For more than 2 weeks In the days following the shooting at Donald Trump’s campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, some details about the deadly security failure have emerged. The 20-year-old gunman who wounded the former president and three others in the crowd and killed one person was on authorities’ radar for more than 90 minutes before the attack. He eluded law enforcement at the rally, eventually reaching an unsecured rooftop about 150 yards from where Trump spoke. He fired at least eight rounds from an AR-15 before being killed by a Secret Service sniper.
As three federal investigations continue, major questions about the disaster remain. In the meantime, Trump’s associates continue to try to capitalize on the assassination attempt politically, whether by raising unfounded conspiracy theories about the Biden administration or attacking FBI officials, as Trump himself has done for years.
Ryan Zinke, a Montana congressman who served as secretary of the Interior under Trump, suggested on Fox News Monday that the security failures may have stemmed from some kind of government conspiracy. “We know there was incompetence,” he said. “But was that incompetence deliberate and intentional? Did you deliberately and intentionally (sic) weaken security and put the president in a position where this could have happened?” Zinke offered no evidence, but flatly speculated, “That moves from an assassination attempt into conspiracy territory. There’s a big difference between an attempt and a conspiracy.”
Appearing on Fox News on Sunday, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis criticized the FBI’s investigation into the shooting. Fox host Maria Bartiromo called out FBI Director Christopher Wray for “trying to cast doubt” on whether Trump was shot when he testified before Congress last week that investigators were still investigating whether the former president was struck in the ear by a bullet or shrapnel. (The FBI later said it was a bullet or shrapnel.)
“I think these institutions have lost the trust of the American people,” DeSantis responded. “Going back to the Las Vegas shooting, we knew nothing about that.” (Hundreds of pages of FBI documents and a lengthy investigative report on that incident have been released.) He continued, “Now the FBI director is questioning what we saw live on TV, that President Trump got shot in the ear. These institutions are failing the American people. They lack credibility.”
Since the horrific shootings of July 13, conspiracy theories have been rampant on both the political right and the left. But while some Democratic voters have baselessly speculated that the violence was somehow orchestrated to benefit Trump, few or none of the leaders on the left have come close to believing so. (The closest one is an aide to major Democratic donor Reid Hoffman, who later apologized.)
But a number of prominent Trump allies immediately began to accuse Democrats of orchestrating the shooting, without evidence. They included Georgia congresswomen Marjorie Taylor Greene and Mike Collins, as well as Trump’s sons Donald Jr. and Eric. Bartiromo took Eric Trump to task when he claimed that Democrats “will stop at absolutely nothing” and were trying to kill his father. “I said on this show that I wouldn’t be surprised if they tried something worse, and I implied exactly what happened, and I was right.” (And that’s what Don Jr. said on former Fox host Megyn Kelly’s radio show that Trump’s political enemies are “trying to kill him right now.”)
At the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, which began two days after the shooting, several speakers used Trump’s connection to death to declare that his survival and nomination were nothing short of a miracle. The grand visual backdrop for Trump’s acceptance speech addressed the theme of martyrdom, featuring iconic news photos of Trump covered in blood and defiantly in the aftermath of the attack.
After the assassination attempt, threat assessment and law enforcement leaders said partisan exploitation of the bloodshed could lead to more political violence, already a serious concern ahead of the election, as it exacerbates a “really big conspiracy” by extremist groups.
On Monday, the FBI announced that the shooter, Thomas Matthew Crooks, began purchasing gun-related items and bomb-making materials more than a year before the attack. He took firearms training courses and researched online about mass shootings, assassination attempts and various potential targets. He planned carefully and “went to considerable lengths to conceal his activities,” said Kevin Rozek, the FBI special agent in charge in Pittsburgh.
According to The Wall Street JournalFBI investigators interviewed more than 450 people, including dozens of Crooks’s colleagues, family members, and former classmates. The FBI repeatedly found no evidence that he was motivated by partisanship or political ideology. As I reported five days after the attack, absent specific revelations, Crooks more likely fits a different motivational pattern, one that is vague and shared by many of his predecessors.
Top image: Clockwise from top: Donald Trump Jr., Ron DeSantis, Ryan Zinke, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Eric Trump, Maria Bartiromo and Mike Collins. Credit: Mother Jones illustration; James Manning/PA Wire/ZUMA; Paul Hennessy/SOPA Images/ZUMA; Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call/ZUMA (3); Pat A. Robinson/ZUMA; Prensa Internacional/ZUMA
