So a deranged California leftist armed with a shotgun, a handgun, and multiple knives rushed a Secret Service checkpoint at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on Saturday night in what federal prosecutors are now calling the third assassination attempt against President Trump — and the biggest story to come out of it is a talent agent who refused to stop eating his appetizer.
We live in the greatest country on earth.
Michael Glantz — a senior agent at Creative Artists Agency who represents Wolf Blitzer and Christiane Amanpour, so you know he’s seen some dramatic people in his life — was caught on camera calmly forking through his burrata salad while Secret Service agents literally hurdled over tables and chairs around him. The President, the First Lady, and the entire Cabinet were being rushed out of the ballroom. Guests were diving under tables. And this guy just… kept eating.
When the New York Times tracked him down to ask why he didn’t take cover like every other person in the room, Glantz delivered what might be the most perfectly New York answer in recorded history: “First of all, I have a bad back. I couldn’t get on the floor, and if I did get on the floor, they’d have to bring in people to get me off the floor.”
But wait — it gets better.
“And No. 2, I’m a hygiene freak. There was no freaking way I was getting in my new tux on the dirty Hilton floor.”
This man looked at a potential mass casualty event, weighed it against the cost of dry cleaning a tuxedo, and chose the salad. Absolute legend.
Now, we should probably talk about the lunatic who caused all this chaos in the first place, because the details that have come out about Cole Tomas Allen are exactly what you’d expect — and that’s the problem.
Allen, 31, from Torrance, California. Caltech grad. Former NASA intern. Part-time teacher at a test-prep company where he was once honored as “Teacher of the Month.” Donated $25 to Kamala Harris through ActBlue. And on Saturday night, he stuffed a shotgun, a pistol, and a collection of knives into a duffel bag, used a stairwell to avoid hotel security cameras, and rushed the magnetometer checkpoint outside the ballroom where the President of the United States was sitting.
He shot a Secret Service agent in the chest. (The agent was wearing a ballistic vest, returned fire, and survived — because our guys are tougher than their guys, every single time.)
Allen sent a 1,052-word manifesto to his family ten minutes before the attack. He opened it with a breezy “hello everybody!” — like he was sending a holiday newsletter — before explaining that he’d appointed himself the “Friendly Federal Assassin” and that it was his “duty” to target Trump administration officials. He called the President a “pedophile, rapist, and traitor.” He ranked his intended targets from “highest-ranking to lowest.” He ranted about “rage” over “everything this administration has done.”
Friendly. Federal. Assassin. That’s what this Caltech-educated, Kamala-donating, Teacher of the Month called himself.
Here’s what nobody in mainstream media wants to say out loud: this is the third time someone has tried to kill Donald Trump, and every single one of these people marinated in the same stew of hysterical anti-Trump rhetoric that MSNBC, CNN, and every Democrat with a Twitter account have been serving up for a decade. “He’s a dictator.” “He’s literally Hitler.” “He’s destroying democracy.” “People will die.”
You tell unstable people that the President is a fascist dictator committing crimes against humanity every single day, and then you act surprised when one of them picks up a shotgun? Please.
Allen didn’t come up with “pedophile, rapist, and traitor” on his own. That’s not original thinking. That’s the MSNBC chyron repackaged as a suicide note. Every word in that manifesto could’ve been pulled from a Rachel Maddow monologue or a Kamala Harris fundraising email. The rhetoric-to-violence pipeline isn’t a theory anymore. It’s a exposed sewer line running straight from cable news studios to crime scenes.
And while all of that was happening — while a radicalized leftist was firing a shotgun at Secret Service agents protecting the President — Michael Glantz sat there eating his burrata salad because he didn’t want to get his new tuxedo dirty on the Hilton carpet.
Christiane Amanpour, his client, called him “calm, collected and carrying on in a scary crisis.” Glantz himself put it simply: “I’m a New Yorker. We live with sirens and activity happening all the time. I wasn’t scared. There are hundreds of Secret Service agents hurtling themselves over tables and chairs, and I wanted to watch.”
He wanted to watch. While everyone else panicked, this man trusted the Secret Service to do their job — which they did — and decided the show was better than the floor.
Honestly? That’s the most American response possible. A free man, eating a salad, watching the good guys take down the bad guy, and refusing to wrinkle his tux in the process.
The left keeps producing these deranged would-be assassins. And we keep producing guys who eat through the chaos because they know — they know — that the people protecting this country are better than the people trying to destroy it.
Cole Allen is sitting in a federal cell facing attempted assassination charges. Michael Glantz is sitting somewhere in New York, probably still thinking about that burrata.
We know which one we’d rather be.