The Absentminded Assassin: The New Profile of Political Violence in America
Cole Allen is not what you picture when you picture an assassin. But he is the new face of political violence: educated, smart, left.
Cole Allen is back in court for trying to assassinate the President, among other charges. Federal prosecutors released new images of Allen just 30-minutes before he tried to kill President Trump. He took a bunch of selfies in his hotel mirror wearing multiple knives, a handgun, and a sheepish little grin.
Just look at this goofball preparing to kill the President and his Cabinet:
I don’t say this to God forbid minimize the threat, but rather to point to its incongruity. This would-be assassin is not who you probably imagine when you picture a vigilante out to commit political violence and murder scores of people, as Allen’s manifesto says he was trying to do. If asked to imagine someone about commit a heinous act of political violence, you’d probably picture someone with a low IQ, someone poor, an outcast and White Nationalist who owns an AR-15, votes Republican and hates minorities. The mainstream media has done its best to try to portray this as the profile behind political violence.
But Allen is none of those things. He has a degree in mechanical engineering from the prestigious Caltech and a Master’s in computer science from California State University. He was teacher of the month at the school where he tutored. He is from a loving family, by all accounts. He is a man of the Left.
And Cole Allen isn’t some aberration. He epitomizes the kind of person likely to defend and commit acts of political violence in America in 2026.
Meet the absent-minded assassin, part of a wave of educated killers with Leftist credentials. Think of Luigi Mangione, murderer of United Health Care CEO Brian Thompson, who got both a BA and an MA at the University of Pennsylvania in just four years. Tyler Robinson, the animal who killed Charlie Kirk, was also at the top of his class. Elias Rodriguez was a University of Illinois graduate when he murdered two people outside the Jewish Museum of D.C. last year because he thought they were Jews.
This is not surprising: A new survey found that Americans with the highest level of educational attainment—with a graduate or professional degree—were twice as likely to support political violence than those with less formal education. That’s because having a graduate degree is highly correlated with being on the Left, and political violence these days is a Left-wing problem.
The incongruity is, in other words, a misperception, a holdover of a previous era.
Allen’s manifesto is of a piece with this. He refers to himself as a “friendly federal assassin” in a note he sent to his family minutes before he tried to kill Trump. The whole manifesto maintains a tone of bashful self-deprecation that, like his sheepish grin, feels so at odds with the violence Allen was about to perpetrate: “Hello everybody! So I may have given a lot of people a surprise today. Let me start off by apologizing to everyone whose trust I abused. I apologize to my parents for saying I had an interview without specifying it was for ‘Most Wanted’.”
Womp, womp!
But in its twee self-abnegation, you can, it seems to me, hear something else, something that resolves that tension between violence and goofiness: the expectation that he would be lauded as a hero on the Left for this heinous act.
And the sad thing is, judging by the recent past, this was not an unreasonable expectation. A third of Democrats (!) wish Trump had been killed at Butler. The Luigi fanbase keeps growing. The data shows that the more Left-wing you are, the more you support political violence.
Despite what the liberal media and the Democrats want you to believe, both sides aren’t equally responsible for political violence.
The media likes to share charts and “data” purporting to show that it is the Right that is responsible for most political violence. But they’re cooking the books, as we’ve been saying all week.
To arrive at this “data,” organizations that pretend to be non-partisan do things like reclassify all antisemitic violence as Right wing, even when it’s perpetrated by Leftists. Or they refuse to consider the violence of the 2020 George Floyd riots as political violence. Every White Nationalist meth lab is classified as political violence—but not the 24 Americans who died during the Left’s rioting in 2020.
Yet despite the naked partisanship in this “data”, these charts get shared ad nauseam by outlets like the Wall Street Journal and The Economist, giving fodder to the Left—the perpetrators of the vast majority of political violence in America—so it can blame the victims of political violence.
And it’s this that we must wrap our heads around: A goofball like Cole Allen is now the profile of political violence in America. An English major like Elias Rodruiguez, an affluent Masters’ degree holder like Luigi Mangione—these are the new faces of America’s political assassins.
If the Democrats actually care to tackle political violence, the Left needs to stop blaming the victim and own up to the fact that it is responsible for inculcating a culture of violence that targets the Right.
Cole Allen's mirror selfie, taken 27 minutes before he rushed a Secret Service checkpoint armed with a shotgun, a .38, multiple knives, and a loaded ammunition bag, is being treated primarily as evidence of premeditation. It is that. But it's also something more psychologically revealing.
The selfie wasn't taken for anyone present. He had already scheduled his "Apology and Explanation" emails to go out at 8:30 p.m., timed to coincide with the attack. The photo was for posterity, or more precisely, for the version of himself he wanted preserved. Dressed in black with a red tie, weapons visible, smirking into a hotel mirror: it's a self-portrait of someone performing their own mythology.
This is a recognizable pattern. Across the spectrum of radicalized actors, regardless of ideology, there is a recurring compulsion to document the moment before, to establish that the act was real, that the actor was serious, that they were the genuine article. It mirrors the behavior you see in online spaces where sincerity is performed rather than demonstrated: the person who posts the most extreme take, wears the most conspicuous symbol, or in review culture, can only conceive of a rating of one star or five. Nuance is the enemy of identity when identity is built on intensity.
Whether Allen genuinely believed he could reach Trump is almost secondary. The DOJ's own framing suggests this was less a tactically rational plan and more a calculated act of political violence where the outcome mattered less than the attempt. He tracked the president's live movements on his phone while walking to the checkpoint. He knew the security posture. The selfie suggests he had already accepted what would happen to him. The emails were his goodbye; the photo was his monument.
What the image exposes is not incompetence but a particular kind of ideological narcissism: the belief that the gesture itself is the point. That posture, earnest, humorless, costumed, documented, is the hallmark of someone who has collapsed the distance between conviction and performance entirely.
The anarchists of 100 years ago had some similarities. Arafat was an engineer. Che was a doctor. Collins was an accountant.