Originally published in Spanish on April 26, 2026.
Opinion | Ernesto García
On April 25, 2026, while President Donald Trump attended the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner in Washington, gunfire broke out near the ballroom. Authorities identified the suspect as Cole Allen, 31, of California. The Secret Service stopped him, and the president was unharmed.
The following morning, Americans faced a tally that should trouble anyone committed to democracy, regardless of party: three alleged attempts against Trump in less than two years, after a decade of anti-Trump rhetoric.
There was Butler, Pennsylvania, in July 2024, where a bullet grazed Trump’s ear and killed a father shielding his family. There was the West Palm Beach golf course two months later, where a gunman lay in wait. And now the Washington dinner shooting. The separate Coachella incident, in which an armed man was arrested at a security checkpoint, added to the atmosphere of alarm; it should not be treated as a legally established assassination attempt.
The uncomfortable question — one major newspapers too often avoid — is why.
Anti-Trump rhetoric: words have consequences
For a decade, a loud segment of America’s political, media and cultural establishment has repeated the same script. Trump is described as a tyrant rather than a political opponent, a fascist rather than a president with whom one disagrees, a king to be overthrown rather than a man twice elected to the presidency.
An existential threat. An American Hitler. The end of democracy.
What happens when a country is told, morning, noon and night, that one man embodies absolute evil and the end of the republic? Politics begins with language. Language portraying an opponent as absolute evil has consequences. An attacker need not hold a party membership card to have absorbed a poisonous political atmosphere.
That is the moral reckoning the American left resists. This is an argument about the climate created by public anti-Trump rhetoric, rather than proof that any speaker directed a particular crime.
“No Kings” and the language of delegitimization
Weeks before the April 25 shooting, No Kings marches filled streets in several American cities. Professionally printed signs and celebrity appearances delivered a simple message: Trump wanted to be king, and he had to be stopped.
The comparison collapses under scrutiny. Trump won two presidential elections. He governs subject to Congress, courts that can strike down executive actions, a largely hostile press and states run by the opposing party. If that is monarchy, the protesters need to consult a dictionary.
But the slogan’s function is to delegitimize. Calling an elected president a king makes him an apparent usurper. History offers ample examples of how portraying opponents that way can make extreme measures seem permissible.
The author sees a permission structure being built since 2016 through editorials, late-night monologues, protest placards and actors using award speeches to deliver political abuse.
Hollywood’s megaphone: Robert De Niro
Robert De Niro exemplifies the pattern. For years he has made his anger toward Trump a public article of faith: profanity at awards ceremonies, incendiary speeches and appearances on any available platform. He has called Trump a clown, an idiot and a danger. He is free to think and say so.
But that freedom does not oblige everyone else to accept a vocabulary applied in only one direction. While De Niro and his peers attack America’s elected president, their condemnation of the hemisphere’s actual dictatorships is far less conspicuous.
Where is comparable outrage over Miguel Díaz-Canel’s political prisoners? Over Nicolás Maduro and the exodus of roughly 8 million Venezuelans cited in the original column? Over Daniel Ortega’s stripping of citizenship, including from clergy?
The cultural industry that celebrates its courage becomes suddenly cautious when the dictator belongs to the left. That asymmetry reveals an ideological hierarchy in American progressivism.
Related: No Kings, Robert De Niro, Díaz-Canel and the left’s double standard toward dictatorships.
Havana and the narrative
The insults directed at Trump echo the labels Havana has long deployed against Republican presidents who challenge it. Havana did not invent the anti-Trump left. It embraces, celebrates and amplifies it through state media.
The regime has reasons of its own. Trump restored Cuba’s state sponsor of terrorism designation, restricted economic channels benefiting the government and refused its account of a supposed transition.
For Díaz-Canel, reducing Trump’s political influence is a matter of regime survival. Actors, activists and academics repeating the king narrative may therefore serve Havana’s interests, knowingly or otherwise. That is the political alignment this column challenges.
Read the original report concerning De Niro and Díaz-Canel.
A warning the exile communities recognize
For a Cuban in Hialeah, a Venezuelan in Doral or a Nicaraguan in Sweetwater, this script evokes lived memory. Delegitimization precedes exclusion, prosecution and the criminalization of political supporters. At its worst, someone decides words are insufficient and reaches for a gun.
The author views the repeated attacks as a pattern whose political atmosphere deserves scrutiny, even when individual offenders act alone. That interpretation does not establish criminal responsibility for cultural figures, protesters or political opponents.
America should never have a king. It should also reject the idea that an elected president of either party becomes a legitimate target because parts of the cultural elite find his existence intolerable.
Those who call Trump a tyrant while applauding Díaz-Canel might discover something uncomfortable in the mirror: the ruler they should fear is in Havana’s Palace of the Revolution.
While they applaud, Washington has again heard gunfire.
Case context added for the English edition: the Justice Department announced charges against Cole Tomas Allen on April 27, 2026. Charges are allegations, not a conviction.
