Vol. 172: The folly of assassins

One quality they all share

Cole Thomas Allen, who presumably hoped to assassinate President Trump and/or his entire cabinet at the White House Correspondents’ dinner on April 25, explained in a rambling manifesto apparently written just before his apparent attack (which apparently injured nobody), “I am no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes.” Also: “I am a citizen of the United States of America. What my representatives do reflects on me.”

So why not shoot them?

In the long and ludicrous history of political assassinations, the perpetrators’ goals and motives (not to mention their states of mind) have varied wildly. Some believed they could change the course of history: In 1865 John Wilkes Booth harbored delusions that disposing of Lincoln and his cabinet would rally the South to rise again. In 1914, the Bosnian student Gavrilo Princip thought slaying the Archduke Franz Ferdinand would convince the Austro-Hungarian empire to liberate Bosnia and Herzegovina; instead, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia, launching World War I.

Some assassins were driven by punitive vengeance. Nathuram Godse, a Hindu nationalist, shot Mahatma Gandhi in 1948 because he thought Gandhi was too nice to Muslims. Sirhan Sirhan, a Palestinian nationalist, shot Robert F. Kennedy in 1968 ostensibly because of the senator’s support for Israel during the Six-Day War of 1967. Egypt’s president, Anwar Sadat, was shot and killed at a parade in 1981 by members of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, who thought Sadat was too nice to Israel. Israel’s prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, was similarly assassinated in 1995 by Yigal Amir, an Israeli law student and far right nationalist who deemed Rabin too nice toward Palestinians, and who apparently felt his mere legal degree was inadequate to deal with such issues.

Oswald’s place in history

Some assassins believed they had had scores to settle. In 2024, Luigi Mangione tracked and killed Brian Thompson, the CEO of United Healthcare, not for any offense Thomson had committed per se but because Mangione apparently viewed Thompson as a human symbol of the health insurance industry’s “corporate greed.”

Some had specific aims. In 1935 Carl Weiss, a 29-year-old physician, shot Louisiana’s demagogic/populist senator (and former governor) Huey Long because Long intended to eliminate the district where Weiss’s father-in-law, Judge Benjamin Pavy, had held office for 28 years. (Whether Weiss killed Long is still debated. Weiss fired only one shot at Long. Long’s bodyguards then fired 60 shots at Weiss, at least one of which hit Long, who didn’t die until two days later.) The Stern gang, a Zionist paramilitary group, assassinated Folke Bernadotte, the UN mediator in the Arab-Israel war of 1947-48, because they perceived him (probably mistakenly) as a puppet of the British and the Arabs.

Some assassins just craved attention. We still don’t know exactly why Lee Harvey Oswald shot JFK in 1963 (and, since Oswald was himself fatally shot two days later, we probably never will). The Warren Commission concluded that Oswald was driven by a combination of a distorted narcissistic personality, deep-seated resentment of authority, and a frantic desire to establish himself as a significant historical figure. And how can we forget John Hinckley Jr., who, after seeing the 1976 film Taxi Driver, tried to assassinate Ronald Reagan in 1981 out of an obsessive desire to impress the actress Jodie Foster?

Caesar and Hitler

Some assassinations make no sense, perhaps because we haven’t yet learned the full story and maybe never will. Martin Luther King Jr. had plenty of enemies in 1968, from J. Edgar Hoover to the Ku Klux Klan on down. But James Earl Ray, a drifter prone to inept holdups and burglaries, a man who had served more than 13 years in penitentiaries, where he became notorious for bizarre and sometimes successful escape attempts?

And, yes, a few assassination attempts may have been justified. Julius Caesar was assassinated in 44 BCE by a group of some 60 presumably responsible Roman senators, who stabbed him 23 times to prevent Caesar from seizing dictatorial power. Operation Valkyrie was a failed 1944 attempt to assassinate Adolf Hitler and overthrow the Nazi government. The plotters belonged to the German resistance, composed mainly of Wehrmacht officers (among them the “Desert Fox,” Field Marshal Erwin Rommel), who tried to kill Hitler at least five times in 1943 and 1944. Their apparent aim was to wrest political control of Germany and its armed forces from the Nazi Party and to make peace with the Western Allies.

But whether history’s assassins were rational or nuts, smart or stupid, noble or nasty, all shared one common trait: None of them achieved what they’d hoped to accomplish.

Those Roman senators who collectively murdered Julius Caesar thought they were saving the Roman Republic; instead, that stabbing triggered civil wars that led to the final collapse of the Roman Republic and the rise of the Roman Empire. Huey Long’s death in 1935 may have snuffed out his radical “Share Our Wealth” movement and eliminated him as a presidential election threat to Franklin D. Roosevelt, but it failed to eliminate Long’s legacy: After his death, Long’s descendants and relatives dominated Louisiana politics for more than 50 years.

Germany’s anti-Nazi Valkyrie plotters, for their part, received no help or encouragement from Germany’s American, British, and Russian enemies, who were committed to a view of all Germany as irredeemably evil.

And now, a teacher

So now we have Cole Thomas Allen, a 31-year-old math tutor and one-time “Teacher of the Month” for a test preparation company in Torrance, California— holder of a master’s degree in computer science from the prestigious California Institute of Technology. Allen may be history’s first teacher/assassin.

OK, OK, maybe he’s not a teacher of civics or psychology, but still— someone who made his living communicating some sort of useful information from one generation to the next.

Yet last month, in his hotel room, Cole Allen posed for a selfie decked out in guns and knives, then traumatized a big Washington social/political event. To be sure, no one was shot or hurt that night, including Allen himself. (At least three shots were fired at Allen by security guards.) He never came within 355 feet of his presumed target, President Trump. Ultimately, Allen caused a lot less harm than, say, the Washington mob that invaded the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

Where are the shrinks?

James Earl Ray, you may recall, pleaded guilty to killing Dr. King in 1968 to avoid the death penalty, then spent the remaining 30 years of his life claiming he had been “set up” by shadowy conspirators— a view supported, among other parties, by Martin Luther King’s own family. So much for our criminal justice system’s hunger for the pursuit of truth.

So maybe this time around, when we’ve all finished hyperventilating over the White House Correspondents’ party-pooper, let’s cut him a deal: Instead of sentencing Cole Allen to one of the limited punishments available in our criminal justice system— say, execution, or life imprisonment, or torture, or castration, or six months’ community service— let’s talk to him.

Let’s get a good shrink or two capable of probing beneath Allen’s faux macho surface and ask him: What were you thinking, really? If you did shoot Trump, what did you expect would happen next?

Now that you’ve had your 15 minutes of fame, you’ll have a lifetime to reflect about it. Would you share your thoughts— as opposed to your manifestos— with us? It’s not too late to make something useful of your life, even now. Could you maybe help us find other, less violent ways to air our grievances? Ways that might actually work?

Enjoy Dan Rottenberg’s newest book, The Price We Paid: An Oral History of Penn’s Struggle to Join the Ivy League, 1950-55. You can also visit his website at www.danrottenberg.com