The Narrative, Which Means Manipulated Storyline, Matters More than the Actual Story: Trump's Attempted Assassination

American Eclectic posts articles twice a month, on the 1st and 15th. This is the third year of publication; previously published articles can be found on my site.

August 1, 2024

I met a man at my youngest daughter’s Girl Scout Brownies father/daughter pizza party years ago.  His wife was the leader of the group, a very nice woman.  He approached me quickly and got up very close to me and said he heard I knew about baseball.  There were baseball pictures on the wall of the pizza parlor we were in, and he stated that he knew who the player on the wall was behind him: He got it wrong, it was Willie Mays.  He kept getting closer and I took a knuckle and let him have it in his chest plate.  He backed off.  The next morning as I was walking through our home to get my kids up, he was standing inside the front door, I calmly said his name and he told me we were going to become great friends and go to baseball games together; I gently led him out of the house—we never attended any games together. 

A couple of months later, there was a picnic and bike ride the Brownies were having and I brought the bikes on a flatbed trailer.  I was planning to leave and was going to come back later and pick up all the bikes.  It was apparent that several of the women who were there with their daughters did not want me to leave.  This man was there cooking the food and bossing his wife around.  So, I stayed to make the women feel comfortable. 

About six months after this event, several of us heard that his wife, the Brownie leader, was filing for divorce.  Soon after I heard this news, one evening I got a phone call from a woman I knew, and her voice was frightened on the phone: she heard there was a shooting and that bodies were still in the street.  She was convinced that one of the dead was her husband since he had frequent encounters with this same man.  I raced over to the scene and the police were already there. I could see bodies with white sheets over them on the road.   One of the dead was the man’s wife, and the other was the babysitter.  This couple had three young children, and they were in the car. 

I called the woman who had called me to tell her it was not her husband, which relieved her greatly.  I stayed at the scene and talked with a woman in a house that looked out on the road, and she told me she saw the shooting.  She was quite disoriented by the shooting, understandably so, and said she saw him shoot one woman then put the barrel of the gun in his mouth, suck on it, and then shoot the other woman. 

While I was talking to the woman, I realized that the couple’s three children were in her house.  The police had taken them and placed them in the house, I guess not sure what to do with them.  I offered to take them home since my youngest daughter was close with one of the girls and she knew the other two.  A police officer seemed agreeable to this suggestion, but then someone showed up who had a relationship with the family and took the children with her.   

The man died that same evening in a police chase when his SUV turned over.  A few days later, at the funeral of the wife, I discussed the shooting with a detective who was there.  He told me that the man had several guns hidden in different places, one was under the seat of the SUV, I guess different than the one he used to kill his wife and babysitter. 

Television news covered the story but when you see stories like this on television there seems to be a general theme that things such as this happen in such a way where one moment the person was normal and then suddenly a switch goes off and they suddenly change.  What several of us knew that interacted with this man was that it was only a matter of time before something set him off and he lost control to do something violent. I still can hear it in my head a man I knew saying he believed someday this particular man would kill his wife—this was about a year before it happened and before she filed for divorce. 

Obviously, with his wife filing for divorce that was a tipping point and he responded violently.  I do not know if television news can do a good job of getting beyond the superficial aspects, they tend to focus on the moment of violence as though that is all that matters. 

My late wife and I frequently went out to dinner with a couple, she is a therapist and told me that when she sees young people, in this sense maybe between the 18 to 24 or so age range, one of the questions she asks them is about the political party affiliation of the parents and if it is different from the patient.  She said she found this is sometimes a point of tension in a family.  These were conversations we had years ago, well before Donald Trump was ever on the political scene.   

A television series, Family Ties (starring Michael J. Fox, Meredith Baxter, and Michael Gross) was on the air between 1982 and 1989.  The premise of the show was that Alex Keaton (Fox), the son was a member of the Young Republicans, and his parents (Baxter and Gross) were two former hippies.  This comedy series highlighted the theme of “where did we go wrong” from the point of view of the parents.  Here, comedy did not necessarily reflect the actual tensions that can exist in a family because of political differences. 

Thomas Matthew Crooks, the 20-year-old who wounded Trump and killed a person sitting behind him as well as having wounded two others came from a family where the father has been identified as a Republican and the mother as a Democratic, Crooks was a registered Republican.  Crooks used a semi-automatic rifle that his father had bought.  An FBI spokesman said, “We do not currently have an identified motive, although our investigators are working tirelessly to attempt to identify what that motive was.”  The chances are they never will have a clear idea of what motivated Crooks to climb up on a roof and shoot Trump. 

Crooks worked at a senior living facility not far from his home as an aide. Reading a statement given by the center’s administrator says a whole lot of nothing. She stated, “Thomas Matthew Crooks performed his job without concern and his background check was clean.” I thought about the man who shot his wife and babysitter. I believe behind the scenes people did see problems with Crooks. Of course, there would be no way to know or anticipate that Crooks would simply go to such an extreme and shoot a Presidential candidate, but just as with the man I knew, violence did not suddenly come out of nowhere. No doubt there are people Crooks interacted with who saw or felt something they were uncomfortable with or concerned about. I suspect many of us have run into people over the years who we just have a bad feeling about and want to keep at a distance.

Will any of this matter, where the storyline is to see a disturbed young man who had been trying to do something horrible and Trump just happened to be a target? The Lee Harvey Oswald image where Oswald had every intention of shooting John Kennedy may have no relation to what happened here. Although the “second shooter” myth, popular with the John F. Kennedy assassination, has raised its head in this situation with a belief that Crooks was set up to take the fall. As a political scientist stated, “It’s not shocking that people are talking about second shooters. There’s really nothing new under the sun.”

Political polarization and political language seen as inciting violence are the background noise that will play to create a narrative, a storyline that develops and grows and ends up having little, if any, relationship, to why this shooting happened.

Senator Marco Rubio (R, FL) soon after the shooting posted on X, “God protected President Trump.” A pastor, obviously a Trump supporter added, “[This was] a demonstration of the power of Almighty God.” And, he further went on, “I believe God spared Donald Trump’s life for a purpose…for the purpose of calling our nation back to its Judeo-Christian foundation.” I guess the father of two daughters who was killed had no purpose, no reason for God to save him. Do people like this pastor even think before they open their mouths? There is something utterly contemptible about exploiting a shooting, or a killing, and using it to try to advance a religious agenda. No doubt his congregation will have people approach him and thank him for his words. I doubt anyone in his congregation will say to him, “What’s wrong with you, exploiting religion for political reasons.”

The wife of the man killed gave a statement that was touching and carried none of the political narrative that is being used to drive a storyline. The wife said after Biden called her:

I didn’t talk to Biden. I didn’t want to talk to him. My husband was a devout Republican and he would not have wanted me to talk to him. I don’t have any ill-will towards Joe Biden,” she added. “I’m not one of those people that gets involved in politics. I support Trump, that’s who I’m voting for but I don’t have ill-will towards Biden. He didn’t do anything to my husband. A 20-year-old despicable kid did.

The wife of the man killed had more honor and decency than the pastor seeing an opportunity to exploit a shooting. Unfortunately, the hand of God theme as having worked to protect Trump has only increased as a result of the shooting. As a New York Times article stated:

[S]upporters are less likely to explicitly compare him to Jesus and instead view him as the latest example of a morally flawed Old Testament hero, like Cyrus or David, who was ordained by the heavens to lead profound missions of good versus evil. Their passion for Mr. Trump has long transcended slogans on faded rally T-shirts or political bumper stickers, but now, it appears to be reaching new heights after the assassination attempt on Saturday.

Politics has a way of insulating people, allowing them to freely live in a world removed from normal conversation. Politics enables people to let their ideological passions drive the issues they want to push, to use grieve-filled moments as an opportunity to try to create winners and losers.

A political narrative allows facts that do not fit the actual situation to be easily pushed aside. Crooks, again, was a registered Republican and a member of a gun club, but he contributed $15 to the Progressive Turnout Project, a Political Action Committee (PAC) to increase Democratic voter turnout. This $15 contribution received attention because several X sites referred to a different Thomas Crooks as having contributed $15 to this PAC. Another man named Crooks did contribute $15 and both Crooks were from Pennsylvania, but the shooter was verified as contributing. What background information matters in driving a narrative? The people posting on X that they had identified the Crooks who contributed money, a 69-year-old man in Pittsburgh, had no interest in Crooks, the shooter, but were simply becoming part of the fight over the unfolding narrative.

Misinformation will ensure that rumors and conspiracies about the shooting will fester and metastasize. Where the shooting and its narrative will be a month or two from now is anyone’s guess. One psychological study stated:

[E]xposure to misinformation increases the odds that people will believe it, which in turn increases the odds that they will spread it. At the same time, people do not necessarily need to believe misinformation in order to spread it; people may share information they know is false to signal their political affiliation, disparage perceived opponents, or accrue social rewards. Psychological factors contribute significantly to this process: People are more likely to share misinformation when it aligns with personal identity or social norms, when it is novel, and when it elicits strong emotions.

Representative Mike Collins (R, GA) posted that charges need to be filed against Biden “for inciting an assassination.” Collins knows how to exploit a moment; one has to wonder whether he believes what he said or whether he just saw an opportunity to try to drive the narrative and increase voter turnout for Trump. Not everything about politics is coated in cynicism but in this situation, it is on the mark.

While it is difficult to take Collins’s remarks as anything but exploitation, people were posting on X that they were critical of the Secret Service for having women among its ranks. That the head of the Secret Service was a woman who has now resigned, did not go over well. Chaya Raichik, who is the founder of the site Libs of TikTok, a site that needs to be taken with a grain of salt, posted that, “[a] female agent couldn’t even holster her gun today during the attempted assassination of Trump. DEI hire?” DEI stands for Diversity, Equality, Inclusion, Trump as well as his supporters are critical of anything involving DEI. The Washington Times, a conservative publication wrote that a photo of agents protecting Trump, “seemed to show the female agents were too short to properly shield the Republican front-runner once he stood up. Mr. Trump stands 6 feet, 3 inches tall.” No doubt many of Trump’s supporters will believe that women Secret Service agents are incapable of protecting Trump, and one has to wonder how it will affect their outlook on any number of issues that involve women. While the Secret Service will be the focus of increased attention and criticism, we can assume that the theme of this line of criticism on women and DEI is broader and it is only a matter of time before other government organizations will come into focus for criticism.

The man I knew who killed his wife and children’s babysitter had a long background that led up to the moment of his decision to shoot two women, no doubt Crooks had problems dating over many years and what motivated him to shoot Trump probably had no relationship to political polarization, to Trump himself, to political issues but none of those things matter. Within the way we study politics, there is an awareness that the exploitation of moments will occur. We want politics to help achieve what we all need but that does not preclude unsavory people using moments to advance whatever cause they strongly support.

Congressional Hearing: The Fuel to Spread Narrative and Conspiracies

Congressional hearings looking into any gaps and faults that are aimed at the Secret Service for failing to secure the building where Crook positioned himself to shoot Trump, will not be the only issue that will emerge from the several hearings. The cell phone and laptop of Crooks have been examined, and it is only a matter of time before a glimmer of information will be enough to fuel narratives and conspiracies that Crooks was part of a wider network.

It was inevitable the “Deep State,” that amorphous and difficult to easily define entity was eventually going to surface and become tied to the assassination attempt. A Republican candidate running for a House of Representatives seat in Washington state floated the idea that the Secret Service was “in on” this shooting. As he stated:

I don't think it's unreasonable to say it seems like there's some degree of a plot to kill President Trump that was noticed by people in the Secret Service, and they either let it happen or some of them were in on it.

Another site included a similar theme about the deep state and tried to relate Trump’s assassination attempt to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in November 1963:

The circumstances surrounding the attempted assassination of Trump and the successful assassination of John F. Kennedy on November 23, 1963, are shockingly similar. We are still waiting for information on all of the serial failures to protect Trump as well as the actions taken by the shooter in the days leading to the attack, but the motivations of our government seem to be very similar.

…It is not unreasonable to assume that the organized left operation that runs the federal government from the shadows of Washington, D.C.—which sought to remove Trump from state ballots, drive him into bankruptcy, imprison him, frame him as an asset of Russia, compare him to Hitler, portray him as an existential threat to democracy, and accuse him of an insurrection—would be desperate enough to recruit an Oswald-like patsy to kill him and make sure he had the opportunity to do it.

A former FBI agent, however, stated:

All we have to really go on is what we observe and people try to fit the narrative politically into this. And when we don’t see a lot of narrative that is anti-Trump necessarily we have to look at what we do know. We know he’s been bullied extensively throughout his life. The motivation for assassination is not murder but loathing. Loathing toward those people who have disenfranchised him. So one of my two conjectures on this is possibly is he is trying to impress the people who bullied him his entire life so kind of like the Hinckley case where John Hinckley tried to assassinate Ronald Reagan. It wasn’t about anti-Reagan he was trying to impress [the actress] Jodie Foster. A deranged mentality.

This statement seems so logical, but I doubt it will be heard by those looking for some deeper, hidden meaning behind the shooting. I suspect that any questions that are asked by members of Congress that carry an ominous overtone of broader implications about the shooting will be enough to be used by those who want to find whatever meanings they are looking for. QAnon is alive and well and I am sure followers will use it to develop outlandish theories despite how removed from reality those theories might be.

A New Ballgame for the Presidential Election

Although Biden is out of the Presidential campaign, it will not end any narratives arising from the assassination attempt on Trump. Furthermore, conspiracy thinking is not solely limited to Trump supporters. As one site on X posted, “It looks very staged. Nobody in the crowd is running or panicking. Nobody in the crowd heard an actual gun. I don’t trust it. I don’t trust him.”

Although conspiracy thinking is associated with political polarization and any current level of vitriol in American politics, there is nothing current or new about conspiracy thinking. The Congressional hearings, however, might influence whether this assassination attempt takes on some sort of life in ways that no one wants to see.

Trump in his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention attempted to reduce any political temperature in the country by saying, “The discord and division in our society must be healed. We must heal it quickly. As Americans, we are bound together by a single fate and a shared destiny. We rise together. Or we fall apart.” He contributed, however, to some of the religious overtone thinking about the shooting by adding, “I stand before you in this arena only by the grace of almighty God. …If I had not moved my head at that very last instant, the assassin’s bullet would have perfectly hit its mark.” His concluding point about the shooting went, “You'll never hear it from me a second time because it's too painful to tell.” Although 14 days after the shooting Trump referred to the shooting at a religious conference stating, “I took a bullet for democracy.” The problem, however, is not what Trump said, or will say, but supporters who take that shooting and add their interpretations, spins, and narratives and the impact they may have on this campaign or even after the campaign is over.

Notes

Michael Bender, Andrew Trumsky and Neil Vigdor, “After Saturday, Trump’s Devotees See ‘God’s Protection’,” New York Times (July 16, 2024): https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/16/us/politics/trump-followers-devotion-shooting.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

Maya Boddie, “Latest far-right conspiracy blames Women and DEI for Trump rally shooting: report,” AlterNet (July 15, 2024): https://www.alternet.org/trump-shooting-republicans/

Shane Claiborne, “God did not save Donald Trump,” RNS (July 15, 2024): https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/god-did-not-save-donald-trump/ar-BB1q1ATT?ocid=msedgntp&pc=U531&cvid=1837d67e049d42e18bc94bd066320bed&ei=13

“Former FBI special agent suspects Trump rally shooter’s motive was like ‘notoriety’,” Fox News (July 17, 2024): https://www.foxnews.com/video/6358320801112?dicbo=v2-iSFQk5X

Kenny Jacoby, Christopher Cann, Emily Le Coz, and Suhail Bhat, “Trump rally shooter Thomas Crooks: Neighbors, classmates, employees speak,” USA Today (July 14, 2024): https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/investigations/2024/07/14/thomas-crooks-trump-rally-shooter/74397935007/

Tim Hains, “Donald Trump Full 2024 Convention Speech: ‘We Rise Together, Or We Fall Apart’,” RealClear Politics (July 19, 2024): https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2024/07/19/donald_trump_full_2024_convention_speech_we_rise_together_or_we_fall_apart.html

“How and why does misinformation spread?” American Psychological Association, Journalism and Facts (March 1, 2024): https://www.apa.org/topics/journalism-facts/how-why-misinformation-spreads

Alex Kasprak, “Fact Check: Yes, Trump Rally Shooter Once Donated Money to a Democratic Cause,” Snopes (July 15, 2024): https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/careersandeducation/fact-check-yes-trump-rally-shooter-once-donated-money-to-a-democratic-cause/ar-BB1q2iDT?ocid=BingNewsSerp

Shawn McCreesh, “From Believers to Bitcoin: 24 Hours in Trump’s Code-Switching Campaign,” New York Times (July 28, 2024): https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/28/us/politics/donald-trump-campaign-2024-bitcoin.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

NBC News and Matt Lavietes, “What we know about the Trump assassination attempt and the suspect,” NBC News (July 13, 2024): https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/trump-injury-shooting-incident-pennsylvania-rally-what-we-know-rcna161745

Marianna Spring, “How conspiracy theories and hate dominated social feeds after assassination attempt on Trump.” BBC (July 15, 2024): https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cyr7pyd0687o

Andrew Solendar, “GOP candidate floats theory Secret Service was ‘in on’ Trump shooting,” Axios (July 26, 2024): https://www.axios.com/2024/07/26/joe-kent-trump-shooting-secret-service

Richard Truesdell and Keith Lehmann, “The Trump Assassination Attempt and the Kennedy Connection,” AG American Greatness (August 4, 2024): https://amgreatness.com/2024/08/04/the-trump-assassination-attempt-and-the-kennedy-connection/

Nick Visser, “Wife of Man Killed at Trump Rally Has Not Heard From Former President,” HuffPost (July 16, 2024): https://www.huffpost.com/entry/helen-comperatore-corey-comperatore-killed-trump-rally_n_6695f614e4b0463bea24ad58

Brandy Zadrozny, “How the ‘second shooter’ conspiracy theory spread after the Trump assassination attempt,” NBC News (July 23, 2024): https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-second-shooter-water-tower-conspiracy-theory-rcna163154