A man tried to murder the President of the United States Saturday night. He brought a shotgun, two handguns, and knives to the White House Correspondents' Dinner. He had spent three weeks planning the attack. It was the third attempt on Donald Trump's life since 2024.

By Monday, Chuck Todd had a different story. The President, he said on a podcast, was the reason he, Chuck Todd, did not feel safe.

That is not commentary. That is the same attack on democracy continued by other means.

The Third Attempt on the President's Life

Cole Tomas Allen booked a Hilton room on April 6, the same week Trump confirmed he would attend the dinner. He boarded a train in Los Angeles, transferred in Chicago, and rode it across the country with a pump-action shotgun in his luggage and a written assassination plan in his bag. On the train from Chicago, federal prosecutors say, he read a Washington-area article guiding readers to the dinner weekend. He used a public website to track the President's movements during the day of the attack. At eight p.m. Saturday, he posed for a mirror selfie in his hotel room, fully armed. At eight-thirty, the prescheduled email he called "Apology and Explanation" went out to his family. Then he took an unguarded back stairwell down ten floors, dropped a long black coat in the lobby to reveal the shotgun, and sprinted through the metal detector.

A Secret Service officer took the round in his vest. Allen fell to the ground. He is alive only because his target's protective detail did its job.

This man is an attempted murderer of the President of the United States. He is the third such man in twenty months. Federal law makes that crime punishable by death. The Justice Department should seek capital charges, and the country should impose them. The example matters because the country has not stopped producing him.

The Press Class Called the Assassin's Target the Threat

Within hours of the evacuation, Hasan Piker posted that White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt had foreknowledge of the assassination attempt. Piker is the Twitch streamer with three million followers who electrocuted his own dog on stream, has been publicly accused of brutalizing his girlfriend, reads Lenin and Mao to the camera, and called for "capitalist blood" to be spilled in his coverage of the Brian Thompson murder. The New York Times had run a glowing profile of him three days before the dinner. Piker called the assassination attempt an obvious false flag. MS NOW hosts had to call out the false-flag conspiracy theories on air the next morning.

Sunday morning, the Washington Post's lead opinion column on the shooting argued that the dinner had displayed "America's best and worst." The shooter and his target were given equal billing on the moral ledger of a major American newspaper.

Monday afternoon, Chuck Todd recorded a podcast on which the former Meet the Press host announced he no longer felt safe attending events the President attended. He blamed Trump's rhetoric. He said Trump had created a "permission slip for political violence" through January 6 pardons. He cited a 2018 episode in which mailed pipe bombs targeted Trump critics and complained that Trump had not called him personally.

None of this was an isolated reaction. Five hundred journalists had drawn the same line in petition form the week before, demanding the WHCA oppose what they called Trump's "efforts to trample freedom of the press." A protester outside the dinner held a sign that read "Journalism is dead." The class that wrote that petition lost an attempted murder of the President at its own dinner and never broke character. Within seventy-two hours its loudest voices had agreed: the man with the shotgun was a footnote. The President he tried to kill was the threat.

The Press Class Wrote the Justification

Cole Allen has a Caltech mechanical-engineering degree and a master's in computer science. He had been named Teacher of the Month at the school where he tutored. He is not stupid.

He is also not original.

The written justification he sent his family ten minutes before he ran the metal detector frames the President as "a pedophile, rapist, and traitor" whose continued occupation of the White House makes Allen, by inaction, complicit in the President's crimes. It catalogs grievances about "everything this administration has done." It distorts Christian scripture to argue that violence is required when speech and politics are not enough.

The first two pieces are the daily inventory of cable opinion programming. The President as criminal, illegitimate, fascist, dangerous. The eighty million Americans who voted for him as a problem to be argued past, not heard. These are not Allen's inventions. They are MSNBC's stock in trade. They are the New York Times opinion page's editorial line. They are Hasan Piker's nightly stream. They are the Washington Post's house style. They are what the academics who taught Allen's classes argued from a lectern, and what his colleagues praised when they named him Teacher of the Month.

The third piece, the leap from grievance to violence, is Allen's own bridge. It only stands because the first two pieces are load-bearing. Take the press class's framing out of the picture and Allen has nothing to escalate from.

The journalistic class cleared the path he walked. He had degrees. He was paying attention.

What the President Actually Did

While Todd was preparing his Monday podcast, here is what Donald Trump did.

Within minutes of the evacuation, while Allen was still on the lobby floor in handcuffs, the President posted on Truth Social that the Secret Service had done a "fantastic job" and that he wanted the dinner to "let the show go on." He called the wounded Secret Service officer that night and reported afterward that the officer was "doing great." He held a press conference in the briefing room two hours later in his tuxedo. He thanked WHCA president Weijia Jiang from the podium for what he called her "fantastic job." He called the night "totally unified." Sunday morning at seven a.m., he called ABC News chief Washington correspondent Jonathan Karl on Karl's landline to ask if Karl was alright. Karl recounted the call on This Week a few hours later: "He was calling to see if I was ok with what happened last night."

This is not unusual. Trump takes reporter questions in the Oval Office, on the South Lawn, on Air Force One, and at Cabinet meetings. He calls reporters off the cuff. He does cable, broadcast, and podcasts that the press class will not appear on themselves. Joe Biden held the fewest since Reagan, and only Reagan and Nixon averaged fewer in the past century. Karine Jean-Pierre cut off questions on camera as a workflow. Karoline Leavitt does not.

The President who has been shot at three times in twenty months calls reporters to check on them. The press class that has not been shot at says he is the danger.

Todd Watched the Third Attempt and Made Himself the Victim

Chuck Todd watched a man try to murder the President of the United States for the third time and concluded that he, Chuck Todd, was in danger.

That is not an argument. That is a derangement. It is also the derangement the rest of his profession operates inside.

The press class believes its own framing of Trump so completely that an actual assassination attempt against him becomes additional evidence that he is the threat. That is the story Allen sat with for years. That is the story the petition signers signed onto in writing. That is the story Hasan Piker tells three million viewers a night. That is the story the Washington Post editorial board ran the morning after Trump survived the third attempt. That is the story Chuck Todd recorded on Monday afternoon while the President of the United States was on a phone call with Jonathan Karl asking after Karl's safety.

It is the story that produced Cole Allen, and it is the story the press class chose to keep telling on the day after he failed.

We Need More Than Luck

A man tried to kill the President of the United States. The country was given seventy-two hours to look at what happened and call it what it was. The press class used those hours to tell the country something else.

That is the same act, performed twice, with different tools. Allen used a shotgun. Todd used a podcast.

The President of the United States, who has been shot at three times in twenty months, used the time to call the press, recognize the press, and ask the press's own annual dinner to be rescheduled.

The press made Trump the threat. The shooter believed them.

The country cannot continue surviving these premeditated attacks on democracy like this. An assassin only has to make it through once. One very nearly did in Butler, PA. We're celebrating our 250th anniversary on more than luck. At some point we need everyone driving in the same direction instead of laying the groundwork for killing each other.