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Now that the president has safely survived a third assassination attempt, an objective observer can appreciate Donald Trump‘s stoicism and near-serenity at the moment he finds out on video that yet another allegedly homicidal leftist had stormed Saturday’s White House Correspondents’ Association dinner. Beside a mostly unbothered Trump were the visibly panicked Weijia Jiang, the CBS News reporter and president of the association hosting the dinner, and Melania Trump. For the third time, the first lady is hearing that her husband is under fire, but only for the first time is she at imminent risk of leaving her son an orphan as well.
So it comes as little surprise that Melania Trump, whose fears for her husband’s safety were well-documented in her eponymous and oddly touching Amazon documentary earlier this year, would respond to the WHCA dinner assassination attempt with uncharacteristic aggression. On the Monday morning after the shooting, she excoriated Jimmy Kimmel, formerly known as a comedian, for quipping two days before the event that the first lady had a “glow like an expectant widow.”
WHAT IF THE EPSTEIN FILES PROVE THAT ANTI-TRUMP ACCUSATIONS WERE ACTUALLY CONFESSIONS?
“Kimmel’s hateful and violent rhetoric is intended to divide our country,” she posted on X. “His monologue about my family isn’t comedy- his words are corrosive and deepens the political sickness within America. Enough is enough. It is time for ABC to take a stand. How many times will ABC’s leadership enable Kimmel’s atrocious behavior at the expense of our community.”
Melania Trump isn’t wrong to have a righteous trauma response to gunshots that were so close to succeeding that guests inside the dinner were reportedly able to hear them. Small-government conservatives will correctly quibble over the appearance of regulatory overreach in the Trump administration’s ostensible retribution against ABC’s coddling of Kimmel, but the real problem is that the WHCA dinner shooter was not radicalized by Year 10 of the same B-list celebrities foaming at the mouth over Trump with violent language and fantasies about Trump. The violence against Trump isn’t being fomented by a mere turning up of the rhetoric — rather, it’s a product of the falsifiable and flagrant lies peddled not just by most of the loudest voices across the American Left, but by the anti-American far Right as well.
Contrary to the performative pearl clutching by former President Barack Obama that we don’t actually know the motivation of the since-arrested suspect, Cole Allen wrote us a very lucid and useful manifesto that explained exactly why he was allegedly trying to murder the leader of the free world.
“I am no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes,” wrote the 31-year-old Californian, who explicated that the only administration official exempt from his alleged plot was FBI Director Kash Patel. “I would still go through most everyone here to get to the targets if it were absolutely necessary (on the basis that most people *chose* to attend a speech by a pedophile, rapist, and traitor, and are thus complicit) but I really hope it doesn’t come to that.”
Allen, a downwardly mobile but still objectively intelligent mechanical engineering alumnus of the California Institute of Technology, provides us with as clear and precise a meaning to his alleged motivation in his language. First, he prioritizes and repeats his smear that the unnamed president is a “pedophile,” while exempting Patel, the administration official seen by Jeffrey Epstein obsessives as the most ardent and earnest investigator into the crimes of the late child rapist, from his assassination attempt. First and foremost, Allen was activated by the lie that Donald Trump was not just friends with Epstein or even the disproven assertion that he remained friends with the billionaire even after discovering his predilection for abusing underage girls. Rather, Allen was primarily motivated by the conspiracy theory that Donald Trump was complicit in raping girls along with Epstein.
No matter that Trump, who has joked about his well-known romantic escapades with very adult women, reportedly cut ties with Epstein and banned him from Mar-a-Lago around 2004 or 2005. This claim was first made in a legal filing in 2011, and to date, there is no evidence that Trump ever again socialized with or reached out to Epstein after 2004, well before Epstein’s 2008 guilty plea that he solicited prostitution from a minor who was publicly reported at the time to have been only 14. Furthermore, Trump’s type is pretty publicly well known: disproportionately Eastern European models well into their 20s or 30s at the youngest. Melania Trump was 34 when he married her, about two decades older than Epstein’s target demographic.
That hasn’t stopped the diktat that Trump raped children from dominating the mainstream Democratic Party and even infiltrating the far Right with charlatans such as former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene buddying up to the conspiracy theory. And lies have consequences.
It’s not merely that Democratic voters uniformly believe that Trump knew about Epstein’s crimes or is intentionally covering them up — nearly 9 in 10 Democrats polled by YouGov in February believe that Trump was involved in Epstein’s crimes.
Allen was also a well-documented believer that the July 2024 assassination attempt against Trump that nearly succeeded in blowing his head off was staged. Evidently, he is not alone. In a Manhattan Institute study from this past March, nearly half of all Democrats said it was “definitely” or “probably” true that Butler was a false flag orchestrated to bolster sympathy for Trump. Another two-thirds in this poll agreed that “Russian President Vladimir Putin has compromising information on Donald Trump and uses it to sway Trump’s policy positions.” Luckily, only a quarter believe that 9/11 and the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks were inside jobs.
Allen’s repeated invocation that Trump is a “traitor” would indicate some buy-in to the Russiagate conspiracy theory, and Allen later goes on in the manifesto to indicate that he believes that Trump is intentionally killing civilians in Iran and during his drug boat busts.
“Turning the other cheek is for when you yourself are oppressed,” Allen writes in a painful perversion of the Gospel. “I’m not the fisherman executed without trial. I’m not a schoolkid blown up or a child starved or a teenage girl abused by the many criminals in this administration.”
NO, ISRAEL IS NOT MAKING TRUMP BOMB IRAN
It’s true that the overall “turning up of the temperature,” rhetorically speaking, has created a permission structure for radicals to graduate to violence. This is borne out in both past examples — recall the supporters of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) who tried to slaughter a baseball field of congressional Republicans and nearly shot Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA) to death in 2017 — and in the polling. According to polling by the Skeptic Research Center, more than one-third of those who identify as very liberal agreed that property damage was justified collateral damage during protests, while 44% said that violence is often necessary to create social change. This is a problem that is indeed worse on the Left than on the Right, but it’s orders of magnitude worse among young people rather than old people. Only a quarter of Generation X liberals agreed that violence is often necessary to create social change, versus half of Generation Z liberals. The problem is further escalated among elites. Two-in-five postgraduates of all political affiliations agreed that violence is sometimes the answer, versus fewer than one-quarter without a college degree.
The recent escalation in violence cannot be attributed to the same decade of apoplexy we’ve seen over Trump. Rather, the actual lies smearing the president have indeed intensified. When Hollywood celebrities, liberal reporters, or even washed-up GOP congresswomen lie that Trump is acting at the behest of a foreign government, a crime punishable by death, or guilty of raping children, even once, normal people will begin to believe them, and God help us all as they begin to act.