Profile of a would-be American assassin: Trump shooter straddles the political divide

Although Thomas Mathew Crooks was a young man, he does not fit the profile of a one-off mass shooter seeking some type of revenge or infamy. Nor do I think that he was suffering from delusions of grandeur like his target Donald Trump, or that Crooks thought that he could or would become some kind of superhero if he succeeded.

If Crooks was obsessed with politics, there is no evidence of it on or offline. Nor did he have a social history of family abuse or neglect. Crooks' one commonality with some of those other shooters appears to be a high-powered semiautomatic weapon used in his intentional attempt to assassinate presidential candidate Trump and in the unintentional killing of one individual and the injuring of three other innocent bystanders.

After conducting more than 100 interviews, searching the suspect’s home and vehicle, and cracking into his cellphone and other devices, the FBI is still searching for the shooter’s motive. This is at least in part due to the fact that there is no evidence so far in his biography that conforms with the forensic profile typically portraying these shooters as deranged or mentally ill and/or ideologically driven. It is also due in part because Crooks appears to have been acting alone or was not a part of some kind of conspiracy  — real or imagined — to kill the former president. In the case of a real conspiracy, most people would have viewed it as rationally and ideologically motivated. In the case of an imaginary conspiracy, as irrationally or psychologically motivated.

Importantly, the FBI has learned that Crooks, a native of Bethel Park, PA, had spent time checking out the Republican convention site in Milwaukee and the Democratic convention site in Chicago. Indicating that the shooter may have had the leading presidential candidates of both major parties in his crosshairs. This also suggests that he could have had different reasons for killing either of these two candidates to accomplish the same objective that I am speculating was to prevent Donald Trump from winning the 2024 presidential election.

However, besides the photos in his phone of Biden and Trump there were photos of House of Representatives Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., and Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., which may or may not have been related to his motive in Butler, Pennsylvania. In this analysis of Crooks’ motive, I have chosen to ignore those other photos as not being necessarily relevant to the attempted assassination of candidate Trump. We also know that Crooks had searched online about other mass shooters including Ethan Crumbley, who suffered from a range of mental health conditions when he killed four classmates in 2021 at Oxford High School in Michigan. We also know from testimony on Wednesday that FBI Director Christopher A. Wray admitted to lawmakers that Crooks had Googled, “how far away” Lee Harvey Oswald was from John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963, when from the nearby Texas School Book Depository, he assassinated the president.

This type of searching, especially by highly organized serial killers and rapists, or one-off shooters as in this case, is not unusual. Both before and after there was the Internet, those who have engaged in these types and other related antisocial high-profile killings have often studied the methods and mistakes of those who have come before them. And whose shoulders, so to speak, they stand upon and sometimes, as well, pay tribute to. A tradition dating at least as far back as Jack the Ripper and his serial killing of five prostitutes in late 19th-century London.

We also know from multiple law enforcement sources that investigators found a bulletproof vest, three fully loaded magazines and two remote-controlled explosive devices in Crooks’ car. In his residence, another bulletproof vest and remote-controlled explosive device as well as a 3D printer was found. It is possible that the vests and explosives were to be used for something far more sinister and less rational than the attempted assassination of Trump, as investigators have speculated. In any case, at the time of the shooting, Crooks was not wearing a vest or carrying any explosives.

We also have learned from eyewitness accounts that before he got up on the roof of the building where shootings occurred and he was killed by a sharpshooting sniper, Crooks had been moving about the grounds with the use of a rangefinder to measure various heights and distances that could have been of use to him or another potential shooter. Investigators have also learned that on the day of the attempted assassination, Crooks flew a drone over the grounds on a reconnaissance mission to obtain an overview of the buildings and rooftops that may have helped to select the unoccupied building of secret service persons with the slanted rooftop 130 meters away from Trump.

We also know from Wray’s testimony that Crooks “used a rifle with a collapsible stock” that may have helped him to conceal the weapon before he was up on the roof and where there were eight shells found from his fired weapon.

From what the FBI has learned so far, they believe that Crooks was working alone but they have not ruled out the possibility that others may have been involved.

There were rally attendees on the day of the assassination who claimed on ABC News that there was also a person or second shooter moving around on the top of the nearby water tower. Of course, that individual may very well have been another sniper working to protect the presidential candidate. To my knowledge, neither the FBI or Secret Service have publicly commented about this. If true, that second person may have disappeared without a trace.

One issue that was difficult to answer from the day of the shooting was whether or not Trump’s ear had been grazed by a bullet. At his Congressional testimony on Wednesday, Wray suggested that the FBI is still not convinced that Trump was struck by a bullet rather than a piece of shrapnel, a statement the agency walked back on Friday, concluding after a push from Speaker Mike Johnson that a bullet, or a fragment from a bullet, did the damage to the former president's ear. To date, Trump has still not released his medical records.

Assuming that Crooks was indeed working by himself, then I expect the FBI will ultimately conclude that the young man was not ideologically motivated, as revealed by the usual conspiratorial or manifesto postings on social media. This does not rule out the possibility that Crooks was politically motivated as in “the political is personal” and the “personal is political.”

On the day of the shooting, Crooks had taken the day off from work as a dietary assistant where he had told his boss that he “had something to do” and he told his fellow workers that he would see them on Sunday, knowing in all likelihood that he would never see them again. This timeline, in combination with other biographical information that has been gathered and now constitutes Crooks’ “working personality,” along with a panoply of theories to choose from that animate unlawful murderers excluding those crimes of passion, provide the data for building my conjectural motive for the attempted assassination of Trump.

We have a behavioral profile as far as we know that is not consistent with one who has been a victim of bullying growing up. There was one televised interview with a former classmate who maintains that Crooks was “bullied” on a regular basis at least before college. Although there is no other corroboration for this claim that I am aware of.

What we have also learned from those persons who knew him in his neighborhood, his workplace and at college was that Crooks was a quiet person and not outgoing. He also kept to himself, like about one-quarter of his fellow post-adolescent generation of peers. However, he was not a “loner” in the traditional sense because Crooks belonged to a gun club as, well as a math club where he regularly interacted with the same people. We have also learned that Crooks was a highly intelligent person who excelled in both mathematics and physics.

Folks knew Crooks as a polite, respectful, and decent human being. We also know that he grew up in a pro-gun, libertarian family with Trump signs in the front yard. When Crooks turned 18, he registered as a Republican the same as his father. He also appears to have made a $15 donation to the Progressive Turnout Project on Inauguration Day in 2021, suggesting that he did not approve of Trump’s attempts to steal the election or the president’s inspired assault on the Capitol two weeks before.

Based on these facts I can draw some inferences and speculate that Crooks straddled the political divide. He was not necessarily pro-Democrat or pro-Republican, nor do I believe that he was an Independent. In other words, within the context of this failed assassination, I suspect that his personal politics transcended party affiliation or identification. Rather, this was more of a transactional shooting of a transactional former and future president motivated – at the time – by Trump’s likely upcoming victory – as indicated not so much by the polls but by the more reliable odds or betting makers.

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In other words, given the existential threat that Trump and his allies pose to the rule of law and to constitutional democracy as well as their enhanced capacity a second time around to establish — not without a fight from the Democrats — the first authoritarian state within the U.S. based upon the 900 plus pages of Project 2025. A manifesto or playbook written by the Heritage Foundation and many Trumpers from the first administration, coupled with the favorable Trump legal rulings by SCOTUS and by federal courts as in the dismissal of the classified documents case by Judge Aileen Cannon, and in combination will be taking America on a pilgrimage back to the days of the 1873 Comstock Act when both racism and misogyny unequivocally ruled.

For these and related reasons, I believe that Crooks decided to intervene, if he could, and impede this trajectory back to the darkest days of America’s caste system at work. Theoretically, Crooks’ motivation to kill the former president could be understood as a classic case of “altruistic suicide” or the sacrificing of one’s own life “in order to serve or benefit others, for the good of the group, or to preserve the traditions and honor of a society.”