Cole Tomas Allen has been identified as the suspected gunman who opened fire outside the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on Saturday, forcing the evacuation of President Donald Trump.
The 31-year-old Allen traveled by train from Los Angeles — where he lives and works as an educator in nearby Torrance — to Chicago, and then another train from Chicago to Washington, D.C., on Friday, after which he checked into the Washington Hilton Hotel, where the Correspondents’ Dinner was being held, CBS News reports.
In the aftermath of the incident, details about Allen’s history have emerged: He earned a degree in mechanical engineering at the prestigious California Institute of Technology in 2017, and then received a master’s in computer science at California State University, Dominguez Hills, in 2025.
A high school classmate told NBC News that Allen was “borderline genius” and “super stable.” “Other people study hard,” said the classmate. “He didn’t have to study. It would just come to him. He was really, really smart.”
While at CalTech, Allen was featured in a local news report in 2017 for developing a prototype emergency brake for wheelchairs.
In addition to serving as an educator at a Torrance tutoring firm, Allen’s LinkedIn page states he is also a self-employed video game developer, with one of his games reportedly available on the Steam marketplace.
Law enforcement told CBS News that Allen legally purchased the shotgun used in Saturday’s shooting in August 2025, as well as another firearm purchased in 2023. Following his arrest, a search warrant was obtained for Allen’s Los Angeles area residence, and his cellphone was seized. While he was not cooperating with authorities, people who knew him were talking with authorities.
Federal campaign records revealed that Allen donated $25 to an ActBlue PAC tied to Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign in 2024, but authorities said they were still investigating Allen’s motive for why the “lone wolf” was targeting members of the Trump administration.
“We’re still looking to try to understand a motive. From our preliminary investigation, it does appear the suspect was targeting members of the administration,” Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche told CNN. “We don’t have specifics yet about particular members of the administration, except that we do understand that that was his goal and his target.”
Blanche added, “We’re still investigating what we knew, if anything about this, this individual. It appears that he purchased the two firearms that he had on him within the past couple of years. He had knives on him as well.”
Allen is due in federal court Monday, where he’ll be charged with one count each of using a firearm during a crime of violence, and assault on a federal officer using a dangerous weapon, with additional charges likely to follow.
“There’s a lot of federal charges that could be in play beyond those two charges, but it depends on us understanding his motive, his intent, his premeditation of what led into him deciding he was going to do what he did,” Blanche said.
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Donald Trump speaks in front of the American flag at the White House, on May 12, 2026.
It’s the Corruption, Stupid
Let’s say it plainly: There has never been a president as corrupt as Donald Trump. There is no close second in our history.
Take two days in May as Exhibit A. Americans just found out that in the first quarter of this year, Trump’s stock portfolio made 3,600 trades — an average of nearly 60 a day. This is a rapacious pace that would make a day trader on meth blush. Many of these appear suspiciously timed to benefit from actions approved by the president himself. For example, his Nvidia stock surged after Trump announced the company would be permitted to sell its cutting-edge AI chips to China. Similar suspiciously well-timed calls were made ahead of big government moves involving other companies, from Intel to Palantir to Boeing. The Trump Organization says all trades are made by a third-party investment advisor. If so, they appear to be psychic.
But the apparent insider trading scam being run from within the Oval Office is small change — merely millions of dollars — compared to the self-dealing plunder of $1.8 billion tax-payer dollars being pushed through the DOJ and IRS.
There’s never been a sitting president who sued his own government for $10 billion. That’s because it’s absurdly corrupt. But that’s what Donald Trump did, arguing he had suffered damages from prosecutions pursued before he was reelected. Trump, like many of his supporters, persistently confuses persecution with prosecution.
The judge who heard the case convened an independent panel to review the suit, suspecting it might be a scam. Before the case could be dismissed, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche — who had previously served as Trump’s personal lawyer — declared that the bogus suit would be preemptively settled, not for $10 billion, but for the symbolic sum of $1.776 billion, which Trump said will be distributed to persecuted political allies.
This is a shakedown. The president is compelling a Justice Department he controls to redirect money from taxpayers — that’s you — to his most fervent supporters. This slush fund will set off a cash grab among MAGA lawyers and be used to reward partisan fanatics who attacked the U.S. Capitol — and police officers — on his behalf.
If that wasn’t enough of a blatantly illegal use of presidential power, it was revealed that the “settlement” deal included a pledge signed by the acting attorney general that would ensure — in the hysterical all caps of a Trump tweet — that the government would be “FOREVER BARRED and PRECLUDED from prosecuting or pursuing” any tax claims, audits or related prosecutions against Trump, his family or their businesses. This is an attempt to get a permanent get-out-of-jail-free card for the Trump family — a license to steal.
All of this is insane. All of it is unethical, and much of it is illegal and impeachable — but our system was not designed to deal with a shamelessly self-dealing president, a spineless Republican Congress, and a complaint conservative Supreme Court that has refused to enforce the emoluments clause of the Constitution and ruled that Trump has immunity for actions he takes as president. That ruling may prove to be the most consequential — and most corrosive — act of judicial abdication in American history. Against this partisan-group think, individual acts of courage matter. So kudos to the top lawyer at the Treasury Department, Brian Morrissey, who at least had the integrity to resign rather than oversee this tax-payer funded plunder.
Just to close out the corruption-palooza, Trump announced that he would endorse the Lone Star State poster-boy of corruption, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, in his primary against incumbent GOP Senator John Cornyn. Paxton’s scandals include a truly buffoonish array of fraud and bribery charges that resulted in him nearly being impeached by the state legislature. But corruption is a feature, not a bug, of Trumpland.All this smacks of late Rome and you’d be forgiven for half expecting Trump will next appoint a horse to an open Cabinet position, with Republicans rationalizing the need for more equine representation. It is no more absurd that the cavalcade of Trump appointees refusing to say that Biden won the 2020 election during their confirmation hearings in the Senate. The decision to parrot unreality for partisan gain defines deviancy down.
But in the search for something hopeful to hold onto in dark times, you can find some comfort in the fact that corruption is often the thing that turns the tide against authoritarian-adjacent administrations. And there is evidence this is happening.
Trump’s billions in self-enrichment, his reflexive twisting of U.S. policy to sell out long-term national interests and enduring values, comes at a moment when nearly half of Americans say they are feeling extremely anxious about their own financial situation.
That anxiety is driven by the widening gap between Main Street and Wall Street, a gap set on fire by a trade war and a real war Trump started, which has no end in sight but promises to further raise energy prices, fertilizer prices, and strangle the global economy. While CEOs embrace the transactional nature of this president, kissing his ring and offering vigs, the situation is grim if you’re not lining up at the Trump trough. At a time when the super-rich are getting richer, everyone else is told to go to hell by the man in the White House.
These are precisely the kinds of conditions that turn people against an aging, autocratic president who shows contempt for the very people who put him in office. It is not just that Trump’s approval numbers have plummeted to the point where two-thirds of Americans disapprove of the job he is doing. It is that Trump, for the first time, is opposed by a majority of non-college-educated white voters — a.k.a. his base — and they feel betrayed because Trump is raking in billions of dollars while they struggle to pay rent and buy groceries. Trump has dismissed and discounted their concerns, turning a blind eye to the anger about rising costs that carried him back into the presidency.
Trump’s aim is to make his thievery so blatant that we collectively become numb to it and disfigure our democracy in the process. Once upon a time conservatives warned about the dangers of “crony capitalism” and corruption. Now they are silent and complicit. It is the temporary triumph of partisanship over principle. Patriotism demands that we reassert the basic American idea that no man is above the law and that our presidents are not kings.