Trump’s Day of the Jackal
Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
When I hear (as per President Biden’s comments on the Butler shooting) “There’s no place in America for this kind of violence – it’s sick. It’s sick,” I am reminded that the narrative of American history is actually one long paean to political violence—from Bunker Hill to all those weapons being sent off to kill Gazans.
Now about half of the Republican party is strutting around with an AR-15 lapel pin, which suggests that rooftop gunman Thomas Matthew Crooks might well (at least for the Grand New MAGA Party) have been part of the solution, not part of the problem.
After Abraham Lincoln was shot, not many of his Republican supporters walked around with buttons that read “Sic semper tyrannis” (“thus always to tyrants”)—which is what assassin John Wilkes Booth shouted as he leaped onto the stage at Ford’s Theatre.
On the other hand, Trump might well owe his next presidency to his would-be assassin, so perhaps, as it becomes clear that Crooks was in lockstep with Trumpism, a revived Warren Commission might be pressed into service to explain how the gunman himself was a victim of Deep State transgenderism and to attribute his rooftop violence to hormone blockers that robbed him of him of his manhood.
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My doubt about the official narrative of the Butler shooting is this: I am not entirely persuaded that Crooks mounted his step ladder to heaven only with the goal of dispatching Donald Trump to eternity.
Yes, in all likelihood he fired the shot that either winged the former president or blooded him with a ricochet, but did Crooks really intend to kill Trump?
From what I read and hear on newscasts, Crooks was a rank-and-file MAGA, J.D. Vance circle jerk Republican, sheep dipped in Trump ideology and someone who probably recited the Second Amendment when saying grace at Thanksgiving.
Crooks died wearing his Demolition Ranch t-shirt (it’s a GunTuber video website that closes the circle between porn, cartoons, and assault weapons as a cure for societal ED, if not Bidenism), and not long after the Crooks’ front yard was awash in Trump signs (“God, Guns & Country: Trump 2024…”).
Before that, the American sniper was singing Trump’s praises in his conversations with friends. So why, now, did he want to bring down his idol?
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My sense is that Crooks needs to be defined as a post-modern assassin, the spiritual heir of AR-15 school shooters, different from such historical presidential assassins as Charles Guiteau (who in 1881 shot President James Garfield and shouted the words, “I am Stalwart. Arthur shall be president”) or John Hinckley, who shot at Ronald Reagan in 1981 “to impress” Jodie Foster.
For all I know, Crooks might well not even have been aiming at Trump, but instead imagined himself on his rooftop laying down covering fire to Make America Great Again.
Maybe he thought his shots would take out some members of the seditious press? Maybe he believed that his gun burst would be construed as the first shots of the next American Revolution, that which convict Steve Bannon preaches on his podcasts?
Maybe by some twisted logic Thomas Matthew Crooks believed that in his efforts as an onward Christian nationalist soldier, Trump would invite him to the White House, much the way the president rewarded triggerman Kyle Rittenhouse with a presidential audience for taking out some Black Lives in Kenosha?
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In case Rittenhouse is lost in your jumbled memories of the bump stock nation, Kyle was the Illinois teenager sent off to Wisconsin with a lunch box from his mother and an AR-15 (the semi-automatic military-grade weapon, not the lapel pin) to do battle with Kenosha protesters (many of whom were unhappy that the police had shot Jacob Blake during an arrest).
Vigilante Rittenhouse initially self-deployed in a car lot in downtown Kenosha, then under threat from BLM rioters.
During the confrontations of that summer night, Rittenhouse shot and killed two men, and seriously wounded a third.
One of the men Rittenhouse killed was chasing him, suspecting that the Illinois teenager armed with an AR-15 was an active shooter and not some minuteman drafted by the Kenosha police to ensure domestic tranquility.
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Rittenhouse was tried, according to press reports, for “first-degree intentional homicide, attempted first-degree intentional homicide, first-degree reckless homicide, and two counts of first-degree recklessly endangering safety.” A jury exonerated him.
Following the not-guilty verdict, former president Trump issued a statement: “Congratulations to Kyle Rittenhouse for being found INNOCENT of all charges.”
Trump said: “If that’s not self-defense, nothing is,” and he added: “He should never have been put through that. That was prosecutorial misconduct.”
Later the former president welcomed Rittenhouse to Mar-a-Lago, where Trump called the gunslinger a “really a nice young man”. Trump told broadcaster Sean Hannity that Rittenhouse “wanted to know if he could come over and say hello because he was a fan.”
Then, as if a presidential audience at Mar-a-Lago wasn’t enough for Kyle Rittenhouse, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Pluto) issued a statement that read:
Kyle Rittenhouse deserves to be remembered as a hero who defended his community, protected businesses, and acted lawfully in the face of lawlessness. I’m proud to file this legislation to award Kyle Rittenhouse a Congressional Gold Medal.
Was it lost on AR-15 owner Thomas Matthew Crooks that the Trump circle beatified another AR-15 active shooter?
Was the Demolition Ranch, MAGA-loving gunman fantasizing that when it was all over in Butler the former president and Republican candidate would invite him to dinner? Maybe together they could watch The Day of the Jackal?
Guns twist mens’ minds, and to many in American politics (but probably not those who had to collect the dead in Uvalde), AR-15s now speak an auto-erotic language of love and attraction, at least to the likes of Thomas Crooks and Donald Trump.
* * *
The attempted assassination (or whatever metaphor the shooting was) has allowed Trump to ascend into political heaven where his rape judgments, civil fraud penalties, and felony charges for espionage, sedition, and electoral racketeering are seen as little more than “trespasses” that the electorate is happy to forgive (provided it doesn’t have to vote for the demented Biden).
If assassination deification wasn’t enough for one month, around the same time the Supreme Court decided to sell the former president various indulgences for his repeated sins.
First, the flag-waving Roberts Court overturned the original intent of the U.S. Constitution that no man or woman, even a president, is above the law—by listing all those presumptive instances (including the official act of paying off a porn star while seated at the Resolute desk in the Oval Office) when a president (the judges mostly had Trump in mind) can beat any and all raps.
When those dispensations seemed insufficient to curry favor with his candidate mob boss Trump, Justice Clarence Thomas (apropos of nothing in the case being heard) added an addendum that was little more than a mash note to Florida Judge Aileen Cannon to embolden her to dismiss the Florida documents case against Trump.
The Thomas addendum was written in such a way (legally misleading and false, but that hardly matters if it’s on Supreme Court letterhead) that it can be used to challenge many of the other cases pending against the criminally charged Trump.
In less than two weeks, the Supreme Court ruling and the assassination attempt have transmogrified Trump from a psychotic (who sounded like Travis Bickle talking about how “the late, great Hannibal Lecter is a wonderful man…”) to a statesman and the Great White Hope of those who dream of the United States of Apartheid.
At this week’s Republican National Convention (and what felt like an endless rerun loop of Dynasty) Trump basked in the near-endless hallelujahs that “God protected him” in Butler for a higher purpose. That was the message spread from every speaker from Marjorie Taylor Greene to Marco Rubio and Kristi Noem (I had hoped we might be done with this cast of B actors).
After a while, the Almighty began to sound like yet another political action committee eager to buy Trump air time or launder money for his attorneys.
* * *
I am not surprised that Donald Trump would find common cause with the school shooter industrial complex—the NRA, gun fetishizers like Don Jr., the U.S. Concealed Carry Association and the Second Amendment crowd, not to mention all those clicking on Crooks’ own Demolition Ranch snuff films.
Here’s the advertisement copy for a Demolition Ranch pimped-out edition of the AR-15:
Team EMG is proud to announce this special collaboration with F1 Firearms and Demolition Ranch to bring you the Demolition Ranch AR-15! The Demolition Ranch AR-15 is a special edition rifle in the real shooting world engineered and spec’d out to perfection by the elite engineers at F-1 Firearms and Matt himself. Fully licensed featuring authentic F1 and Demolition Ranch engravings, this EMG airsoft parallel training rifle is a stunning recreation of the real firearm this was based on.
Does it sell at a discount to any Republican member of Congress now wearing an AR-15 lapel pin?
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Even before the AR-15 had its own congressional fan club, Trump was refusing to consider any legislation that might make it harder to spray an assault weapon around a grammar school or shopping mall.
For example, after a school shooting in Perry, Iowa in January 2024 that killed one child and wounded six others, it took Trump 36 hours to say anything (even though he was then campaigning in Iowa), and when he did say something, it was to tell Iowans: “It’s just horrible, so surprising to see it here. But have to get over it, we have to move forward.”
And here, according to U.S. News and World Report in 2024, is how Trump summed up his gun policies while president. He told the NRA’s Great American Outdoor Show in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania:
During my four years nothing happened. And there was great pressure on me having to do with guns. We did nothing. We didn’t yield… [I am the] best friend gun owners have ever had in the White House….Every single Biden attack on gun owners and manufacturers will be terminated my very first week back in office, perhaps my first day.
These words would have been music in the ears of Thomas Matthew Crooks, who must have thought he would be dying to absolve Trump of any sins.
Matthew Stevenson is the author of many books, including Reading the Rails, Appalachia Spring, andThe Revolution as a Dinner Party, about China throughout its turbulent twentieth century. His most recent books are Biking with Bismarck and Our Man in Iran. Out now: Donald Trump’s Circus Maximus and Joe Biden’s Excellent Adventure, about the 2016 and 2020 elections.
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