Phelim McAleer: No wonder Donald Trump is targeted by assassins when the mainstream media - which hates him - compares him to Hitler
Torrance is one of those places you never visit when you come to Los Angeles. In fact, I have lived in LA for over 15 years and I can safely say I have never been there.
Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with Torrance. It’s where people work, live, and raise families. Like most of LA, it has gotten a lot posher and more expensive in recent years, but it’s inland and has no major landmarks or attractions. There’s just no reason to go to Torrance.
That was true until this weekend. Then it turned out to be the home of the man who tried to kill President Donald Trump at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.
1915 Gramercy Avenue in Torrance doesn’t look like the home of a wannabe presidential assassin. It’s well kept and modernish—probably 30 years old—in a street of houses where most look to be over 100 years old.
It’s a fine house in a nondescript suburb. At 1,450 square feet, with three bedrooms and two bathrooms, it’s small by American standards, and as it’s in Los Angeles, it is worth just under one million dollars. That’s where Cole Allen lived until last week, when he took a days-long train journey from Los Angeles to Washington, DC.
Once he got to DC, he checked into the Washington Hilton Hotel and on Saturday night tried to murder the president of the United States.
Cole Allen’s home, with the two cars in the driveway and a nicely mown lawn, doesn’t look much like an assassin’s house and Cole doesn’t fit the traditional profile either. He is uber-educated, with a degree from the prestigious Caltech University and then a master’s in computer science.
However, like many over-educated young people these days, he has struggled to gain employment to match his qualifications. Most recently, he has been making a living tutoring high school children. In December 2024, he won the Teacher of the Month prize. However, he is 31 and his career was going nowhere, and he certainly would never be able to afford the house he lived in with his parents on Gramercy Avenue.
And so, like many over-educated people struggling with life, he turned to far-left politics so that he could blame hard-working conservatives for his problems. And that is how he ended up trying to — and almost succeeding in — storming the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on Saturday night.
The American Secret Service has a lot of questions to answer about how they allowed a disturbed man to check into a room with an arsenal of weapons close to where the president was going to speak. (Were they not taught about the IRA’s Brighton bombing at Secret Service school? Did they not know that having a high value target in a hotel allows assassins to plan and plot in nearby rooms – ready to pounce)
But as I said in this column before, the Secret Service has to be one of the most incompetent government departments in the US. There have been so many assassination attempts on American presidents. One succeeded in recent times and President Gerald Ford only survived because the female radical firing the pistol was incompetent. During 9/11, Vice President Dick Cheney could not be brought to a secure bunker because no one in the whole of the Secret Service could find the key. And then there was President Ronald Reagan who was shot and seriously wounded outside the very same Washington Hilton Hotel.
But why did Cole Allen feel compelled to try and kill the president?
On Saturday night journalists filmed themselves hiding under tables, frightened and shocked as they hid from the bullets. Frightened I can understand but should they have been shocked? What did the journalists think would happen when they kept comparing President Trump to Hitler? Did they not think that disturbed young men pumped up on moral certitude would conclude that the moral thing to do is to kill Hitler?
The mainstream media, which hates Trump, created a monster and a permission structure to do something that used to be taboo. They have demonized Trump but not the people who want to kill him. Most people couldn’t remember the names of the men who tried to kill Trump before Saturday night. They should be household names but are not because many journalists are not interested in pursuing the story. Until the media drops the demonization of Trump and condemns political violence, it is likely we are going to have another similar assassination attempt in the near future. Let’s hope the Secret Service has learned some competence by then.