The assassination doomscroll

Journalists watch a press briefing by President Donald Trump on a mobile phone at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner after a reported shooting, Washington, D.C., April 25, 2026.(Elizabeth Frantz/Reuters)


By Michael Brendan Dougherty
April 28, 2026 9:59 AM

Cole Allen seemed to be aiming to be a smirk in your social media feed.
What disturbs me most of all about the attempted assassination of President Trump, this time allegedly by Cole Allen, is that it seemed to leave little impact on the public consciousness. When the shot rang out in the field in Pennsylvania and the bullet grazed Trump’s ear, the whole world seemed to stop and mark the moment. The images from that day became iconic. This time, even Donald Trump seemed unusually ready to continue on with the party. Has political assassination become background music or white noise in our political culture?




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Not quite, but close, I realize with some horror. This assassination attempt was treated with almost a level of public boredom because the public has already seen this before. It was a retweet, a re-post, a share. This was an assassination attempt as meme.

This explains one of the chilling aspects of Cole Allen’s “manifesto.” Terrorists and assassins tend to fall into two camps. The first is the fanatic, who reasons his way into committing an enormity with incredible energy, hoping to achieve and justify his acts before the world. The other clearly communicates his plain insanity: John Hinckley (trying to impress Jodie Foster) or Jared Lee Loughner (angry at grammar).

Cole Allen’s manifesto, however, isn’t an argument. It offers a few apologies to family and those whose lives will be inevitably disrupted by his crime. But then it carries on in an almost cheerful way, detailing his rules for how he will engage security and target his violence.

He writes:

I apologize to everyone who was abused and/or murdered before this, to all those who suffered before I was able to attempt this, to all who may still suffer after, regardless of my success or failure.

This is a mind reciting what he’s seen on his social media feeds. He seems at times to be invoking the plight of illegal immigrants, or perhaps those in Gaza. He brands himself the “Friendly Federal Assassin” amid a valedictory section of thank-yous — clearly expecting that these will be his last moments on earth.

When Hannah Arendt spoke about the banality of evil, she was describing a bureaucratic thoughtlessness. This is something like that, an algorithmic thoughtlessness. Allen didn’t build a logical case for his actions. He retweeted and reposted images and memes of the Trump administration’s supposed perfidy, and his assassination attempt becomes the comment. “Please like and share.”

A meme doesn’t require an argument. It doesn’t even really need to elicit a full thought. It’s meant to stimulate, to drip out your brain’s dopamine with a sense of recognition, even as the rest of your nervous system is relaxing. Assassins want to be heroes in their story of political struggle. Cole Allen seemed to be aiming to be a smirk in your doomscroll.

What we have is a killer who would kill not out of passion but out of sheer arrested emotional and political development. And perhaps that explains the public’s response. It’s not just that this violence has become routinized and we can’t summon the same depth of public outrage. It’s been denuded of context. It’s a snippet or clip of violence apart from any story that would make sense of it. And so, lacking any character role, ourselves as witnesses, we turn away.

Cole Allen will, thankfully, face justice. But will we be able to face a world, and ourselves, shaped by social media? A world where violence needs no argument.