Another “assassination” attempt in the United States.  The third one in two years.  All three directed at Donald J. Trump.  Several while he was a presidential candidate and now one as president.  Predictably, the president and his supporters blame Democratic criticism of Mr. Trump and the media’s reaction to the Epstein scandals while refusing to acknowledge that they themselves engage in similar rhetoric when given the chance, both branches of the AIPAC controlled uniparty doing everything possible to increase polarization within the United States electorate[1]. 

To me, the issue is more serious and more strategic.  What to me is very different this time is that the Trump administration no longer treats assassinations or murders of heads of state or of their families or of their cabinets and their families as crimes, at least when the United States and Israel engage in such activities.  The generality of such crimes which constitute violations of the most fundamental principal of international law, jus cogens, no longer seems applicable in the context of the United States and if assassination of political leaders is no longer a crime when engaged in by the United States, how would it then be a crime when engaged in against its own leaders?  Legal logic, possibly an oxymoron, would dictate that political assassination is either always or never legal.  In the pure legal sense, there is no room for self-serving hybrids.

Cole Tomas Allen, a 31 year old engineer, a purportedly highly intelligent and well educated individual, apparently believed that it was his duty to target Trump administration officials because of their connection to Jeffrey Epstein’s heinous crimes involving rape, pederasty, sexual abuse of minors, murder and satanic rituals, crimes which Mr. Allen’s targets refused to investigate, at least that’s what he claimed according to a note he sent family members minutes before the attack.  There are also allegations that he was a pro-Ukraine fanatic furious because of declining United States support for the Volodymyr Oleksandrovych Zelenskyy regime and even a photograph briefly posted on Instagram of Mr. Allen in an Israeli Defense Forces sweatshirt[2].  Indeed, “Never Trumpers” have little trouble believing that all three purported attempts on Mr. Trump’s life were orchestrated, something to which Mr. Trump’s reactions sometimes add credibility.  For example, immediately following the latest incident Mr. Trump and members of his cabinet went on the air to indicate how the incident proved the need for the “Big, Beautiful White House Ballroom” currently tied up in litigation.  Furthermore, Mr. Trump and his supporters used the incident to justify renewal of authority for warrantless spying on United States citizens.  Based on the prevalence of artificial intelligence, it’s impossible verify any of the allegations involving Mr. Allen’s motivation, ludicrous though they may be.  If they are. 

So, based on the foregoing, how is Mr. Allen to be judged based on the current state of the law?  Or is he to be judged at all?  After all, conviction without trial is hardly unusual now, at least when the United States is involved.  Or Israel.

Many people I know, men who I trust admire and respect and who share a similar educational background with me, at least through undergraduate studies, see no problem with what the United States and Israel have done to leaders in Iran, and in Gaza and in Lebanon and in Syria and in Libya and in Iraq.  The list goes on.  But they’re horrified when assassination is “attempted”, even unsuccessfully, in the United States, whether the attempts are successful or not and whether against United States political leadership or against civic leaders like Charlie Kirk (unless, of course, it involved an Israeli project, the assassination Charley Kirk and of United States president John F. Kennedy in 1963 comes to mind, or the attack on the USS Liberty).  Paranoia, apparently, is catching and I may have a touch, which brings to mind a probable urban myth concerning President Richard M. Nixon who, purportedly once exclaimed: “just because I may be paranoid does not mean there are not people out to get me.  In Mr. Nixon’s case he was obviously right (no pun intended).

So, is “the do as I say and not as I do” refrain some parents used in the past (perhaps some still do) applicable when it comes to legal concepts such as crimes?  In legal systems the concept of “comity”, a concept related to reciprocity, would seem applicable.  But do legal systems still exist?  Did they ever?  Or are they as much of an illusion as are the concepts of democracy or of liberty or of accountability for one’s actions regardless of who one is (i.e., that purportedly no one is above the las)?

It’s entirely possible that neither international nor constitutional law (at least United States constitutional law) now exist.  Perhaps only the “state of nature” posited in the seventeenth century by political philosopher Thomas Hobbes exists, one where only power matters (as Donald Trump has expressly stated).  The demise of law and of legal systems in an international context seems like a cancer metastasizing but one which may soon spread to domestic law.  Remember when, starting with the Obama administration, it became acceptable, if perhaps not really legal, for United States agents to kill United States citizens using drones and other means without a trial or even an indictment and without the excuse of self-defense?  I do.  It sickened me then, it sickens me now.  It especially sickens me when its probity among our citizenry depends on the political party in power at the time.  Especially in light of the reality that, in the United States, both major political parties are AIPAC owned, AIPAC bought and paid for.

My friends who find the extrajudicial execution of United States citizens and foreign leaders acceptable are, to the best of my knowledge, Christians, and religious Christians at that, and they claim to live in accordance with the Decalogue (the formal term for the Ten Commandments), or at least to try to do so.  Most insist that the Decalogue should be posted in classroom and courthouses and in public buildings and public spaces.  One of the commandments, not the least important, forbids murder.  But, then again, it’s never really been taken seriously as a universal proscription, after all, we have abortion and capital punishment and war and “collateral damage” and lately, much to the surprise of many of us but not to many of my friends, the perception that genocide itself is not really wrong, or that deliberate mass murder of hundreds of thousands of civilians, most women, children and the elderly, is not “technically” genocide.  Not any more anyway.  Most of my conservative friends also claim to believe in a “strict interpretation” of the United States Constitution adopted in 1787 and of the first ten amendments thereto (adopted shortly thereafter), the ones contained in what we refer to as the Bill of Rights.  However, their attitude towards both the Constitution and especially the Bill of Rights has undergone a gradual metamorphosis and strict construction is no longer as strict as it once was.  That is especially true with respect to the first, fourth and fifth amendments to the Constitution and with respect to the fourteenth amendment adopted following the War Between the States (also referred to as the Civil War, although there was nothing “civil” about it). 

I wonder what my friends would feel “duty bound to do” if, as Mr. Allen purportedly believed, they believed that Mr. Trump and members of his administration were in fact involved in rape, pederasty, pedophilia, murder and satanic rituals and that it seemed that their actions would never be prosecuted?  Would it matter?  Would they dare to take the law into their own hands as Mr. Allen purportedly attempted to do?  Should they?  I was once pretty sure they would, after all, they were heroes many times over under circumstances involving life and death, their own and those of men and women they commanded.  Now, I’m pretty sure they would not.  But also, that they should not.  John Wilkes Booth firmly believed that Abraham Lincoln was a tyrant responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths.  Brutus believed the same with respect to Julius Caesar.  Indeed, most political assassins are firmly convinced of the justice of their respective causes.  And they are frequently not wrong.  But as a society, until very recently, political assassination was anathema.  Or at least purportedly anathema.[3]  Is that still the perspective we should adopt?  Pragmatically it is and should be despite the resulting impunity, otherwise political violence would be even more prevalent than it currently is.  But the lid to the amphora in which Pandora purportedly kept the ills of the world safely locked has been smashed to smithereens.

I’m not a believer in the divinity of the person my friends refer to as Jesus (his real name was the Aramaic rendering of Yešu), nor am I any longer a believer in the god Yešu is said to have worshipped, YHWH, and whose son Yešu purportedly was[4].  But I am a believer in many of the proscriptions contained in the Decalogue and specifically the proscription against killing, and I am a believer in many of the teachings concerning interpersonal relations attributed directly to Yešu.  And I am a believer in the United States Constitution although I think it is long overdue for a massive revamping[5].  Consequently, to me, any assassination is anathema, any murder is anathema and all genocide is anathema.  But the greatest crime of all may be the corruption of the bravest and best among us, those we believed would protect us from the evil and corruption that surrounds us, those who, seeing it all, now accept it as right and proper and patriotic.  Something certainly not unique to United States society.  It obviously occurred as the Weimer Republic came to an end.

That people who share backgrounds so similar to mine have such divergent perspectives so passionately held is problematic.  For all of us I suppose.  As is the profound general demise of empathy and tolerance which has been replaced with intolerant polarization and the rejection of the philosophies reflected in United States Bill of Rights, philosophies that the world seemed to admire so much and which many societies sought to emulate.  But today’s world seems more like one in which the most fervent fascists defeated in the Second World War would feel comfortable.  Assassination of political leaders and their families and extermination through genocide and ethnic cleansing has somehow become reasonable, at least to many, and the imbalance of wealth between the wealthiest and the poorest now seems an unbreachable chasm.  As in preludes to civil wars, we see each other, even within families, as not just mistaken but evil, and we seem unable to even consider the reasons others hold opposing views.  The apparent human instinct to vilify is availed of by tiny minorities comprised of the worst among us in order to keep us divided and easily controlled, fighting each other while we’re slowly bled, morally, ethically, economically and physically.  We react based on our fears rather than our hopes, fears that are induced rather than prudent, casting aside the values of tolerance that we had seemingly been developing over the past several centuries.  The values which echoed those the gentle Nazarene from Palestine tried to teach us millennia ago.  Values largely predicated on a single concept: empathy.

How is it that so many Christians, that so many military officers (both serving and retired) who have willingly put their lives at risk to uphold a noble system of values, now so cavalierly reject them?  How is that those who so cavalierly wasted the lives and welfare of so many of my fellow alumni[6] now rule unfettered and without sacrifice over us?  People like the current president of the United States and his predecessor Joseph Robinette Biden, or Barrack Obama, or George W. Bush, etc., people who have no “skin in the game”, either theirs or their families.  People who continue to send the best of us to waste their lives, taking the lives of other young men and women, other sons and daughters, other mothers and fathers, other siblings and friends as though they were irrelevancies because they were born elsewhere and feel as strongly about their values as we purport to feel about ours?

How sick is that?  How sick are we?  Where have our values gone?  Where has our humanity gone?  For what have we exchanged it?  Would our planet be a better place without us?  If Yešu in fact lived, whether as a divinity or merely as an ethical human being, what would he think of us, especially of those who promote assassination and murder and genocide and ethnic cleansing and inequity and inequality and injustice, in his name?

So, back to more current events, should we be surprised that political assassination attempts and that mass killings in our schools are seemingly becoming so normal when the organized mass murder of so many millions abroad has become praiseworthy and when the armaments industry has become the prime beneficiary of a major portion of our earnings?

Are we really as stupid and manipulable and lacking in decency as the worst among us hope?  It’s hard to imagine that we are when we think of those we love and respect but, when we listen to them now, when we read their posts and their opinions, the decency inherent within them seems to have vanished.  It seems to have been stolen in a manner identical to the way the virtue of children is stolen when they’re raped and abused.  Something sickeningly more common than until recently, until after Epstein and friends were brought into the light of day (sort of), we thought possible.  But our hypocrisy and lack of empathy and ability to rationalize makes it possible, heaven or something like heaven, help us.
_____

© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2026; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet and aspiring empirical philosopher) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. Previously, he chaired the social studies and foreign language departments at the Eastern Military Academy in Huntington, New York. He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review available at Substack.com; an intermittent commentator on radio and television; and, an occasional contributor to diverse periodicals and publications. He has academic degrees in political science (BA, The Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina), law (JD, St. John’s University, School of Law), international legal studies (LL.M, the Graduate Division of the New York University School of Law) and translation and linguistic studies (GCTS, the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta, cosmology and cosmogony. He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.

[1] See, e.g., Fisher, Anthony L. (2026): “The shameless hypocrisy of MAGA’s post-WHCD attack blame game”; MS Now, April 28, 2026, 6:00 a.m., EDT.

[2] See, e.g., Olson, Cade (2026):  “The Correspondents’ Dinner Shooting, Time Travel, and Solomon’s Temple: Conspiracy Roundup”, Substack, April 28, 2026.

[3] The Central Intelligence Agency, the Mossad, Britain’s MI6, etc., clearly not only believed otherwise but acted otherwise.  Do you perhaps remember Ngô Đình Diệm and the havoc that ensued?  Or president Kennedy?

[4] Jews, of course, reject those assertions as discussed in the Toledot Yeshu (See Calvo Mahé (2024): “The Life of Yešu According to Diverse Jewish Sources”; Academia.edu.).  Muslims take an equivocal position between the two, respecting Yešu as the second most important man who ever lived, and as their savior, but not as divine.

[5] See Calvo Mahé (“2023): “Motley Constitutionalism: a labyrinthine aphorism”, Academia.edu.

[6] E.g., of graduates from the Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina and from the Eastern Military Academy, and from institutions like those that to me seem so noble, institutions like the Virginia Military Institute, the United States Military Academy at West Point, the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis, the United States Air Force Academy at Colorado Springs, Norwich University, Texas A&M, etc., and, of course, of the men they led.