Cole Tomas Allen, the 31-year-old Caltech graduate who tried to attack the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, acquired his weapons legally, years ago, according to the Justice Department. He trained. He took a three-day train ride to transport them to Washington, D.C., apparently without fear of detection. He checked in to the hotel hosting the dinner, President Donald Trump, and his cabinet, at 3 p.m. the day before. He methodically used his intellect to get close to the dinner, and then he rushed a secure area so full of Secret Service agents that he had no hope of reaching the door, much less crashing through it. What was the point of all that reconnaissance and forethought when there was no way to effect an assassination?
I’ll go with President Trump’s description of Allen. He’s a whack job. A whack job with an impressive level of intellect culminating in climactic stupidity.
Trump attracts assassins. At his black-tie briefing later last Saturday night, the president seemed to revel in this fact a bit, saying that assassins shoot only at the impactful presidents, Gerald Ford and James Garfield excepted. Then Trump laid some statistics on us about race car drivers having safer jobs than presidents. Exaggerated, but four presidents assassinated out of 45 is actually a pretty high percentage.
