☕️ THIRD TIME IS NOT A CHARM ☙ Sunday, April 26, 2026 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Special edition— the third Trump assassination attempt in two years. And the now-undeniable thread connecting all three attempts. Avoid the hot takes— all the reliable info is here.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Sunday! Once again, our regular programming has been co-opted by major breaking news. They tried to kill the president again. I’ve rounded up all the reliable facts you need to know— plus the incredible dots connecting this historic third assassination attempt to the previous two. The connections are undeniable.

Given the nature of the story and the need for accurate information, and to counter the dumb corporate media narratives, I’ve opened today’s supporter-only bonus post to everyone (except that the comments are restricted to paid subscribers).

🌍🇺🇸 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🇺🇸🌍

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Well— it happened again. Thank heavens, they failed again. As you almost certainly know by now, nearly every news platform in the world covered last night’s latest assassination attempt. After midnight, the Hill reported, “Trump’s WHCA dinner with the press turns into night of tears and terror.” President Trump is fine. The shooter is in custody. The attendees are traumatized.

The White House Correspondents’ Association (WHCA) dinner is a black‑tie banquet in Washington, DC. Once a year, the President, political officials, and journalists gather for speeches, awards, and light‑hearted roast‑style humor. Organized by the WHCA, a group representing reporters assigned to the White House, the annual event is held at the Washington Hilton, which has hosted the dinner for decades. It mixes serious elements, like journalism scholarships and awards, with entertainment, jokes from the president, and a featured comedian.

Coincidentally, the Washington Hilton is also where John Hinckley shot Reagan in 1981. Having now been the scene of two attacks on a sitting or former U.S. president in 45 years, the Washington Hilton is rapidly accumulating the kind of reputation hotels usually only earn through radioactive bedbug infestations or hosting snuff films.

Nevertheless, Trump kept a positive attitude. “I was all set to really rip it,” the President said afterward. “I said to my people, this would be the most inappropriate speech if I said it now; I’ll probably be very nice, very boring next time.”

The dinner event is usually widely covered by U.S. media, since they love talking about themselves, and as a symbol of the close-but-sometimes-awkward relationship between the press and the presidency. President Trump boycotted the dinner during all of Trump 1.0 and last year. So last night’s WHCA dinner would have been his very first as Commander in Chief.

Now this.

🔥 It went down around 8:30 pm, right after everyone had been seated and the dinner service had begun. Blurry hotel security footage on the floor just above the conference room showed a heavily armed black man racing past the Secret Service security checkpoint in a full sprint, heading for the staircase leading to the ballroom. As he sprinted past security officials at a dead run, he fired at the closest agent and hit him in the center of mass (the agent’s vest caught the bullet).

CLIP: President Trump posts security footage showing assassin sprinting past security (0:24).

Three or four more shots were fired. It’s not yet clear who fired them— Allen or security. Alert agents tackled the would-be assassin about 50 feet later, near the grand staircase down to the ballroom, where he would have had a clear shot to the stage— where the President, Vice-President, their wives, and other officials were innocently dining.

Meanwhile, downstairs in the ballroom, Secret Service and other security personnel heard five shots in quick succession and sprang into action, rushing the Vice President and then the President offstage. The ballroom exploded in chaos and panic. A local DC reporter said, “You heard the pops, then a beat of silence, and suddenly everyone in tuxedos and gowns was under the tables.” Wolf Blitzer reported that an officer “threw him to the ground.”

The room was locked down while terrified attendees cautiously emerged from under their tables, and staff began clearing broken glasses and dishes destroyed in the race to the floors. Around 9 pm, a WHCA official said the program would resume; at 9:20 pm they changed their mind and told everyone to go home.

By 10:30 pm, the shooter had been identified, and President Trump held a press conference at the White House. “Some of these people are genius-level IQ, but they’re nuts,” Trump said plainly. And some of these people have unaccountable weapons skills and security knowledge.

🔥 Early this morning, the Wall Street Journal reported, “Caltech Grad, ‘Teacher of the Month’ Named as Washington Shooting Suspect.” The subheadline said, “‘I’m in shock,’ says former classmate of Cole Allen, who is in custody after attack outside White House correspondents’ dinner.”

Cole Thomas (alt. ‘Tomas’) Allen, 31, of Torrance, California, was quickly publicly identified. Allen graduated from Caltech in 2017 (the same campus where they filmed exterior shots for The Big Bang Theory) with a degree in mechanical engineering, interned at NASA’s JPL, and in 2025, he got a master’s degree in computer science from California State University. In other words, he was of the credentialed elite class.

When caught, the Teacher of the Month was found armed with a shotgun, a handgun, and an unspecified number of knives. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said, “It does appear that he, he did, in fact, set out to target folks that work in the administration, likely including the President.” CBS reported that he “told law enforcement he wanted to shoot Trump administration officials.” He aimed for total mayhem.

For convenience, Allen also booked a room at the Washington Hilton where the dinner was held, so he wouldn’t have to run too far. We don’t know yet whether he used the baggage cart to get all the weapons to his room. (And presumably, he collected his Honors points and his free chocolate-chip cookie.)

The Journal reported that Allen was registered with no party preference, according to voting records. But in 2024, he donated $25 to ActBlue with the memo “Earmarked for Harris for President,” according to FEC filings. I wonder what his politics are. According to a recent LinkedIn post, he worked at C2 Education, a private tutoring and test-prep company, which had just awarded him ‘Teacher of the Month’ only four months ago in December, 2024.

Somewhere right now, an HR Director at C2 Education is prying a laminated certificate from a lobby wall.

Allen’s younger sister, Avriana Allen, is a far-left journalist who lives in DC. She graduated in 2021 from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. Until just recently, she worked for progressive platform CalMatters as a ‘voter-guide developer.’ Since September, she has appeared to work for the PEW Research Center, with an office within walking distance of the Hilton. So far, no evidence has been reported suggesting Avriana helped Cole, such as by providing him details about the WHCA dinner or the layout of the DC Hilton, both of which she was almost certainly familiar with.

US Attorney for DC Jeanine Pirro announced Allen will be arraigned on charges including using a firearm during a crime of violence and assaulting a federal officer with a dangerous weapon. For starters. Pirro promised, “There will be many more charges based upon the information that we are learning in this very fluid situation.”

The WHCA and President Trump both said the dinner will be rescheduled within the next 30 days.

🔥 Corporate media is already downplaying the story. Though headlining it with multiple stories, Outlets like PBS and the awful New York Times are calling it “an incident” instead of an “assassination attempt.” They are one euphemism away from calling it a “spirited disagreement.” As of going to press, the Times refused to name the shooter, babbled about how the president was never in danger, and basically called it a mostly peaceful shooting. PBS:

Overseas, the coverage was closer to what we would expect. One European outlet dryly noted that the Washington Hilton attack “brings the number of attacks suffered by the current president to three in just two years.”

Social media hot takes are also exploding, as you would rightly expect. Independent researchers are hard at work, digging into the internet, scouring public records, and harvesting historic social media posts. They are uncovering dots and speculating wildly.

One of the most eerily mysterious items they’ve found was an anonymous X account, created in 2023, that has posted exactly one thing in its entire existence —the two words ‘Cole Allen’— and then went dark. This is the social-media activity of either a retired intelligence officer, a deeply committed haiku poet, or someone who mistook X for Venmo.

Independent investigators have already located a “Henry Martinez” who worked at NASA at the same time Cole Allen interned there. I would not be surprised if it turns out the men were romantically involved. If that is the same guy, why would he post Allen’s name on X— as his only social media activity? It’s hard to guess.

🔥 Some curious patterns are emerging from the three shooters. All three episodes share a common shape: a lone, heavily armed man, apparently motivated at least in part by politics, probing the edges of Trump’s protective bubble and exploiting a specific vulnerability in the environment. When does a ‘lone wolf’ become a pack?

In Butler, Pennsylvania, shooter Thomas Matthew Crooks climbed onto an unsecured rooftop just outside the rally perimeter; in Florida, Ryan Wesley Routh built a sniper’s hide along the fence line of Trump’s golf course; and at the Correspondents’ Dinner, Cole Thomas Allen tried to blast through the Secret Service checkpoint just outside the ballroom.

Each time, the attack emerged from just beyond what security planners assumed was “good enough” standoff distance— high ground outside the venue fence, a concealment point just beyond the fairway boundary, or a magnetometer line that turned out to be just spread-out enough for a rapid charge from around the corner.

I’m not saying all three attacks suggest deep, intimate knowledge of presidential security strengths and weaknesses. I’m just saying.

Taken together, the three attempts highlight a paradox: the protective apparatus keeps evolving— and so do the shooters’ tactics. It’s almost like each successive shooter knows how the Secret Service’s protocols have changed.

In the most recent two, the attacker was successfully neutralized before Trump was physically harmed, and in the latest, the suspect never made it to the final stairway. Yet, in spite of increasingly paranoid and enhanced security, each incident exposed a brand‑new seam — an unguarded rooftop, a gap in a golf‑course fence, a “layered security” perimeter that still allowed an armed man to sprint the last 50 yards.

This, agencies assure us, is fine. What can you do?

Politically, that narrative pattern feeds two competing stories: one, of a president repeatedly targeted and miraculously spared, which can be framed in almost providential terms; the other, of a security system that keeps being surprised by shooters who seem to know exactly where the gaps are, keeping Trump’s public appearances in a permanent state of high‑alert brinkmanship.

Three different venues, three different attackers, three different sets of local circumstances— yet in each case the gunman materialized precisely where the security architecture was thinnest, as if he’d been handed a highlight reel of the weak spots. An unsecured rooftop in Butler, a scrubby fence line along a golf course, and now a magnetometer choke point close enough to allow a 50‑yard sprint at a black‑tie dinner where the president, vice president, Cabinet, and much of Washington’s press corps were all in the same room.

You needn’t believe in a grand conspiracy to notice that the “random loner” keeps showing up exactly where the professionals left the door cracked open.

At a minimum, the now-clear pattern poses uncomfortable institutional questions. Who, exactly, signed off on a rally site that left a clear shot from a low commercial rooftop directly into the candidate’s stage and moved the rooftop agents into the building because it was “too steep?”

Who decided that a former president under active threat should play golf on a course where a man with a rifle could dig into the foliage just beyond the fence line and wait for hours— and fail to screen the perimeter?

And **who approved the WHCA security plan that routed the top political and media elite of the United States through a screening funnel that still allowed a heavily armed shooter to get within sprinting distance of the ballroom doors?

Those aren’t “acts of God.” They’re choices, made by specific people, inside specific agencies, under specific pressures.

Once you start asking these kinds of questions, the official narrative —lone wolves, no broader plot, nothing to see here, just move along— begins to sound less like a conclusion and more like a reflex. Investigators insist that Crooks, Routh, and Allen were all acting alone, with no evidence (so far) of any coordinating hand.

Maybe that’s true. But even if you take them at their word, you’re still left with a different kind of coordination problem: a security culture that keeps treating each near‑miss as an isolated fluke instead of a connected stress test of the system. The result is a protection posture that hardens yesterday’s failure point while leaving tomorrow’s gap wide open.

Trump’s critics mostly yammer about rhetoric, polarization, and staged attacks, not about how three successive attackers all managed to find the one tiny pixel in the security perimeter that would give them a shot. Meanwhile, the agencies in charge issue boilerplate statements about reviewing procedures, enhancing coordination, and moving forward— language that has, so far as I can tell, was cut and pasted directly from the agency’s response to the previous two attempts.

As if “more of the same” is any kind of adequate answer to a pattern that keeps repeating, with increasingly higher stakes each time. What do they think will happen if one of these attempts finally succeeds?

🔥 At some point, a serious country would stop treating these as three separate news cycles and start treating them as a single, very troubling data set. Even the New York Times is starting to notice a pattern. Headline this morning:

I don’t want to beat a dead horse here. But this is important. If this were just three different shooters exploiting three different weak spots, that would be bad enough. But when you look more closely at the details, the pattern gets even harder to wave away as “bad luck.”

First, Butler wasn’t just an overlooked rooftop; agents were assigned to that roof and then pulled off it, with the Secret Service cycling through goofy explanations it could not defend in public. Then-Director of the U.S. Secret Service, Kimberly Cheatle, told lawmakers, “That building in particular has a sloped roof, so, you know, there’s a safety factor that would be considered there that we wouldn’t want to put somebody up on a sloped roof.”

The initial claim that the roof was too steep to stand on was quickly walked back after we all saw photos of the FBI standing easily on the nearly flat rooftop, yet all we have been offered to replace Cheatle’s moronic initial excuse is the tailpipe of an industrial-grade fog machine.

It wasn’t just the failure to anticipate a vulnerability. It was the conscious decision to vacate the exact piece of high ground that turned out to be decisive— and then to stonewall when asked why. Isn’t that the most important question?

Florida shows a different but related flavor of failure. Routh did not teleport into position. He moved weapons and gear onto the course and sat in the brush along the fence line for hours, in brutal Florida sunshine, within sightlines that normal perimeter doctrines are supposed to check and re‑check before the protectee shows up.

If the Secret Service’s own “layered security” model means anything, it should mean that a guy with a rifle can’t lie motionless for half a day inside the outer ring of the bubble and still be there when the president walks into his field of fire. The fact that agents only engaged Routh once they happened to visually pick him up with a weapon, rather than because a sweep flushed him out long beforehand, is its own quiet indictment of how seriously those outer layers are being enforced (or not being enforced).

Again, the failure isn’t just that there was a blind spot; it’s that the part of the system designed specifically to catch that particular blind spot was never switched on.

Now we get to number three: Cole Allen at the Correspondents’ Dinner. It’s still early, of course, but the odds picture gets even weirder. Watch the security video that Trump released. You’ll see what looks like a secure choke point: multiple officers at the magnetometers, a tight cluster of bodies forming a bottleneck between the public space and the ballroom.

Yet somehow, Allen is able to accelerate from out of view, around the corner, roughly 50 yards away, sprint straight past that knot of security, and close the distance without colliding with a single person— as if the lane in front of him had been cleared just in time for his dash. That’s some pretty good luck right there. At that speed, just one agent shifting his stance, one officer stepping back half a step, one official walking to talk to another, should have been sufficient to produce a messy collision and a dogpile.

Instead, all six or so visible officials happen to be positioned just far enough off the through‑line to give Allen a clean shot at the stairwell. How did he know when to start running? There may be a good answer. But if so, we haven’t heard it yet.

🔥 Combine those three stories, and our N=3 dataset starts to look a lot less like three independent miracles of bad fortune and a lot more like a system that keeps failing in eerily specific ways.

One rooftop that was covered and then mysteriously uncovered. One would‑be sniper who spends hours inside the outer perimeter without any sweep pushing him out. One gunman who manages to pick the exact right moment when a half‑dozen security professionals aren’t physically in his way at a choke point designed precisely so that someone should always be in the way.

We can dismiss those questions as coincidence —as lottery-level luck— for three separate, consecutive “lone wolves.” If so, well, the crack where “incredible luck” lives is getting microscopically skinny. Or we can admit that, at a minimum, we’re looking at a protection culture that somehow keeps moving the wrong people off the wrong roofs, skipping the wrong sweeps, and leaving the wrong lanes open at the wrong time. And that the three shooters all somehow sensed right where the lapses would occur.

Did these shooters get help —active or passive— from people inside who know how the system really works? Remember the Ian Fleming chestnut: once is coincidence. Twice is happenstance. Three times is enemy action.

In the case of Trump assassination attempts, we’ve now reached three— three gunmen, three “lone wolves,” three times the system somehow accidentally left the exact wrong piece of ground uncovered. One hopes that the Administration knows its James Bond lore.

🔥 Finally, what’s equally troubling is the surge of recent left‑wing violence. You see partisan and ideological motives aimed up the food chain: at CEOs, presidents, political leaders, Tesla dealerships, ICE facilities, party headquarters, Supreme Court judges, and popular conservative activists. We have would‑be assassins like Ryan Routh, a man clearly helping the deep state with the proxy war, allegedly lying in wait on a golf course fairway because he decided Trump’s foreign policy justified a bullet.

You see a swelling catalog of plots and attacks that, taken together, suggest not random outbursts but an emerging permission structure: a belief that “stopping fascism” or “saving democracy” might require a rifle, a Molotov cocktail, or worse. Last September, in the difficult says following Charlie Kirk’s assassination, YouGov asked Americans whether political violence can sometimes be justified. Among self-described ‘very liberal’ respondents, one in four said yes. Among 18-to-44-year-old liberals, that number rose further to 26%, against just 7% of conservatives the same age.

The smallest group of agreers was the “very conservative.”

At some point, you would think a serious country would stop pretending this is just a law‑enforcement problem and start treating it as a political toxicity problem. The party supposedly opposed to “hate speech” is never accountable for its political and media elites who keep pouring gasoline on deranged minds and then acting surprised when it ignites.

In October, 2024, then-VP Kamala Harris said Trump fits the definition of “fascist.” In May, 2024, Biden responded to a Trump speech by mumbling, “That’s Hitler’s language. That’s not the language of America.” There are many more examples.

Until accountability happens, we shouldn’t be asking whether or not there will be a fourth attempt. We should be asking why, given the incentives we’ve created, there wouldn’t be one.

🔥 President Trump, the security officers, and the attendees were shaken. But everyone is fine.

In a remarkably dignified way, President Trump called for conciliation. “As you know, this is not the first time in the past couple of years that our republic has been attacked by a would-be assassin who sought to kill,” he said. “In light of this evening’s events, I ask that all Americans recommit with their hearts in resolving our differences peacefully.”

“Quite an evening in D.C. Secret Service and Law Enforcement did a fantastic job,” President Trump continued, praising his security team. “They acted quickly and bravely. The shooter has been apprehended, and I have recommended that we ‘LET THE SHOW GO ON’, but will entirely be guided by law enforcement.”

Trump’s response was gracious and presidential. But a nation cries out for accountability. Three strikes is supposed to mean you’re out. We have got to start asking who’s pitching.

Have a blessed Sunday! Then check back in tomorrow morning to kick off another terrific week of C&C-style essential news and commentary.

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