THE COUNTRY’S IN THE VERY BEST OF HANDS: Trump shooter was ‘spotted on roof 26 minutes before assassination attempt’ as pressure mounts on how Secret Service allowed gunman to open fire at rally.
Related: Mystery Around Trump Shooter Deepens.
Two days after Thomas Matthew Crooks committed one of the most shocking acts of political violence in half a century, both investigators and people in his western Pennsylvania community are no closer to understanding why he did it.
The FBI has analyzed Crooks’s cellphone and has found nothing that explains why he climbed onto a roof and shot at former President Trump, grazing his ear, law-enforcement officials said. Crooks’s parents have spoken to law enforcement, but they also seemed to have little insight, telling authorities he didn’t appear to have any strong political leanings and had few, if any, friends.
The attempted assassination looked likely to drive the country to new levels of partisan distrust, but the initial mixed picture of the bespectacled young gunman of a quiet loner who wasn’t politically outspoken has instead left most of the American public scratching its head.
* * * * * * * *
Crooks appears to have acted alone, investigators said, and they were turning to his computer and other devices in hopes of finding any clues about his ideology.
More: Claire Lehmann on Courage and Cowardice in Pennsylvania:
The last attempted assassination of a US president provides a lesson. Forty-four years ago, a man named John Hinckley Jr. followed US President Jimmy Carter across multiple states, stalking him from Washington, D.C., to Columbus, and then Dayton, Ohio. Hinckley came within 20 feet of President Carter but decided at the last minute not to shoot him. That fate would await the next president, Ronald Reagan, outside the Washington Hilton hotel in an assassination attempt that left three Secret Service agents with gunshot wounds, and the President with serious injuries.
Surprisingly, this assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan lacked a clear political motivation. Hinckley was driven not by ideology, but by a delusional desire to impress actress Jodie Foster. A note he wrote prior to the shooting provides insight into his morbid fantasy:
Over the past seven months I’ve left you dozens of poems, letters and love messages in the faint hope that you could develop an interest in me. Although we talked on the phone a couple of times I never had the nerve to simply approach you and introduce myself. … The reason I’m going ahead with this attempt now is because I cannot wait any longer to impress you.
Seemingly irrational violence is not unique to Hinckley. In fact, it fits into a broader pattern identified by behavioural science. Psychologist Robert King, in a 2019 study on spree killers, wrote: “Males have been literally running amok—attacking innocent strangers en masse—across time and space.” In their study of spree killers, King and his colleague Nadia Butler analysed an archival search of 70 mass murderers, and found that they fell into two distinct groups. These groups were defined by age and stage of life. The younger killers, with an average age of 23, often had troubled pasts and mental health issues, and appeared to use violence as a way to obtain status, simply through infamy. By comparison, the older group, averaging 41 years old, were typically married with children and did not have a history of mental illness. They had recently experienced a significant loss in status, such as job loss or marital breakdown. Their primary motivation was jealousy.
* * * * * * * *
In the realm of political assassinations, we see a similar pattern of youth typically combined with mental illness or emotional disturbance. John Hinckley Jr. was 25 years old, with no job and no girlfriend, harbouring delusions of forming a relationship with Jodie Foster. Lee Harvey Oswald, who assassinated John F. Kennedy, was a 24-year-old with a history of violence, paranoia, and social rejection. Sirhan Sirhan was 24 when he killed Robert F. Kennedy in 1968, reportedly motivated by Kennedy’s support for Israel. John Wilkes Booth, Abraham Lincoln’s assassin, was just 26.
In an article for Quillette published last year, Robert King observed that “mass killings are, among many other things, a deliberately public, attention-seeking attempt to drive a wedge into the existing social order.” In 2024 America, what could be more attention-seeking than attempting to kill Donald Trump?
Read the whole thing.