Cole Tomas Allen, the 31-year-old Californian who broke into the Hilton hotel in Washington armed on Saturday with the alleged intention of killing Donald Trump and senior members of his cabinet, appeared this morning before a court in the capital for his arraignment. The prosecution has already made public the charges against him: attempted assassination of the president, transportation of a firearm and ammunition with the intent to commit a felony, and use of a firearm during a violent crime. These serious criminal offenses could lead to him spending his life in prison.
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Federal prosecutor Jocelyn Valentine explained in court that Allen traveled armed to Washington with the express intention of carrying out a political assassination. The court has set a hearing for Thursday morning to determine whether the accused should remain detained. Until then, the judge has approved the prosecution’s request for him to remain in temporary custody. Allen, who appeared at the courthouse in a blue prison jumpsuit, remained silent and did not declare whether he considered himself guilty or innocent of the crimes he is accused of.
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However, the evidence against him is overwhelming. Security footage from the Hilton hotel and the officers’ own cameras show that, just as Trump was about to give a speech in the Hilton hotel ballroom, Allen ran about 20 meters towards the security device located on the upper floor, from which the stairs leading to the ballroom door were accessed. When intercepted, he fired a series of shots with his shotgun, one of them hitting a Secret Service agent, who was unharmed thanks to his bulletproof vest.
The attacker, who stayed at the same hotel two days before the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, the annual event where Trump was scheduled to speak for the first time since becoming president, left a trail of his intentions. Authorities have taken as solid evidence a “manifesto” loaded with ideology against Trump, the “pedophile, rapist, and traitor,” which Allen allegedly sent to some of his relatives a few minutes before the attack, the third thwarted against Trump in two years.
Shortly after receiving the letter, Allen’s brother contacted New London (Connecticut) police, a official told The Washington Post, but it was already too late for security to be reinforced. Nevertheless, although the incident has called into question security at such events, the Secret Service acted quickly and effectively and Trump was never in real danger.
Karoline Leavitt, White House Press Secretary
“Those who label and defame the president as a fascist and compare him to Hitler for political gain are fueling this type of violence”
The situation has also called into question the Administration’s protocols, as the first two in Trump’s line of succession, Vice President J.D. Vance and Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, were in the same room on Saturday. Chief of Staff Susie Wiles has called a meeting this week to review security protocols.
For now, the central hypothesis is that the shooter acted alone. As described by acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, Allen embarked last week on a long journey from Los Angeles, near his residence in Torrance (California), to Chicago, and then took another train to Washington. On all these trips, he carried his two firearms, described by authorities as a pistol and a shotgun, which he fired on Saturday night (around 8:30 PM in Washington) after being intercepted by the security checkpoint before the ballroom where Trump and hundreds of journalists were located.
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In a series of interviews with his friends and family, authorities have discovered that Allen gave different explanations for his absence. To his co-workers and the students he taught, he said he had a personal emergency. To his parents, he simply said he had an interview.
In his manifesto, however, he was candid about his intentions: “I am no longer willing to allow a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to stain my hands with his crimes,” he stated, in a veiled reference to Trump, whom he did not mention by name at any point. In another excerpt, he states that “Administration officials (not including Mr. Patel) are targets, prioritized from highest to lowest rank,” making clear the intent to assassinate cabinet members. It is unclear why he made an exclusive reference to Kash Patel, the FBI director, whom he excluded from the list of targets.
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In an interview with CBS’s 60 Minutes program, aired on Sunday, Trump took offense when journalist Norah O’Donnell read him these same excerpts. “I am not a rapist. I did not rape anyone. I am not a pedophile. You read that garbage from a sick person. They associated me with things that have nothing to do with me. I was totally exonerated,” he stated. “You should be ashamed of yourself for reading that. You are a disgrace,” he told the journalist.
Insistently throughout the interview, Trump did not hesitate, as he has done in recent episodes of political violence in the country, to blame left-wing discourse for the growing scourge of political violence in armed American society. “I really believe that the Democrats’ hate speech, much more than the rest, is very dangerous. I really believe it is very dangerous for the country,” he stated.
It is the same way he reacted after his first two assassination attempts, during the election campaign, when he warned of the threat from “radical left-wing lunatics,” who are the true “enemy within.” White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt insisted this Monday that “this political violence stems from systematic demonization by elected members of the Democratic Party and even some in the media. This constant and violent hate rhetoric directed at President Trump, day after day for 11 years, has contributed to legitimizing this violence and leading us to this dark moment.”
“Those who falsely label and constantly defame the president as a fascist, as a threat to democracy, and compare him to Hitler for political gain are fueling this type of violence,” Leavitt noted. However, political violence has grown strongly, also from far-right militias, since Trump’s entry into politics and, even more so, after his frustrated coup attempt, the January 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol.
