From ‘one guy, one gun’ to foreign plots: Glenn Beck exposes the terrifying evolution of assassination attempts against Trump
In the past, assassination attempts against a president were fairly simple, Glenn Beck says.“It looked like one guy, one gun.”But those days, he argues, are “absolutely gone.”Today, assassination attempts — especially those against President Trump — look “really different.”On this episode of “The Glenn Beck program,” Glenn exposes a terrifying pattern behind the numerous attempts on Donald Trump’s life. The first attempt to assassinate Trump occurred in 2016 at a rally in Las Vegas when a young man tried to grab a police officer’s gun with the stated intention of shooting and killing Trump.“That’s the old model,” Glenn says.But in 2017, things began to take a darker turn.In September of that year, during President Trump’s visit to a refinery in Mandan, North Dakota, a man stole a forklift and tried to enter the presidential motorcade route with the intent to flip Trump’s limousine and kill him.“To me, this is the difference between planting a bomb in the basement of the World Trade Center and then that not working, and then trying to fly airplanes into the side of the building five years later,” Glenn says, highlighting the growing desire for “spectacle.”In 2020, things progressed again when a Canadian woman mailed a letter containing homemade ricin (a highly toxic poison) addressed to then-President Trump at the White House.“Distance now is entering the picture,” Glenn says. “You don’t need access; you just need to find a way to get proximity.”Then came the closest attempt in 2024, when at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks opened fire from a rooftop with an AR-15-style rifle, grazing President Trump in the ear.“This is no longer chaotic. This is ... well-planned and calculated,” Glenn says, drawing attention to all the “warnings” leading up to Crooks’ attempt, most notably the numerous sightings of Crooks on a strangely unguarded rooftop.Two months later at Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, Florida, 58-year-old Ryan Wesley Routh hid in bushes along the course with an AK-47-style rifle and a scope, lying in wait to shoot President Trump while he was golfing, but was spotted by Secret Service agents before Trump arrived at that hole.“This is not anger anymore. Now they’re stalking him,” Glenn says.“Behind the scenes, federal prosecutors uncover a plot tied to individuals linked to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. ... Not just Trump, but several U.S. leaders are targeted,” he continues. “Now, that’s a different category. ... That’s geopolitical; that’s foreign terrorism.”And finally, the latest attempt on President Trump’s life occurred just last month when armed gunman Cole Tomas Allen allegedly tried to storm the security perimeter at the Washington Hilton where President Trump was hosting the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. He allegedly fired multiple shots in an attempt to kill Trump and other Cabinet officials, but Secret Service tackled and arrested him, preventing any casualties.“I want you to think about the target. It’s not a rally; it’s not a golf course. It’s a room full of the leadership of the United States,” Glenn says. “That’s not an assassination. That’s destabilization. ... That is the constitutional order being disrupted.”Why have these assassination attempts become more organized and common?Glenn answers that question by recapping three stories just from this month:During a CNN interview, Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Mallory McMorrow (Mich.) drew parallels between Nazi Germany and what’s happening under the Trump administration, citing an “authoritarian slide.” Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Raymond Chandler (Penn.) was arrested after allegedly leaving voicemails threatening to slit the throats of a Republican congressman and his young daughter, and making threats against President Trump.Mohamed Abdou, a former Columbia University professor who was fired in 2024 after publicly praising Hamas, Hezbollah, and the October 7 attacks, spoke at Virginia Tech as part of his “Death to the Akademy” tour. During the event, he openly declared support for Hamas/“Palestinian resistance”and explained the slogan “Death to America” as meaning a total end to the U.S. empire and the destruction of America as a “settler-colonial” project.“What’s happening here, America? What’s changed?” Glenn asks.“Everything,” he answers.“It used to be one guy walking in behind President Lincoln and shooting him. ... Now it’s layered. You have the lone actors; you also have the ideological extremists; you have the distance attacks, the mail, the surveillance, the infiltration,” he explains.“But you also have something else. You have the failure points; you have the security gaps; you have the missed warnings; you have systems that don’t seem to be adapting, or at least not fast enough.