Be nice to people. This changes the whole environment.
- Manlobbi
Halls of Shrewd'm / US Policy❤
No. of Recommendations: 6
Most media sites have a front page headline today to the effect that the FBI and other agencies are searching for a motive for the Saturday attack on Donald Trump's ear.
A motive. Damn! That's a toughie. What could possibly motivate a lonely young bed-pan changing ammosexual to steal his Libertarian father's AR-15 and shoot up a Trump rally?
It couldn't be that Trump caused the overturning of Roe v Wade by stacking the Supreme Court with liars, such that millions of women are now in medical peril....
....or Trump's science denial/lunacy resulted in the deaths and long term illness of tens of thousands of Americans from Covid.
...or Trump's pandering to christian nationalists, furthering the elimination of the separation of church state.
...or that Trump is a bully who regularly denigrates wide swaths of American citizens.
OTOH, it's possible he was an Alex Jones fan. "It turns out that the idea that a Trump assassination would be somehow beneficial for the right was actually advanced publicly five months ago, according to right-wing watch group Patriot Takes. On Infowars, Alex Jones and a guest spoke openly about how a Trump assassination would be “so much better for us and so much worse for them” because it would lead to retaliatory in-kind assassinations of a “deep state” list that included President Joe Biden. It’s just the kind of insane idea that a young and troubled zealot might attempt."
No. of Recommendations: 4
A motive. Damn! That's a toughie. What could possibly motivate a lonely young bed-pan changing ammosexual to steal his Libertarian father's AR-15 and shoot up a Trump rally?
In our discussions here at the Albaby household, I've taken pains to remind others that while it seems like an assassination attempt would always be politically motivated, it still sometimes happens that the target's politics aren't really a factor.
Often it's obviously and entirely because of the target's politics - for example, Booth killed Lincoln because he thought Lincoln was a tyrant. But sometimes it's not - Hinckley shot Reagan just because doing so would bring him fame/notoriety, not because of Reagan's politics. Sometimes it's....complicated, like with Squeaky Fromme - a disturbed person who apparently was a zealot about trees (which is a policy), but didn't have any especial complaint about Ford's policies towards trees. He just happened to be the President.
So until there's more information, literally anything could be on the table in terms of motive.
No. of Recommendations: 6
The Alex Jones theory ain't so far-fetched.
"A former classmate of the 20-year-old man who tried unsuccessfully to kill former President Donald Trump at a Pennsylvania rally on Saturday recalled him being staunchly to the right of the political spectrum. “He definitely was conservative,” Max R. Smith told The Philadelphia Inquirer of Thomas Crooks. “It makes me wonder why he would carry out an assassination attempt on the conservative candidate.”
Smith shared an American history class with Crooks, and remembered a mock debate where their teacher made students stand on one side of the classroom or another to signal their allegiance. “The majority of the class were on the liberal side, but Tom, no matter what, always stood his ground on the conservative side,” Smith said. “That’s still the picture I have of him. Just standing alone on one side while the rest of the class was on the other.”
..........
“I would almost put money on the fact that I probably had seen him wear a Trump shirt or something along the lines of that beforehand, which is why this is so shocking to me,” Paige Updegraff told Pittsburgh public radio station WESA."
.............
No. of Recommendations: 0
It's perhaps too early to rely on reporting. They're all falling over themselves to try to be first with some tidbit or other. But I have read a few times now that he was a registered Republican, and this was going to be his first time he was eligible to vote.
If registered Rep, why shoot your candidate? Unless he wanted someone else to be the candidate? Like I said, it may be some time before we know the motivations.
Hinckley wanted to impress Jodie Foster. I seem to recall a lot of references to the movie Taxi Driver as the story evolved.
No. of Recommendations: 3
No. of Recommendations: 1
If registered Rep, why shoot your candidate? Unless he wanted someone else to be the candidate? Like I said, it may be some time before we know the motivations.
Act Blue and Joe Biden donor point to a Republican registration that was in name only. Recall the open primary and the fact that lots of democrats want their folks to register as R’s so as to affect the results.
That’s the most likely possibility.
No. of Recommendations: 6
That’s the most likely possibility.
There is no "most likely possibility" at this point. We don't know anything.
It might have something to do specifically with Donald Trump. It might not. It might be a situation like the Reagan or Ford assassination attempts - the assassins had no opinion about the officeholder personally or politically, they just wanted/felt compelled to attack the head of government for some ulterior motive. It might be a Leon Czogolz scenario, where the attack was motivated by a rejection of the nature of government or politics, not the candidate (ie. the assassin would have killed any President or candidate, Republican or Democrat). It might be a situation where he shot at the candidate because the voices in his head told him to, or because he wanted to "live forever" by doing something that would be in the history books, or commit suicide by counter-sniper, or some other crazy reason.
It still very well might be something specific to the politics of Donald Trump - but a non-trivial number of U.S. assassinations actually had very little to do with the politics of the person person being targeted, and we should always consider that possibility.
No. of Recommendations: 1
There is no "most likely possibility" at this point. We don't know anything.
No, I meant for his registration as a Republican.
No. of Recommendations: 3
No, I meant for his registration as a Republican.
Gotcha. I think the same point still applies. There's no reason to assume that this man had any coherent political philosophy at all - or that if he did, we could discern it from something like a $15 donation or voter registration. Neither of those actions require a ton of thought or commitment, so who knows whether they offer any real visibility into this guy's politics - or if he even had any politics at all.
No. of Recommendations: 1
It's perhaps too early to rely on reporting.
Way too early. One factual tidbit drops and everyone is slobbering all over it trying to figure out what it means. Then the next one drops, and the process repeats.
Unfortunately, that is what multiple 24 hour a day news channels does for you. No one takes the necessary time to gather lots of facts, then report on those facts. We have to spend half a day trying to figure out what meaning there is in the fact** that he stopped at a convenience store to relieve himself an hour before arriving a the rally site.
The reality is that we'll likely never know why he did this. The best we'll be able to do is gather some inconclusive information and speculate away.
--Peter
** To be clear, this is not a verified fact. Probably not factual at all. I completely made it up as an example. On the other hand, maybe we need to find out if he bought skittles or a chocolate bar while in that convenience store. Maybe it was M&Ms, and we need to know if he ate the green ones.
No. of Recommendations: 1
“That’s still the picture I have of him. Just standing alone on one side while the rest of the class was on the other.”
--------
Inclusivity only matter when the includee is from your own tribe..
No. of Recommendations: 4
Replying to my own post:
while it seems like an assassination attempt would always be politically motivated, it still sometimes happens that the target's politics aren't really a factor.
Often it's obviously and entirely because of the target's politics - for example, Booth killed Lincoln because he thought Lincoln was a tyrant. But sometimes it's not - Hinckley shot Reagan just because doing so would bring him fame/notoriety, not because of Reagan's politics. Sometimes it's....complicated, like with Squeaky Fromme - a disturbed person who apparently was a zealot about trees (which is a policy), but didn't have any especial complaint about Ford's policies towards trees. He just happened to be the President.
So we're more than two weeks out, and the FBI (and others) still haven't found any indication that the shooter had any strongly held political beliefs. They're releasing some information because they're under enormous pressure from Congress to release information (with some justification) - so if there was anything that would clearly point to what we would regard as a conventional motive for an assassination, we probably would have heard it by now.
While he certainly had a "motive" in the most literal sense - some impulse caused him to do these things - it's starting to look like he didn't have the type of motive that ordinary folks would expect for an assassination attempt.
No. of Recommendations: 5
Replying to my own post:
It might have something to do specifically with Donald Trump. It might not. It might be a situation like the Reagan or Ford assassination attempts - the assassins had no opinion about the officeholder personally or politically, they just wanted/felt compelled to attack the head of government for some ulterior motive.So it's beginning to look like that might end up being the case. The shooter does not appear to have acted based on any ideological goals, but appears to have only wanted to shoot a very high-profile political figure. It looks like he was equally willing to consider shooting Trump or Biden, motivated by a desire to commit an assassination without much caring who the target was:
The gunman in the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump searched online for events of both Trump and President Joe Biden, looked up information about explosives over the last five years and eyed the Pennsylvania campaign rally where he opened fire last month as a “target of opportunity,” a senior FBI official said Wednesday. https://apnews.com/article/fbi-trump-assassination...
