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What motivated Trump’s would-be assassin?
"There is no place in America for this kind of violence, for any violence ever. Period. No exceptions. We can't allow this violence to be normalized," President Joe Biden said in a televised address after the assassination attempt on Donald Trump. "The political rhetoric in this country has gotten very heated. It's time to cool it down."
A firm No, now and always, to political violence united public figures across America and the world, including some of Trump’s bitterest opponents.
“Political violence is absolutely unacceptable,” tweeted Senator Bernie Sanders. “There is absolutely no place for political violence in our democracy,” tweeted former President Barack Obama.
Ditto for Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: “There is no place for political violence, including the horrific incident we just witnessed in Pennsylvania.” And Representative Ilhan Omar: “It’s sad to hear the tragedy that occurred at the Trump rally today. We must condemn acts of violence and pray for the victims. May calmness and decency prevail.”
It's unlikely that Biden’s advice will cool things down. Brandon Tatum, a Trump-supporting “influencer” with hundreds of thousands of followers, responded to Ilhan Omar: “Pure evil. They’re upset, but only cause Trump survived.” Calling someone "pure evil" is not an auspicious start to a bridge-building campaign.
Pundits immediately rushed in to explain that the United States had a long tradition of political violence. “American society was formed from violence, and it has remained violent ever since,” wrote a professor at The University of Texas at Austin in Time magazine. In Foreign Policy, a professor from Princeton University wrote that: “the truth is that the United States has a long and sordid history of people who try to solve political differences using bullets rather than ballots”.
This is nonsense. Only a month ago, Mexico went to the polls to elect its president and local politicians. About 60 of them were assassinated. That is what I would call political violence. The United States, with all of its political polarisation, with all of its supposed rednecks clinging to their guns and religion (as Obama famously said), with all of its racial tensions, is relatively free from political violence.
The pundits are waving their lists of presidential assassinations and assassination attempts. But with the exception of John Wilkes Booth, who shot Abraham Lincoln, they were all loopy loners. Charles Guiteau shot President James A. Garfield in 1881 because he had been overlooked for a job in the civil service. Leon Czolgosz shot President William McKinley; he claimed to be an anarchist, but even the anarchists thought he was mad. Lee Harvey Oswald killed President John F. Kennedy, but he was a loner.
In 1933 Giuseppe Zangara aimed at President Franklin Roosevelt and killed the mayor of Chicago instead; he was loopy. In 1981 Ronald Reagan survived after being shot by John Hinkley Jr – who wanted to impress actress Jodie Foster. He spent 35 years in the loony bin.
In 1950 two Puerto Rican nationalists tried to kill President Harry Truman at Blair House, a second residence for the President in Washington DC. Truman was unharmed; a police officer and one of the attackers died. But that was an exceptional event which had nothing to do with domestic American politics; it was a response to the US military bombing and strafing of the Puerto Rican city of Jayuya.
Rather than scanning the very short list of American politicians who have been assassinated, the pundits should look at the very, very long list of mass shootings, which is an international scandal and a symptom of something very sick in their society.
Last year there were 42,987 gun violence deaths, including 656 mass shootings. The reasons for this are deeply controversial. But the perpetrators of senseless killings in shopping malls and schools are often young men with disturbed family backgrounds.
Thomas Matthew Crooks is in good company with 18-year-old Salvador Ramos who shot 21 dead in Uvalde, Texas in 2022. Or 18-year-old Payton Gendron, who killed 29 in Buffalo, New York, in 2022. Or 17-year-old Dimitrios Pagourtzis, who killed 10 people in Santa Fe, Texas, in 2018. Or 19-year-old Nikolas Cruz, who shot dead 17 people in a Florida high school. Or 20-year-old Adam Lanza who killed 26 people, mostly young children, at Sandy Hook, Connecticut, in 2012.

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Crooks’ motivation is still a mystery, but it is unlikely that he was part of a political conspiracy. He was probably another geeky young man seething with interior violence.
Left-wing journalists have sheeted home responsibility for the assassination attempt on Trump to a culture of political violence projected overseas. As Natasha Lennard wrote in The Intercept: “when you have Israel’s minister of foreign affairs, Israel Katz of the fascistic ruling Likud Party, tweeting, ‘Violence can never ever be part of politics,’ the very concept of ‘political violence’ is evacuated of meaning.”
There’s a grain of truth in observations like this.
But more important is the violence which permeates American society because of abortion. According to the Guttmacher Institute, an abortion industry think tank, an “estimated 1,037,000 abortions occurred in the formal health care system in 2023”.
As I wrote in Mercator after the Buffalo massacre, “Moments of deep sadness like this, when glib answers fail to satisfy, are opportunities to look further afield. Did Mother Teresa predict this terrible hatred? No one should ever forget her simple words in Washington DC in 1997: “if we accept that a mother can kill even her own child, how can we tell other people not to kill one another?” After millions upon millions of deaths through abortion, shouldn't we ask whether these shooters are somehow channelling pent-up rage at all that pain?”
Instead of acknowledging the possibility that a culture of death is permeating the country, Americans have doubled down on it. According to Axios, 19 state legislatures are studying whether to legalise "assisted dying".
In all likelihood, the reason why Thomas Matthew Crooks took aim at Donald Trump will never be known completely. But he swam in waters made toxic by decades of intimate family violence. Ignoring that is insanity.
Your take? Tell us the comments box below.
Michael Cook is editor of Mercator
Image credit: Thomas Matthew Crooks in his 2022 high school year book / CBS News
Have your say!
Join Mercator and post your comments.
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David Page commented 2024-07-20 08:24:21 +1000Is it possible that fetal alcohol syndrome played a roll here?
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Tom Mullaly commented 2024-07-18 22:58:24 +1000An excellent reflection Michael. Many thanks.
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mrscracker commented 2024-07-17 00:55:20 +1000It’s certainly concerning Mr. Marty.
Back when they were having the BLM & other protests going on a group of armed protesters showed up in a smallish town in our area. The mayor of the town used a couple drones to keep an eye on the protesters in case anything got out of hand. It was all good, no violence occurred but if a town in one of the very poorest states in the nation can afford a drone for security, why not the Secret Service? And surely, they’d have the correct tech. skills to know it was their drone & not something hostile?
I’ve heard that conspiracies almost always turn out to be incompetence. I suppose that’s a reasonable explanation here. -
Christopher Szabo commented 2024-07-17 00:47:18 +1000It is argued that political violence is not part of America. Certainly not as much a part as it is in Latin America, Zimbabwe or the Asian sub-Continent, but remember that one in seven (almost 15 percent) of US presidents have endured an assassination attempt or been assassinated. I would argue that it is part of American political life, much as it might be regrettable.
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mrscracker commented 2024-07-17 00:46:42 +1000“If we accept that a mother can kill even her own child, how can we tell other people not to kill one another?”
Yes, it starts there & wherever innocent human life is devalued. -
David Page commented 2024-07-16 23:39:22 +1000The shooter was registered Republican. Spin that.
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Marty Hayden commented 2024-07-16 22:25:05 +1000I’ve never been a conspiracy theorist. Frankly, the ones I know seem to have deeper personal problems. But this is just too much, too many inconsistencies, too many questions. A boy with a high powered rifle got within 150 yards of the president of the United States. The older I get (and I’m an old guy now) the less I believe in coincidences. The Secret Service missed this young man when several people on the ground warned them. Yeah, right.
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Israel Kalman commented 2024-07-16 20:50:38 +1000Michael, I have always been a great admirer. Your breadth of knowledge is enviable, and you are logical and moral.
However, I cannot emphasize enough how dismayed I am at your views on Israel. You take a conservative bent in Mercatornet, but you get your information about Israel from extreme far left sources. What in the world does the assassination attempt of Donald Trump have to do with Israel? Yet you bring down the following atrocious quote that has absolutely no relevance to the article you are writing: "As Natasha Lennard writing in The Intercept: ‘when you have Israel’s minister of foreign affairs, Israel Katz of the fascistic ruling Likud Party, tweeting, “Violence can never ever be part of politics,” the very concept of ‘political violence" is evacuated of meaning.” Who in the world is Natasha Lennard? What evidence does she provide that the Likud Party, which has been the leading party in Israel for a few decades, that it is fascistic? Is the Likud killing political opponents? It is using “lawfare” to silence or eliminate critics? Those are actually tactics used by the leftist parties in Israel, as they have been doing in the US. Israel Katz is a veteran and highly respected politician. I am getting the sense ever since Israel’s war with Gaza that you take every opportunity to bash Israel, the nation in the Middle East that most closely reflects your own Western liberal values.
Really, Michael, please find a better source of information on Israel than The Intercept, Haaretz (Israel’s leftist newspaper), and B’tselem, an organization funded largely by leftist anti-Israel governments and NGOs, providing them with endless material with which to demonize Israel. Unless you have decided to identify as a leftist, you owe it to your readership to find better sources of information on Israel. -
Paul Bunyan commented 2024-07-16 20:25:14 +1000What’s the connection between abortion and the assassination attempt? If anything, it’s the easy access to guns and ammunition that led to the attempt, not abortion.
Don’t forget that JFK was assassinated long before Roe vs Wade was passed in 1973. -
mrscracker commented 2024-07-15 23:59:59 +1000To be fair, one can be unbalanced & at the same time attempt to solve political /ideological differences through violence. The one doesn’t exclude the other.
The USA began with a revolution which was really our first civil war. John Brown carried out his mission of abolition through murder. His cause may have been right but his mind surely wasn’t.
Teddy Roosevelt was also shot while giving a speech during an election campaign. His would be assassin was unhinged & apparently thought he was being guided by the ghost of William McKinley :
“As an experienced hunter and anatomist, Roosevelt correctly concluded that since he was not coughing blood, the bullet had not reached his lung; he declined suggestions to go to the hospital immediately. Instead, he delivered his scheduled speech. His opening comments to the gathered crowd were, “Friends, I shall ask you to be as quiet as possible. I don’t know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot—but it takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose.”
Afterwards, probes and an x-ray showed that the bullet had lodged in Roosevelt’s chest muscle, but did not penetrate the pleura. Since doctors concluded that it would be less dangerous to leave it in place than to attempt to remove it, Roosevelt carried the bullet with him for the rest of his life." -