Almost one year ago, a teenager murdered his parents as part of a plan to go after a bigger target.
That target would have been Donald Trump.
Now, Nikita Casap is 18 and has pleaded guilty to the killings that he carried out.
An odd twist is that he doesn’t appear to have disliked Trump. We’ll explain, as best we can, what his thought process may have been.
It looks like he wants to avoid a trial
18-year-old Nikita Casap pleaded guilty to two counts of intentional homicide.
This was part of a deal over the murder of his parents, The Associated Press reports.
In exchange for these pleas, prosecutors dropped seven additional charges.
These charges include theft, hiding a corpse, and operating a motor vehicle without consent. Much less serious charges, as you can see.
When he was 17, Casap allegedly killed his parents in order to gain the autonomy and financial resources to assassinate Donald Trump.
On February 28, 2025, police acting on behalf of family members conducted a welfare check on 35-year-old Tatiana Casap and 51-year-old Donald Mayer.
Mayer had not been to work. Casap had not been at school.
In both cases, they had been missing from the public eye for about two weeks.
Authorities found that they were both dead — victims of a double homicide.
This story only gets weirder the more that you learn about it. Weirder and more upsetting.
The timeline is morbid (at best)
According to court documents, Nikita Casap allegedly shot both parents on or around February 11.
He then spent a reported 12 days living in the house with their corpses before leaving.
He took jewelry, a gun, passports, around $14,000 in cash, and the SUV. (He also brought the family dog with him)
The same day that authorities conducted a welfare check, they located him. Police in Kansas arrested him on February 28.
It was a relatively simple matter to track the GPS of the missing vehicle of a pair of homicide victims.
What was less simple was identifying the remains.
Due to decomposition, forensic analysts had to use dental records to identify Mayer and Casap.
One baffling detail of the case is that Nikita apparently penned a three-page manifesto that allegedly explains the crimes to which he has now confessed.
His write-up praises Adolf Hitler (he also reportedly has ties to Neo-Nazi groups online, on Telegram and TikTok, though we do not know specifics).
At first glance, it doesn’t make any sense why an avowed fan of Hitler would want to kill one of the foremost fascist figures of the 21st Century. Our first thought was that he had simply lost touch with reality.
Why would a fan of one fascist be plotting the assassination of another?
However, FBI analysis of the manifesto (which has very reasonably not been made public) makes it clearer.
It appears that this young man is an accelerationist, and believed that assassinating Trump would trigger a race war — and that white Americans would triumph.
Accelerationists are white supremacists who believe that a race war is inevitable. They wish for it to happen now (or soon), when they believe that they can win, instead of in the future, when they believe that they might lose.
This evil ideology really brings this assassination plot into focus. And illustrates that all of this is ideologically consistent.
It isn’t that he disapproves of the Trump regime — the greatest friend to white nationalists to occupy the White House in many generations. It’s that he believes that sacrificing one figurehead would spark a brutal race war.
Fortunately, as we see with many evil-doers, his harebrained scheme was riddled with incompetence.