One of the more bizarre aspects of the third attempt to assassinate President Donald Trump is how the left’s propaganda mills, more commonly known as the mainstream media, have treated the would-be assassin, Cole Allen. As his manifesto makes abundantly clear, he is very much one of them, and so we see nothing of what we would be seeing if, say, a would-be assassin of some leftist had turned out to be a MAGA hat-wearing patriot. In that case, the media would be saying, all day every day, how dangerous the ideas that motivated the shooter really were, and calling for legislation and programs to stamp them out once and for all.
With Cole Allen, however, it’s a vastly different story.
By now, the whole world has weighed in on the tense tête-à-tête between Trump and CBS’s Norah O’Donnell, who used Allen’s manifesto to challenge the president on some of the left’s most hysterical and baseless claims that he is a “pedophile” and a “rapist.” The fact that a would-be killer was making these charges did not deter O’Donnell for one second. It was as if she had been challenging Trump on the political theory of Lee Harvey Oswald. And that was by no means all.
O’Donnell also asked Trump: “The other thing in the manifesto that I think is worth looking at in terms of determining his motive is he had been staying at the hotel since Friday. He checked in, he said he had cased the place, and he wrote, ‘What the hell is the Secret Service doing?’ And he wrote this quote, ‘I expected security cameras at every bend, bugged hotel rooms, armed agents every ten feet, metal detectors out the wazoo. What I got is nothing.’ He wrote, ‘Like, this level of incompetence is insane.’ Sir, you have already had two attempted –”
Contrary to O’Donnell’s preamble, this passage had nothing whatsoever to do with Allen’s motive. That motive was obvious: Allen hated Trump because he had imbibed the left’s talking points, and wanted him dead. The competence or lack thereof of the Secret Service had nothing to do with it. O’Donnell was reading Allen’s words and challenging Trump about them as if the assassin were a security expert.
Even that wasn’t all. O’Donnell told Trump that Allen “had social media accounts that had anti-Trump and anti-Christian rhetoric…. Well, he had a lot of anti-Christian rhetoric. He had-- he was part of a group called the Wide Awakes. He had attended a No Kings protest in California.” She followed this up with “What did security tell you about what may have been his motives?,” as if his motives weren’t clear from what she had just said. This led to Trump discussing the No Kings protests.
O’Donnell effectively got her notes on the issues regarding which she should challenge the president from the man who just tried to murder the president. It looks as if the Democrats’ new top strategist is none other than Cole Allen.
Newt Gingrich had some trenchant words for O’Donnell regarding her decision to treat Cole Allen’s manifesto as if it were a judge’s verdict. Gingrich wrote:
Norah O’Donnell may have reached the low point in disgusting and inhumane demagoguery disguised as journalism. The idea that you would take the vicious dishonest and disgusting words of a woukld [sic] be killer who had been blocked b y [sic] the Secret Service but would otherwise have killed a lot of people and you would dignify them by putting them on the air and asking the President of the United States to comment is about as destructive as anything a major reporter has done in a long time. She should be fired for demeaning her entire profession and being the mouthpiece of a would be killer.
The Washington Examiner’s Byron York added: “Gunman's manifesto is anti-Trump social media come to life. By seeking to murder Trump, Cole Allen managed to have his grievances presented, in his own words, straight to the President of the U.S. on a widely-watched network news program. How could any would-be assassin not see that as a victory?”
Photographer and filmmaker John Hyland asked: “Was the UnaBomber’s Manifesto read to his victims and their families? So they understood where he was coming from? It would be insulting and unnecessary. Right?”
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Exactly. There was a time when the left treated ideas that had been mentioned in a killer’s manifesto as discredited by that very fact — but only when those ideas differed from their own. Back in 2011, the Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik discussed opposition to jihad in his lengthy and highly questionable manifesto, although he also discussed the efficacy of allying with al-Qaeda and Hamas. For years, the leftist establishment treated this as an indication that opposing jihad violence and Sharia oppression was tantamount to calling for mass murder.
Even as late as Feb. 2026, when I testified about Sharia before a House subcommittee, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Head in the Sand) brought up Breivik in an attempt to discredit me (whom Breivik mentioned along with many others) and the entire idea that Sharia should be opposed. (The women of Iran and Afghanistan would like a few words with Raskin, but they won’t get the opportunity to say them.)
If leftists were consistent, they would now treat their own ideas as deserving to be consigned to the dustbin of history, because Cole Allen espoused them. But consistency, as you know, never interests the left. In their all-encompassing lust for power, leftists will happily contradict themselves, as well as lie and — as we see confirmed with increasing frequency — kill.
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