What no one will say about Trump’s shooter | Will Bunch Newsletter

We’ve just survived “10 Days That Shook the World.” Yes, I know that’s the title of the classic 1928 Sergei Eisenstein film, but frankly the 1917 Russian Revolution was a lot more boring than a crazy week-and-a-half that included an assassination attempt on Donald Trump here in Pennsylvania, a Republican National Convention that celebrated a political party’s transformation into a scary cult, and finally President Joe Biden’s shock withdrawal from the presidential race. And the 2024 election is still 15 weeks away.

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The drops of blood from Donald Trump’s grazed right ear hadn’t yet been cleaned up from the July 13 Butler, Pa. assassination attempt on the GOP presidential candidate when Republicans reached a consensus opinion on who was to blame for the shooting that also killed a spectator and injured two others.

“They” did it.

“They literally shot him!” JD Vance, Trump’s newly minted vice presidential running mate, told his very first campaign appearance in Milwaukee, echoing earlier, similar comments by the likes of Donald Trump Jr. and others. No one needed to elaborate on their preferred pronoun because everyone in the target audience of right-wingers can hear the dog whistle about the elite urban Democrats and the fellow-traveler journalists out to take down Trump and the common folk who vote for him.

Never mind that the authorities in western Pennsylvania quickly established that the lone gunman on a Butler rooftop was a “he”: Thomas Matthew Crooks, 20, recent graduate of Bethel Park High School, a registered Republican whose high school friends said he voiced conservative views in class discussions.

But let’s be honest: Political assassinations are bound to be politicized — by all sides. Democrats shellshocked by the Butler events seized not only on the shooter’s GOP registration but also his use of a high-powered AR rifle. The critics on the left are not wrong when they call for stricter gun controls, including a ban on assault rifles similar to one that was in place for a decade before 2004, and restrictions on what weaponry a 20-year-old can purchase. Yet it’s unlikely any new laws would have stopped Crooks from getting the rifle his dad had purchased 11 years ago.

Of course, millions of Americans don’t want to talk about gun safety but prefer to swap the latest conspiracy theories about a second (or third) gunman or an FBI agent in the crowd signaling the shooter or that the assassination attempt was allowed to happen because agents from the Beltway’s so-called “deep state” — which Trump has promised to dismantle — wanted to eliminate the candidate. In the iPhone age, there is plenty of video to debunk all these claims.

But here’s what is so frustrating. It’s been 10 days now since the Trump shooting — including the Milwaukee RNC where the assassination was on the lips of every speaker — and hardly any politician or thought leader or TV talking head has brought up the real root cause in Butler.

It’s the crisis of the young American male — disaffected, isolated, and too willing in too many cases to use violence to get some attention.

FBI agents who were able to finally search the 20-year-old’s smartphone found nothing particularly political, very much in line with his virtually nonexistent social media profile. Indeed, there is little connective tissue between this young man in Bethel Park and those who came before him like John F. Kennedy’s alleged assassin Lee Harvey Oswald, who was obsessed with politics around Cuba and the Soviet Union. Instead, Crooks feels more like the latest in a long line of 18- to 22-year-old mass shooters who’ve attacked schools and supermarkets in recent years.

Crooks was the same age as the 20-year-old who entered an elementary school in Newtown, Conn. in 2012 and murdered 27 people, mostly kindergarteners and first-graders, in 2012. The 2018 El Paso Walmart gunman who aimed at Latino shoppers and killed 23 people was 21 years old. The mass killers at Atlanta nail salons, a Colorado supermarket, an Uvalde, Texas elementary school, and a Buffalo supermarket populated by Black shoppers were all in the 18- to 22-year-old range.

Exactly like Thomas Matthew Crooks.

The stories that friends and acquaintances tell about the Butler gunman are a guidebook to the stresses that America’s young people face in the 21st century. A good student, Crooks nevertheless grew increasingly isolated in high school. “He sat by himself, didn’t talk to anyone, didn’t even try to make conversation,” 17-year-old Liam Campbell told the Associated Press, calling him “an odd kid.” He started wearing hunting clothes to school and was reportedly mocked and bullied for that, and for wearing a mask even after the COVID epidemic died down.

Tom Crooks, as he was called, went on to community college but also reportedly researched Ethan Crumbley, the gunman in the 2021 Oxford, Mich. school shooting, who was in the news earlier this year when both of his parents were also convicted of homicide. He increasingly spent time at a shooting range, the Clairton Sportsmen’s Club, as well. Some have speculated he scoped out and ultimately targeted Trump’s Butler rally less to eliminate a candidate than to fire on a large crowd — more Crumbley than Oswald.

“If this is an individual who was like a school shooter, disturbed and angry, and found this as a way to lash out, that’s a terrible, terrible social problem we need to deal with, but it’s not a question of our democracy,” Jeffrey A. Engel, founding director of the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University, told the Washington Post.

I get the point, but he’s wrong.

It is, in fact, a question of democracy when America abandons its young people at age 18, as “deaths of despair” from drugs or suicide rise among young men with no college diploma while those who do enter higher education face crushing debt. Millions of U.S. young adults can’t afford the rent in the cities where the jobs are. Many can’t afford to get married and have kids. Mental health struggles for people in their teens and their 20s are off the charts.

It should be a front burner issue, but it’s not. I spent much of last week in Milwaukee and didn’t hear anyone speak seriously about this, unless you count the multiple false claims that President Joe Biden is killing kids with drugs. This brand of gutter politics solves nothing. Republicans would much rather pander for young men’s votes than solve their problems.

And there is much we could do. We could certainly flood the zone with new and improved mental health programs for our young adults. We could greatly mitigate the stress of turning 18 with programs like free public college and free trade school for kids itching to enter the workplace, as well as national civilian service. And, yes, we absolutely should make it illegal for someone as young as Crooks to buy assault weapons (which ought to be banned altogether).

They may target a presidential candidate, or a kindergarten class, but the 20-year-old lone gunman will remain a distinctly American problem until “they” — the people in power — do something about it.

Question: What specific policy has Harris championed which makes you such an enthusiastic supporter? Or, do simply hope she maintains Biden policies with regards to Ukraine, our Southern boarder, budget priorities etc. — section (@sectionprocess) via X/Twitter

Answer: Once a year or so, one of my right-wing trolls asks a question worth answering (”boarder”? C’mon, man). But there are a couple policy areas in which I’m intrigued if not excited by the prospects of a Harris administration. One is student loans: Reports said the vice president was a fierce advocate for aggressive debt relief when President Joe Biden’s center-right aides like Susan Rice were against it, so I’d like to see what she’ll do about that $1.7 trillion debt bomb. She also has addressed the Gaza situation in ways that suggest she considers the humanity of Palestinians — something Biden seemed blinded to. She’ll be strong on safety-net issues like child care. I hope we get to see what she can do.

So this is a first: The most recent question has been rendered moot. Back on July 2, we hadn’t yet decided there would be a two-week, Milwaukee-related hiatus in the newsletter, so the question I asked that day — should President Joe Biden drop out and who should replace him — has now been answered in the real world. Thanks to those who responded.

📮This week’s question is a no-brainer: It took less than 48 hours for Vice President Kamala Harris to become the Democrats’ presumptive nominee. Can she beat Donald Trump in November? Will she? For a chance to be featured in my newsletter, email me your answer. Please put “Harris Trump winner” in the subject line.

Unless you just fell out of a coconut tree, you probably remember at least vaguely that Vice President Kamala Harris — already the Democrats’ presumptive presidential nominee after President Joe Biden’s abrupt withdrawal — ran for president in 2019. The problem was that the election was in 2020, but Harris didn’t even make it until the flipping of the calendar — claiming that she lacked the campaign dollars to go forward. It was a stunning downfall for a candidate who’d drawn a throng of 20,000 people to her kickoff rally in Oakland. What the heck happened, and what can it tell us about what might happen in 2024? I went back and read some of my old columns.

I first wrote about her campaign in February 2019, when it seemed she was breaking out of the large Democratic pack. I described her as a charismatic candidate who, when it came to policy, was “a generic Democrat,” eager to tell primary voters what they wanted to hear and not advancing novel ideas of her own. I wrote: “Harris has a stock phrase — ‘Let’s speak the truth’ — but what follows is not so much a bombshell or even insider insights but simply the current Democratic zeitgeist. The positions she espouses — solid if vague support for ideas like Medicare-for-all or the Green New Deal, bold legislation that was written and introduced by other people — run right down the left-center lane of the expressway to 2020′s Democratic convention.”

I was a lot more impressed with Harris after her memorable, winning performance in the Dems’ June 2019 debate — the one where she famously attacked Biden for his 1970s statements against school busing for racial integration. “For a Democratic rank-and-file desperate for the best candidate to defeat President Trump next November, Harris’ withering yet passionate prosecution of Biden’s history on racial issues was a game changer, a statement that everything voters thought they knew before Tuesday night was wrong,” I wrote. But it only changed the game for a short time. By the fall, Harris was under attack from rivals like then-Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, future Trump turncoat, for her criminal-justice record as California attorney general, at a time the Black Lives Matter movement was ascendent.

Harris’ rise and fall in 2019 is instructive, but it’s arguably more important to see how things can change over five years. Political observers said her campaign was badly organized and prone to infighting — a problem that may be solved for 2024 by inheriting Biden’s slick and experienced team. Her more recent work as veep on thorny national issues like abortion rights and student debt shows she has grown into the job, which could give the current campaign a sense of gravitas that seemed sorely lacking five years ago. The past may be prologue, but it is not destiny. Sometimes a candidate runs a lousy campaign and eventually becomes president anyway. Ask Joe Biden.

Are you better off today than you were five years ago, when Donald Trump was president? On July 23, 2019, I profiled the South Philadelphia restaurant Le Virtù, its owners Francis Cratil-Cretalona and Catherine Lee, and the ups and downs of their high-profile advocacy for immigrants, which led to an unexpected visit from U.S. Immigration Control and Enforcement, or ICE, and some ugly pushback on social media. I wrote: “Cratil-Cretarola said that when Trump launched his presidential bid in 2015 by calling Mexican migrants ‘drug dealers’ and ‘rapists’ and calling for a Muslim ban, it freed up people in Philly to make the same kind of ‘go back!’ comments to his employees that his grandfather had heard a century ago.” Why would we ever go back to this? Read the rest: “Neither ICE nor storms of controversy stops South Philly’s Le Virtù from fighting for immigrants.”

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