They Tried to Kill Him

In an interview with Donald Trump in August 2023, Tucker Carlson floated the possibility to the former president that someone might try to assassinate him. “They started with protests against you, massive protests, organized protests by the left, and then it moved to impeachment twice,” Carlson said. “And now indictment. I mean, the next stage is violence. Are you worried that they’re going to try and kill you? Why wouldn’t they try and kill you? Honestly.”

Trump brushed off Carlson’s concerns, but less than a year later an assassination attempt was made at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, vindicating the former Fox News host’s worries. Two months after that, a second assassin was arrested in West Palm Beach, Florida, after a Secret Service agent spotted him aiming a rifle from the bushes at the golf course where the former president was playing.

Let us grant that Tucker Carlson may be more primed than the average person to see dark forces lurking behind acts of political violence. He seems to have been immersing himself in 20th-century conspiracy lore recently, mentioning in podcasts and interviews everything from the revisionist theory of Watergate (that it was a deep-state set-up to take down Richard Nixon) to the claim that the Central Intelligence Agency was responsible for the John F. Kennedy assassination.

But Trump himself is now apparently willing to entertain the possibility that “they,” whoever they may be, played a role in his attempted assassination. At his follow-up rally in Butler on October 5, when Trump returned to the site of his earlier near-death experience, he said, “Over the past eight years, those who want to stop up from achieving this future have slandered me, impeached me, indicted me, tried to throw me off the ballot, and, who knows, maybe even tried to kill me. But I never stopped fighting for you and I never will.”

Investigations into both attempted assassinations are ongoing. At this point, the evidence does not support any conspiracy claim stronger than, as Trump put it, “who knows, maybe.” The responsible thing to do is to wait for all the facts to come in. But there is an election in November, so preliminary consideration of these dramatic events must be undertaken even with incomplete information. There is, after all, much we do know.

There are three possible explanations for a near-miss assassination attempt: first, a fluke of bad luck; second, culpable negligence, where authorities starve a target of protection in the hope, conscious or unconscious, that a lone nut will take advantage of the opportunities thus left open; third, deliberate conspiracy to commit murder. If the attempts on Trump’s life were anything but the first option, then there quite simply are no other issues in this election. The party willing to use murder as a political tool must be defeated. The fact that options two and three are live possibilities months later is itself alarming. 

The last time a president was wounded by an assassin’s bullet, it was easy to establish that the shooter was a lone nut. Within hours of John Hinckley’s attempt on Ronald Reagan’s life on March 30, 1981, the picture of what had happened was clear. Hinckley left a note in his hotel room explaining his Jodie Foster obsession; he learned that Ronald Reagan would be at the Hilton Hotel that afternoon from reading the newspaper. Few mysteries remained.

The fact that so many questions remain unanswered about Thomas Matthew Crooks and Ryan Wesley Routh is enough to make an election issue of these back-to-back assassination attempts, even if the explanations for how the attempts came to pass eventually turn out to be benign.

The eight days between July 13 and July 21, 2024, were among the most eventful in American political history. They began with an assassination attempt that came within centimeters of exploding one candidate’s brain on live television and ended with the other candidate announcing—not on video, as one would have expected, but via a signed letter posted to his personal Twitter account while the candidate was in isolation after testing positive for Covid four days earlier—that he was withdrawing from the race.

At 6:11 p.m. on July 13, Thomas Matthew Crooks fired eight shots at the stage of a Trump rally, hitting the former president and three audience members, one of whom died, namely the former volunteer fire chief Corey Comperatore. Trump was wounded in his ear. A minute after dropping to the ground as Secret Service agents surrounded him, Trump stood up and pumped his fist in the air, mouthing, “Fight! Fight! Fight!” Crooks was killed by a counter-sniper within 30 seconds of his first shot.

Crooks, 20, lived with his parents in the nearby town of Bethel Park. He worked as a dietary aide at a nursing home and was scheduled to enroll at Robert Morris University in Pittsburgh in the fall. He scored over 1500 on his SAT, according to the FBI. The day before the shooting, he told his boss that he would not be able to work his scheduled Saturday shift because he had “something to do.” A receipt in his pocket showed that he purchased a ladder at Home Depot at around 9:30 on Saturday morning.

At 5:38 p.m., local law enforcement officers shared with each other a photograph of Crooks, whom officers had observed acting suspiciously. One officer’s text message noted that the young male had been seen “with a range finder [sic] looking towards the stage.” This photo was circulated to the Secret Service within 10 to 15 minutes, along with the information that officers had “lost sight of him.”

Crooks was spotted again at 6:02 by a local police sniper walking into a dead end between two buildings. At 6:08, a different officer spotted Crooks on the roof of one of the buildings and radioed, “Someone’s on the roof.” The head of the local command post clarified by radio, “We do not have assets on the roof. . . That is not us.” A Butler Township police officer was boosted by a colleague to roof height, where he saw Crooks with a gun, but the officer fell to the ground and seconds later Crooks started firing.

Three questions leap to mind about the events just described. First, how do the facts square with the theory that this was a crime of opportunity? If Crooks was a lone nut who got very, very lucky, then presumably he wandered the rally site for a few hours looking for a hole in the president’s security and just happened to find a truly incredible one: an unguarded roof with a clear line of sight to the stage 130 yards away, a distance that, as Trump later said, “is like sinking a one-foot putt, it’s considered really close.”

Would it have been evident to Crooks from just walking around the site that the roof was unguarded? He could have seen that no one was on the roof, but how could he have known that no one was observing it from a hidden vantage point? He bought a ladder at Home Depot that morning, which suggests a man with a plan. If he had wanted to be prepared for any eventuality, depending on what opportunities presented themselves, he might have purchased several different items.

Second, why did Crooks have no social media presence? The vast majority of kids his age have at least one profile, upwards of 80 percent, and Crooks both owned a smartphone and planned to enroll in college, making it unlikely he was part of the luddite remnant. It is possible he had no social media profile on any platform. It seems more plausible that he was active on social media but his activity was scrubbed either before the shooting or soon after, which would imply intervention by a third party.

Third, why did no one prevent Crooks from climbing onto the roof with a gun, and why did no one prevent Trump from taking the stage at 6:05? The Secret Service preliminary investigative report, released in late September, blamed poor communication:

The failure of personnel to broadcast via radio the description of the assailant, or vital information received from local law enforcement regarding a suspicious individual on the roof of the AGR complex, to all federal personnel at the Butler site inhibited the collective awareness of all Secret Service personnel.

But a description of the suspicious individual was broadcast by both radio and text message on local law enforcement channels. Admittedly the Secret Service was not part of those channels, but by 5:51 all the key information had been passed to their command post: suspicious white male, rangefinder, the specific building complex where the suspect was lurking—plus the photo.  

One local sniper told ABC News that, after he forwarded his report of a suspicious character to his command post, he assumed the Secret Service would send someone to check it out right away: “I assumed that there would be somebody coming out to, you know, to speak with this individual or, you know, find out what’s going on.” When he noticed rallygoers pointing to the roof, he thought, “Oh, they must have found this guy we were looking for out there, and everybody’s watching the police deal with him.”

Why did the Secret Service let Trump go on stage before the suspicious individual with the rangefinder had been located? Delaying Trump’s speech by five or 10 minutes would not have been an outrageous imposition. Why was Crooks allowed to move around freely on the roof for at least three minutes before he fired his first shot? That roof was one of the most obvious vantage points for a sniper at the entire rally site. The Secret Service should have had someone on the roof, or, if not on it, then observing it and covering it.

The question of why no one was on that roof was the number one question everyone was asking in the days after the shooting. The head of the Secret Service made things worse by offering an explanation so lame that it was literally unbelievable. “That building in particular has a sloped roof at its highest point, and so, you know, there’s a safety factor that would be considered there that we wouldn’t want to put somebody up on a sloped roof,” Director Kimberly Cheatle told ABC News. “And so, you know, the decision was made to secure the building, from inside.”

The roof was no steeper than a wheelchair ramp. Cheatle resigned as Secret Service director a week after offering that excuse.

If Thomas Matthew Crooks is a cipher, Ryan Wesley Routh is almost too perfect, an assassin out of central casting. He is a liberal baby boomer who is obsessed with the war in Ukraine. He also has a lengthy criminal history, including convictions for illegally carrying a concealed weapon and possession of stolen property, though he does not seem to have spent any time in prison.

Routh, 58, was spotted by a Secret Service agent who saw a rifle barrel sticking out of a bush at the sixth hole at Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, just ahead of the fifth hole where Trump was playing. The agent fired at Routh, who dropped the gun and fled in a black Nissan, which was later stopped by county sheriffs who arrested him. Discovered at the scene near the gun were a scope, two backpacks filled with ceramic tiles hung on a fence as makeshift shields, and a GoPro camera. 

It is easy to determine that this was an assassination attempt on Donald Trump, even though Routh never got off a shot, because Routh left a note stating, “Dear world, This was an assassination attempt on Donald Trump.” The note was left in a box with a friend, who opened the box after Routh’s arrest. The letter continues: “Everyone across the globe from the youngest to the oldest knows that Trump is unfit to be anything, much less U.S. president.”

Routh’s paper trail is extensive. He self-published a non-fiction book, Ukraine’s Unwinnable War, describing the war and his efforts to aid the Ukrainian side. Chapter 18 is titled, “Why Has Putin Not Been Assassinated?” It states, “We all ponder as to why our great minds did not simply kill Hitler early on, and now why have we not taken steps to kill Putin at all costs.”

Routh’s commitment to Ukraine was apparently more than rhetorical. He spent several months in Ukraine in 2023. His name appears in a New York Times article from March of that year, where he is described as “a former construction worker from Greensboro, N.C.” seeking to recruit Afghan soldiers to fight in Ukraine’s foreign legion.

His attempts along those lines were later corroborated by David M. Edwards Jr., a former U.S. Army Ranger who heads a charity for American-trained Afghan veterans. Edwards confirmed that he put Routh in touch with some of his contacts in Afghanistan, though he also told the Times that something seemed “off” about Routh. There is no evidence that Routh’s recruitment drive was successful.

“I spent 5 months in Ukraine last year and 3 months there this year, and 2 weeks in DC and 2 weeks in Taiwan this year volunteering and trying to supply thousands of Afghan soldiers to help win the war,” Routh wrote in an email to a neighbor, who provided the email to the Times. The most interesting words in that email are “2 weeks in DC.” 

Did he meet with hundreds of congressmen, as he told online news outlet Semafor? Did he meet with the Helsinki Commission for “two hours,” as he told the Times? Why is there a photo of Routh posing with José Andrés, the well-connected Washington restaurateur who has a side line in providing food to combat and disaster zones? Perhaps Routh was written off as a kook by everyone he met with, but his efforts would have been enough to put him on the radar of some who might see in him an opportunity.

The assassination attempts against Donald Trump have vanished from the news as we enter the final month before the election. They were momentous events, especially the one in Butler, which really did come close to succeeding. If Trump had not turned his head at the last second, it would have. Obviously we should be talking about these attempted murders more than we are. But what should we say?

We can give the last word to an unlikely person: Melania Trump. The former first lady, usually quote-shy, released a video on social media on September 10 saying: “The attempt to end my husband’s life was a horrible, distressing experience. Now the silence around it feels heavy. I can’t help but wonder, why didn’t law enforcement officials arrest the shooter before the speech? There is definitely more to this story. We need to uncover the truth.” (The first lady has a memoir coming out in October.)

Melania can’t be sure that a conspiracy was behind either one of the assassination attempts against the former president, but she can’t rule it out either. Neither can voters. That alone raises the stakes of the upcoming election and should make undecided voters more inclined to pull the lever for the assassins’ would-be victim, who is apparently enough of a threat to be worth killing.