We may never know what motivated twenty-year-old Matthew Crooks to fire eight shots from an AR-15 rifle. Presumably he was aiming at Donald Trump, but whereas all he did was graze Trump’s ear, news reports indicate that he killed an innocent bystander and injured two others.
Crooks had won a high school prize for math and science. He obviously was intelligent. Why attempt to assassinate the presumptive Republican candidate? Perhaps Crooks worried that Trump was another Huey Long; perhaps he had read Robert Penn Warren’s All The King’s Men, which was a thinly veiled novel about Long, the murdered populist. Indeed, Trump and his supporters have long argued that the Democrats were doing all they could to hound him out of the presidential race.
Conspiracy theorists will assert that the attack was the culmination of Democrats’ efforts to rid the country of Trump and all he stands for. Alternately, they might argue that the attack was meant to distract the public from the Democrats’ ongoing internal struggles over Biden’s decision to stay in the presidential race.
No doubt conspiracy theorists on the other side of the political divide will conjure up wild assertions of their own. Perhaps they will argue that the attack was all a set-up to discredit the Democrats and present Trump as a martyr, even if it meant harming, indeed innocent bystanders as “collateral damage.”
Pundits will now have even more opportunities to deluge readers with articles about Trump and its impact on the upcoming presidential election. Whether the attempted assassination will affect the outcome of the election is not at all clear, however. Biden may yet drop out of the race. Moreover, most Americans are focusing on their summer vacations, not the election.
What is clear, however, is that the ongoing debate about gun control will go on as before, with no resolution, even as political violence continues to haunt American politics.
Dov S. Zakheim is Vice Chairman of the Foreign Policy Research Institute, Senior Advisor at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and a member of The National Interest Advisory Board. He is a former Undersecretary of Defense and Deputy Undersecretary of Defense.
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