Three makes a trend, as journalists say, and by that standard, America faces a disturbing trend in its civic life: Weirdos keep trying to kill the president.
The trend-making number three was Cole Tomas Allen of California. Strapped up with guns and knives, Allen bum-rushed some metal detectors last week at the Washington Hilton, where President Donald Trump, for the first time as president, was attending the annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner.
Ryan Wesley Routh, a career criminal and serial fabulist from North Carolina, was the number-two weirdo. In September 2024, Routh was found armed with a semiautomatic rifle and hiding in some bushes not far from a Florida golf course where Trump, then a presidential candidate, was hitting balls.
Just two months before that, Thomas Matthew Crooks, a Pennsylvanian, became the inaugural weirdo-would-be assassin. A 20-year-old nursing home aide, Crooks fired on Trump with an AR-15 at an election rally in Butler, Pennsylvania and was shot dead by Secret Service agents.
Another incident, strangely forgotten and rarely tallied among the assassination attempts, deserves mention. This February, one Austin Tucker Martin of North Carolina, brandishing a shotgun and gasoline canister, met the same fate as Crooks after trespassing on Trump’s Florida resort Mar-a-Lago. (The president was in DC at the time.)
The attempt in Butler was by far the most serious, with a bullet from Crooks missing Trump’s skull by an inch or so. Last week’s incident, by contrast, has been overhyped—perhaps because media figures at the dinner spotted a chance to present themselves as survivors of a harrowing attack. Many commentators have alleged major security failures at the Washington Hilton, but Allen didn’t make it to the ballroom where the dinner was hosted before police tackled him.
While the attempts on Trump’s life vary in level of seriousness, they share a couple salient features. In each case, the failed killer was a whackjob. Of course, it’s hardly surprising that the men who tried gunning down the president weren’t playing with a full deck. But what most bothers me is that the unhealthy fixations and bizarro beliefs that ostensibly motivated their extreme acts are shared by sizable chunks of the U.S. population.
For example, Cole Allen appears to believe that the assassination attempt in Butler was staged. That’s like if Pete Conrad, commander of the Apollo 12 lunar mission, had concluded the first moon landing was a fraud.
Conspiratorial thinking about Butler is shockingly prevalent. According to a study published this March by the Manhattan Institute, nearly half of Democratic voters believe “the assassination attempt against Donald Trump in July 2024 was orchestrated by his supporters to increase sympathy for him.” Naturally, conspiracy theories about Allen’s own pitiful attempt proliferated online within hours, if not minutes, of the event.
Allen holds other strange beliefs that have gained prominence the past couple years. In an anti-Trump manifesto—signed “Cole ‘coldForce’ ‘Friendly Federal Assassin’ Allen”—he wrote, “I am no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes.” Evidently, Allen indulges in wild speculation about Jeffrey Epstein, the late disgraced financier and accused sex trafficker with whom Trump was friends decades ago.
Austin Martin, the gas-can-wielding Mar-a-Lago intruder, was also an apparent Epstein obsessive. Days before he carried out the failed attack, Martin texted a friend:
I don’t know if you read up on the Epstein Files, but evil is real and unmistakable.
The best people like you and I can do is use what little influence we have. Tell other people about what you hear about the Epstein files and what the government is doing about it. Raise awareness.
The theory that Trump and other powerful men conspired with Epstein to rape children has become perhaps the most all-consuming moral panic of our time. Iranian propaganda videos routinely reference it, and influential podcasters relentlessly promote it.
And yet, as the independent reporter Michael Tracey has shown, the evidence for this theory is scanty. That Tracey has become a beacon of clear-eyed reasonableness in a sea of phantasmagoria is itself humorous: This week, the disheveled and intemperate shoe-leather journalist challenged critics to come fight him outside the Hampton Inn where he was staying.
Americans have always been oddballs. Even before the Founding, pilgrims and Puritans—the “hotter sort of Protestants,” as they were then known—fled England and its established church to worship freely in North America. Subsequent migration waves comprised other religious extremists, like the German Mennonites and Amish, as well as rugged adventurers drawn to the western frontier. For most of America’s history, its newcomers disproportionately comprised the misfits and radicals of the Old World.
Until recently, America’s freak streak mostly expressed itself in relatively benign fixations like extraterrestrials and Christian fundamentalism. That’s why most of the world’s UFO sightings have occurred in these United States, and it’s why the world’s largest “creation science” museum sits in Petersburg, Kentucky. (Fun fact: The English Puritan and Massachusetts settler John Winthrop in 1639 recorded the country’s first known encounter with an unidentified flying object.)
Of course, you still find UFO obsessives and Biblical literalists in America, sometimes in combination—Vice President J.D. Vance recently speculated that UFOs weren’t little green men, but demons. But the innate strangeness of Americans increasingly leads to a morally self-righteous, uber-skeptical, ultra-cynical, often confused, and sometimes violent form of political fanaticism.
Thus, in 2023 a white, trans-identified biological woman shot up a Christian elementary school in Nashville to “kill all you little crackers” as punishment for the kids’ “white privilege.” Two years later, a young black man inspired by white supremacist ideas killed a Guatemalan girl in another school shooting in the same city.
Routh—the armed man in the bushes, i.e., weirdo number two—fancied himself a brave defender of Ukraine in its war with Russia. He even traveled to the country hoping to join the fight, but the Ukrainians whom Routh met say he was afflicted by delusions of grandeur and, for that reason, most unhelpful. His exact reason for trying to kill Trump isn’t known, but he likely bought into the common liberal view that Trump serves Russian interests and colluded with President Vladimir Putin to win the 2016 election—another conspiracy theory unsupported by the facts.
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The motive of Thomas Crooks also remains unknown. But thanks to an investigation by the conservative podcaster Tucker Carlson, who is himself not exactly allergic to conspiracism, we have a clearer picture: During the Covid pandemic, Crooks’ political ideology seems to have evolved, dramatically, from pro-Trump nativism to anti-Trump leftism. His online accounts suggest he identified as non-binary, a novel gender category claimed by 1 in 14 Americans of Crooks’ generation. In the months before he almost killed Trump, Crooks descended into madness.
Every society has its quotient of the mentally unbalanced, of course, but it seems to me that lately America’s political assassins have been inspired by views that are, though detached from reality, alarmingly popular. Might that not be cause for significant concern? Are we Americans collectively losing it?
Sometimes I feel like the last one who has managed to keep my wits. Then again, that sounds like something a madman would believe.
