Trump Is a Hot Mess—and He’s Cooking His Party

Allen is an unusual would-be assassin. There’s nothing about him that reminds me of any number of mass shooters of recent vintage. There’s no air of glory-seeking; no meme-sludge in his rhetoric. In his manifesto, he spends quite a bit of time apologizing to various people in his life for betraying their trust and takes no evident pleasure in the task he’s put himself to doing. (He also seems prematurely disdainful of the security measures that ultimately foiled his plot.) What’s most unique, and perhaps most troubling, is that his decision to try to take the president’s life is, as TNR contributor Elizabeth Spiers noted on Bluesky, rooted in a sense of moral injury.

The Huffington Post’s David Wood, who has written extensively about how soldiers often suffer from moral injury after their tours of duty have concluded, describes the condition as the “sense that [one’s] fundamental understanding of right and wrong has been violated, and the grief, numbness or guilt that often ensues.” In his manifesto, Allen wrote, “I am a citizen of the United States of America. What my representatives do reflects on me. And I am no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes.” For all intents and purposes, he is saying that he is implicated in Trump’s evident corruption and misrule. “Turning the other cheek when *someone else* is oppressed is not Christian behavior,” he wrote, “it is complicity in the oppressor’s crimes.”

This is perhaps the most worrying part of this story—that there might be others out there who feel this way, and who might be compelled to take the same action. These are the natural consequences of our current age of elite impunity, in which a corrupt president transforms the government into an instrument of self-dealing and revenge, and justice is perceived as slow in arriving, if it arrives at all. Allen spends a considerable amount of time in his manifesto building the moral scaffolding necessary to accommodate his decision to travel to Washington, D.C., to dole out a quick dose of accountability. Based on his writing, I think he works harder than most would-be mass shooters to illuminate a humane logic for his actions. I still think he draws all the wrong conclusions.