Just a few days had passed since the attack on Donald Trump, with the foiled crime scene still in chaos Twitter already in a strident political fray over the motives for the shooting. Either Trump had fabricated a fake attack to win the elections riding a wave of empathy. Or the shooter was following the impulses of the progressive mob, which had always wanted to liquidate Trump. “We must stop the globalist left that is sowing hatred, ruin, and war. The terrible thing is that in Spain, the worst version of this left governs, and right now they will be secretly regretting that the assassin failed,” Santiago Abascal tweeted in the heat of the moment.
The fervor of Spanish Twitter users was such that anyone would say that the sniper’s real motive had been to destabilize Spanish politics and its commentators.
But no. The shots were far from that—far, in fact, from reaching any kind of reasonable explanation as to the motives of the attack…
We know that the man who tried to assassinate Donald Trump was called Thomas Crooks, that he was twenty years old, and that he died during the attack.
Not much else allows us to decipher the mystery of his actions.
Leaving the door open to a future narrative In turn, the sniper’s lack of motivation is now the main reason for the attack, that is, the most disturbing scenario possible: nothing leaves you more chilled than someone committing a crime for no reason, something that happens more often in the US than it seems.
First clue: A person with the same name as Crooks once donated $15 to a progressive organization.
Inevitably, after an attack on Trump, the first thing you think of is that some leftists may have been behind it, an impression that has cooled since it became known that Crooks was a registered Republican voter. Why would a Republican voter go out to kill Trump? Had he been overheated by the QAnon forums, where some—and there are some—accuse Trump of being too reformist?
A neighbor of the Crooks’ family home told the Washington Post that he recalled seeing a pro-Trump sign in their yard on one occasion.
It is disconcerting to find someone who, against all reasonable controlling predictions, decides to kill Trump just because.
But all the political ramifications, some of them contradictory, are now at a dead end.
Indeed, after several days of investigating Crooks’ phone and surroundings, the authorities are far from having an explanation as to what he was limping on or what was going through his head.
What investigators have assembled so far, according to the New York Times, is “less a portrait of the suspect than an empty frame.””
Crooks made no statement about his actions. He had no criminal or mental health history whatsoever. His schoolmates say he was a self-made man who liked to keep to himself and keep his opinions to himself; he was a “smart but solitary student who walked the halls with his head down and rarely raised his hand in class. He did not want any kind of attention, positive or negative,” the newspaper sums up.
So far, his digital life “has revealed no deeply held political beliefs.” “The motives of the young man who tried to assassinate former President Trump remain a mystery, even after the FBI gained access to his cellphone… Lab technicians have examined text messages, emails, and other data from the sniper but have found no clear evidence of a potential motive for the attack,” the New York Times adds.
According to the Washington Post, despite the tracking of Crooks’ cell phone, “puzzling gaps remain about the sniper’s identity.”
In short, Crooks’ digital trail is so inconclusive and politically charged that it is a macabre paradox that he ended up being the protagonist of the political attack of the decade.
It is impossible to get it right.
Two and a half centuries after the founding of the United States, we continue to make the mistake of jumping to conclusions about the country’s violent outbursts. Let’s just say that the American national psyche is complex.
Does there necessarily have to be political motives behind an assassination attempt on a president? If we remember what happened outside the Washington Hilton on March 30, 1981, when a guy named John Hinckley Junior shot Ronald Reagan, it doesn’t seem so. The first hypothesis of the secret services about the attack? The KGB. Indeed, there was some doubt as to whether it was a wave of attacks or a specific action, but always with the Russians in the crosshairs. Everything was set for a festival of media laments about polarization (of the Cold War) and violence towards political rivals.
What was decided at the recorded crisis cabinet meeting after the attack? The air force was put on high alert, and the nuclear briefcase was kept on hand in case the USSR attacked the US. You have a lot to say.
Well, if you had been given 1000 chances in 1981 to find out the motives behind the assassination of Reagan, you would have failed miserably. Who would have thought that Hinckley shot Reagan to flirt with Jodie Foster? (Obviously, no world security agency is prepared to anticipate such a scenario.). In fact, the reasons for the assassination of Reagan are not entirely clear: after falling in love with Jodie Foster from Taxi Driver, Hinkley began a campaign of flirting (in his head) or harassment (in reality) with the Hollywood star, who escaped him as best she could.
But there was still the final straw: in the image and likeness of Travis Brickley in Taxi Driver, who attacked a presidential candidate, Hinkley thought it would be a good idea to shoot a politician. Before Reagan, he planned to liquidate the president of the United States, the Democrat Jimmy Carter, whom he followed (ergo, pointing to ideological motives behind his actions was nonsense). All this in order to, ahem, win Foster’s heart (indeed, maximum emotional toxicity: Hinkley later described the shooting of Reagan as “the greatest display of love in the history of mankind“).
By the way, after the assassination, Reagan was taken to the hospital with a gunshot wound. On the operating table, he did something that epitomizes his art for the traditional joke: he took off his oxygen mask and said to the doctors, “I hope you are all Republicans.” There was thunderous laughter in the operating room.
A jury acquitted Hinckley of the attack, calling him a madman.
Think of Hinckley, then, whenever you make a hasty assessment of the shooting of US presidents.
The black hand
It is no coincidence that the wildest conspiracies arise when parents who have lost their children in a brutal and gratuitous manner—for example, the crime of Alcàsser—seem to give meaning to their deaths with hyperbolic stories that implicate powerful evildoers.
In the case of the attack on Trump, we find that the sniper was an empty book, i.e., one in which anyone can write whatever they want on its pages. A page that is blank and ready to write. Perfect proof for the conspiracy to last until the end of time (to defend the conspiracy theorists, I must say that it sounds like a huge case of police negligence; it doesn’t make sense that someone would climb onto a roof 150 meters above Trump without any agents noticing).
Why did the Crooks attempt to kill Trump? Because he wanted to and because he could, although his father was a social worker, they had an AR-15 rifle at home (among many other weapons). If you have a lucky cat in your living room that moves its paw, Americans have assault rifles. It is their culture, and it must be respected.
Now that the algorithm knows everything about you—it knows which newspaper you read in the morning, what time you go to the supermarket, and what brand of cookies you buy—and all your past and future political and sentimental tastes (even the ones you don’t even know you have yet), it is disconcerting to find someone who wakes up in the morning and, against all reasonable security and control predictions, decides to kill Donald Trump. A bad day for the digital big brother.
These days, even changing a light bulb is seen as divisive and politically motivated. The idea that someone tried to kill Donald Trump for no reason seems like the most countercultural thing that could happen.
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