THE NEW YORK TIMES: Political violence isn’t just evil. It’s counterproductive

Cole Tomas Allen, who was arrested during an attempt to storm the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner Saturday, may be America’s first normie liberal terrorist.

The right, naturally, sees Allen as part of a pattern, lumping him in with figures like Thomas Matthew Crooks, who fired on Donald Trump in 2024, grazing his ear; Ryan Wesley Routh, who carried a semiautomatic rifle to one of Trump’s golf courses a few months later; or Tyler Robinson, charged in the killing of Charlie Kirk last year.

But all those men had weird or heterogenous politics. Crooks was a nihilistic Republican misfit. Routh had a history of violence and a delusional fixation on Ukraine, where he reportedly tried to join the war effort. Robinson seems to have cooked his brain in online fetish subcultures.

But Allen, who on Monday was charged with attempting to assassinate the president, seemed to be a man with remarkably ordinary political opinions. Social media posts that appear to come from him suggest that he despised US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, cared a lot about Ukraine, and, like the majority of Americans, wanted to see Trump impeached.

Far from a radical leftist, he reposted criticisms of pro-Palestinian protesters and left-wing streamer Hasan Piker. He wasn’t exactly a standard Democrat — he was registered to no political party, and at least at one point was an evangelical Christian — but from what we know so far, before he showed up at the Washington Hilton, he had fairly mainstream beliefs.

This makes Allen’s apparent attempt at political martyrdom particularly convenient for conservatives who want to stigmatize Democratic denunciations of the president. National Review blamed “the feverish opposition to Trump” for allowing “sundry fanatics and losers to resort to political violence.”

The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board tied Saturday’s attack to a political culture in which Trump’s opponents have lost “all judgment and proportion.” Some nonpartisan journalists have parroted this framing. On CNN, Dana Bash asked Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., whether he’s thinking twice about “heated rhetoric” against the president, such as calling him “terrible for this country.”

I can’t really blame Republicans for exploiting the attack; Allen has provided them with an irresistible rhetorical cudgel. The problem, of course, is that Trump is indeed terrible for this country.

The fact that people have tried to kill him can’t be a reason to eschew frankness about his depravity. Rather, it’s a reason to reiterate that even depravity doesn’t justify political violence, which is morally abhorrent, socially corrosive and counterproductive.

It’s true that the manifesto attributed to Allen contains exaggerated accusations. “I am no longer willing to permit a paedophile, rapist and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes,” the manifesto declares.

There is no convincing evidence that Trump has ever abused children; all the women who’ve credibly accused him of sexual assault have been adults.

Calling Trump a “paedophile” has become a too-common way to describe the president’s intimate relationship with Jeffrey Epstein and coverup of the Epstein files. The manifesto is a reminder that all of us should be more precise in our language. To describe Trump accurately, however, will always sound to some like incitement.

There’s a fierce argument in America about whether the right or the left is more violent. Until very recently, there was no contest: The right was. (A 2024 study using National Institute of Justice data found that in the United States since 1990, “far-right extremists have committed far more ideologically motivated homicides than far-left or radical Islamist extremists.”) In recent years, however, there’s been an uptick in left-wing terrorist attacks and plots.

A report on this phenomenon from the Center for Strategic and International Studies suggests that there’s a ratchet at work. It noted that both Republicans and Democrats overestimate their foes’ approval of violence, and said:

“Widespread polarization and misperceptions that the other side is far more violent than it actually is creates a dangerous environment where extremists can more easily rationalize using violence.”

Each act of political violence further frays our threadbare social fabric, laying the foundation for authoritarianism.

After any act of political terror, conspiracists will often make “false flag” accusations, and Saturday was no different; as The New York Times reported, uses of the word “staged” soared on the social platform X.

There is, of course, no defence for spreading disinformation or indulging in ideological self-delusion. Still, we can recognize that people start such rumours because they correctly intuit that violence often discredits the causes that inspire it.

The left-wing terrorism rampant in the 1970s helped usher in Ronald Reagan, not socialist revolution. The 1995 Oklahoma City bombing ended up being a boon to Bill Clinton’s political fortunes. By attempting to kill Trump in 2024, Crooks helped to elect him. Violence isn’t just ethically reprehensible; it’s strategically stupid.

At least one person at the White House correspondents’ dinner was elated by the chaos the shooter caused. Describing agents running into the room with guns amid screaming and flipping tables, Dana White, the Trump-supporting head of Ultimate Fighting Championship, said it was “awesome — I literally took every minute of it in.”

Perhaps he understood that the attack had given his movement a gift. Whatever evil the would-be assassin thought he was fighting, all he did was feed it.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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