Cole Allen, the latest alleged wannabe Trump assassin, was an enthusiastic user of the rancid left-wing echo chamber known as the social media platform Blue Sky. 

A breakdown of Cole’s most-liked accounts over the past month, before he tried to kill Trump at the Washington Hilton Saturday night, shows a classic grab bag of Trump-haters and liberal activists, with lefty Trump-deranged lawyer Will Stancil at the top, boasting 28 likes.

But a curious account in the middle of the radical left soup, coming in at number 12 with seven likes, is a little-known China apologist, James Palmer, the deputy editor of Foreign Policy, who uses the handle “beijingpalmer.”

Palmer writes on absurd topics, such as “More hope for gay rights in China than the US,” and once asked his Asian-American followers to contact him if they “have been through the US security clearance process — particularly those who have had problems with it because of ethnicity.”

Allen’s approval of Palmer’s outpourings may mean nothing more than that he liked material favorable to China.

But there’s no doubt China is actively working to magnify social, political and racial divisions in this country and does so in part by seeding psychologically manipulative narratives through social media influence operations. What better venue than the Trump-deranged niche asylum of Blue Sky?  

You just have to look at peer-reviewed analysis by Rutgers University of Chinese manipulation on TikTok to see how determined the influence operations are.

So when we look for overseas influences on the left-wing young men who have become assassins, or aspired to murder conservative bogeymen, we shouldn’t ignore the malign foreign operations on the gaming platforms and social media networks they use.

Which brings us to another troubling point: the danger of President Trump traveling to China next month. Optically, it’s a win for President Xi, with Trump the biggest prize in a conga line of world leaders paying their respects to the Chinese autocrat.

But this is the country that gave us COVID-19, hid the evidence, and got away with it. 

Trump is the only obstacle between Xi and world domination. China has every motivation in the world to do our president harm and is clever enough to do it with plausible deniability.

All it would take is to infect Trump with something that takes effect a month later when he’s back on home soil. Who would ever know for sure?

If he must meet Xi in person, let it be in a neutral third country.