to shoot him.

It was supposed to be the night President Donald Trump finally showed up, after years of calling the dinner a swampy bore and the press the enemy of the people.

Trump had agreed to attend. No comedian on the program this time. No Seth Meyers to twist the knife. Just a mentalist, a man who reads minds, as if anyone needed a trick to figure out what was bubbling under the surface of this black-tie affair. Then a man showed up with a gun, and the mind-reading became a pretty cheap parlor game.

The man with the weapons is Cole Tomas Allen, 31, from Torrance, California. CalTech degree. Teacher of the month. 

Allen allegedly made a twenty-five-dollar donation to Kamala Harris’s campaign back in 2024, the kind of thing this administration considers a sign of domestic terrorism.

Neighbors say he was quiet, peaceful—the kind who waves from the driveway.

Allen, who is registered to vote with no party preference, graduated from CalTech in 2017 with a degree in mechanical engineering. While at CalTech, he was a member of the school’s Christian fellowship and the Nerf club, according to his LinkedIn profile.

He was featured in a CalTech graduation announcement posted by the university in 2017 on Facebook, which included a picture of him as an adult wearing a cardigan and red tie and a photo of him as a beaming young child holding a stuffed bunny.

Allen also earned a master’s degree in computer science at Cal State Dominguez Hills in 2025, according to a commencement program. His LinkedIn profile picture shows him sitting in his cap and gown with the caption: “pretty sure my Master’s in CS is done.” On his profile, he describes himself as a game developer, engineer, scientist, and teacher.

Allen was named teacher of the month in December 2024 at C2 Education, which specializes in college test preparation, tutoring, and academic advising.

On Saturday night, this peaceful soul walked into the Washington Hilton with a shotgun, a handgun, and a fistful of knives, predictably intent on doing as much harm as he could.

A federal officer took a bullet in his vest. The President was rushed offstage.

The rest of us are left to wonder how a nation that cannot agree on the weather has arrived at a place where a teacher solves his disagreements with a ballroom full of journalists and a plan written in live ammunition.

Let us set the stage properly.

This was not just any dinner. This was the dinner Donald Trump had spent two terms avoiding. He had called it a waste of time. He had mocked the press there as “filthy.”

He had sent his spokespeople to say he was the most transparent president in history, all while the White House maintained a “hall of shame” webpage for news organizations it didn’t like.

And yet here he was, sitting down with the very people he had sued, raided, and ridiculed.

There was no comedian scheduled; the standard entertainment was replaced by a man who bends spoons with his mind.

The professional journalists’ groups had begged their colleagues to wear “First Amendment” pins and speak forcefully.

They had called the Trump administration’s assault on press freedom the most systematic in American history.

Trump’s lawsuits and regulatory abuse have sent mega-media owners scurrying to please him, silencing the Fourth Estate. His neo-fascist Justice Department lawyers are hounding innocent people who crossed Trump.

A recent National Security memo threatens to label political critics ‘domestic terrorists’ for what’s protected by the First Amendment.

Trump deployed the military and Gestapo-like immigration enforcement agents in American communities, where they killed citizens without justification.

They use brutal force and long detention to haul foreigners into hearings, where they would have once been summoned by mail.

The courts blocked many of these brazen efforts to dismantle freedom, but cowards in Congress are silent in the face of Trump’s assault on America.

The California teacher chose to rely on force rather than reason or other tools once available in the republic, as those methods seem essentially useless today.

Trump has rejected election results, cheated in plain view, enriched himself, and sent the nation to war without authorization, but 7 million No Kings protesters didn’t curtail his imperial power.

You want irony? The dinner had been a powder keg long before the first shot.

Back in 2011, a younger Trump sat in the audience as President Barack Obama and a comedian named Seth Meyers roasted him over his “birther” lies.

Trump sat stone-faced, and those close to him say that humiliation inspired his march to the White House.

Now, fifteen years later, Trump returned to the same kind of room, on his own terms, with no comedian to sting him.

And still the violence found him. The alleged gunman trying to assassinate Trump ran past a security checkpoint, prompting several officers to draw their weapons and give chase. Secret Service agents brought the suspect down about 60 to 100 yards from Trump and roughly 3,000 guests at the White House correspondents’ dinner on Saturday.

Because the problem was never the jokes. The problem is a country where a twenty-five-dollar donation and a head full of grievances can be turned into a trip to a hotel with a shotgun.

The press corps wanted to send a message about the First Amendment. Instead, they got a lesson that the Second Amendment has proved utterly useless against tyranny.

The authorities are still piecing together why Allen did what he did.

The neighbors are shocked. The politicians are offering thoughts and prayers. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro says he intended to do as much damage as possible.

That much is plain. The rest is just the same sad story we have told ourselves a hundred times: a quiet man, a cache of weapons, a political divide that has long since stopped being about ideas and started being about ammunition.

President Trump is safe. The suspect is in jail. And the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, which had already been stripped of its comedy, its purpose and its pretense of easy fellowship, is now just another American crime scene. The mentalist should have seen that coming. So should the rest of us. That is the way it is.