Former President Donald Trump, grazed by an assassin’s bullet. NBC Television News, Screen shot.
Imagining the king’s death
It has been just a month since Thomas Crooks, a 20-year-old loner and nerd from Bethel Park, PA near Pittsburgh, attempted to assassinate former President Donald Trump. To the relief of some and the consternation of others, Crooks missed by an inch. Disappointment at Crooks’ poor aim is the under-reported story of the year. Was the New York Times deaf to the farm-yard expletive, likely voiced in unison by its own reporters and staff, when Trump rose, phoenix-like from the stage of the Farm Show grounds in Butler, PA? And what was said in a New York City newsroom, was surely repeated on the streets, and in offices and living rooms in Washington, Oakland, Seattle, San Francisco, and Boston. It may be bad taste, it may be harsh, but surely it’s news when a significant proportion of the U.S. population so reviles a presidential candidate that it wants him dead. So why the media silence? Was it simply news not “fit to print”?
In late medieval England, there existed numerous statutes against high treason. One of them (1351 Chapter 2, 25 Edw 3, Stat 5) came to particular prominence centuries later, in the mid 1790s, during a period of intense popular and political antagonism toward George III and his Prime Minister, William Pitt. According to the act, it’s treason “when a man doth compass or imagine the death of our lord the king.” The words “compass” and “imagine” were taken, at the time of the law’s drafting, to mean “purpose or intend.” In other words, “to imagine the king’s death” was to plot or plan a murder – clearly a violation of law in the 14thCentury as now.
But in the 18th C, as the historian John Barrell has written, the word “imagination” was much closer to the definition we give it today: the faculty of forming ideas, images or concepts not present to the immediate senses. What that meant in practice was that state prosecutors had enormous latitude in charging Jacobins (supporters of the French Revolution of 1789) and other British radicals with treason, even when they neither executed an assassination nor planned one. Just thinking about intending the king’s death was treason! The amorphousness of the language additionally allowed Pitt and others to represent challenges to policy as attacks upon the king himself. After all, if the king’s divine judgement – and that of his ministers — was questioned, wasn’t that a kind of murder?
In 1795, a bill was passed in parliament, the Treasonable and Seditious Practices Act (36 George 3 c.7) that for all intents and purposes ended the debate about “imagining the king’s death.” But the legacy of the original law remains in British and American understanding of the relationship between political rulers and the people they purport to serve. To imagine the president’s – or in the recent case, the ex-president’s death – no matter how corrupt, vile, authoritarian or fascist he may be – is to suborn treason. That’s a step too far for The New York Times and other mainstream news outlets. To acknowledge that many Americans imagined – even wished for — the death of Trump, is to suppose that they, not the president, Congress or the courts, might one day be the arbiters of political justice. The name for that arbitration is revolution.
Assassination or mass shooting?
Trump survived the shooting almost unscathed. That was not the fate of poor Corey Comperatore, aged 50, or two other victims. Comperatore, a volunteer firefighter, died shielding his wife and daughter from the fusillade. David Dutch and James Copenhaver were both wounded in the shooting, the latter suffering “life altering injuries” according to his doctors. Crooks himself was shot in the head and killed by a Secret Service sniper moments after he began firing, potentially saving the lives of dozens of other spectators.
Evidence suggests this was a mass shooting, not a political assassination. Crooks was a registered Republican and political conservative. In the days and weeks before the crime, he searched the internet for information about school shootings and rally plans for Joe Biden. It was only the proximity of the Trump rally – Butler is just an hour’s drive north of Bethel Park – that determined the killer’s target.
Crooks also was a notoriously bad shot, banned from his high school shooting club. (Yes, in the age of Columbine — see below — there are high school shooting clubs.) A classmate recalled: “Crooks once fired from the seventh lane — the closest lane to the right wall — and hit the left wall, completely missing every target on the back wall. He missed his target by close to 20 feet.” It may only have been the killer’s bad aim that resulted in the former president’s close call; Trump was the magnet that drew the crowd that was probably Crooks’ real target.
The OED tells us that assassination is the planned murder of a public figure by someone “with a political or ideological motive.” When he opened fire at the Farm Show grounds, Crooks may or may not have intended to kill Trump – we’ll likely never know. But his act wasn’t an assassination attempt in the conventional sense. Crooks had no “political or ideological motive.” In recent decades, that’s been the norm in the attempted murder of politicians and other public figures:
+ In 1972, Arthur Bremer shot and severely wounded Alabama Governor and Democratic Presidential Candidate, George Wallace. He also considered killing Nixon. At his trial, Bremer was determined by a court psychologist to have a “schizoid personality disorder,” with “paranoid and psychopathic” symptoms.
+ In 1975, Squeaky Fromme (an acolyte of Charles Manson) tried to assassinate President Gerald Ford. She did it to attract attention.
+ In 1980, Mark David Chapman killed John Lennon outside The Dakota on Central Park West in New York City. Chapman was mentally ill – a pathological narcissist. As a child, he thought he possessed God-like power over the “little people” who lived in his bedroom walls. Later, he attempted suicide and was diagnosed with clinical depression. Prior to his shooting of Lennon, he considered killing Paul McCartney, Elizabeth Taylor, Jackie Onassis, Ronald Reagan, David Bowie, and Todd Rundgren, among others. He later wrote: “This was my big answer to everything. I wasn’t going to be a nobody, anymore.”
+ In 1981, John Hinkley Jr. shot and badly wounded President Ronald Reagan and his press secretary James Brady. He shot them to impress the actress, Jody Foster.
+ The pattern of politically motiveless shootings of public figures continued in the decades thereafter. In 2011, Jared Lee Loughner, age 22, a community college drop-out plagued with thoughts that the government was brainwashing him, shot U.S. Representative Gabby Giffords and 18 other people in a supermarket parking lot in Tucson, Arizona. Giffords survived, but six others were killed, including a District Court Judge and nine-year- old child. The shooter appears to have been obsessed with Giffords, but there was no apparent political motive.
Paradoxically, mass shootings are more likely to be politically motivated than the shooting of politicians and celebrities. They steadily increased in number from 2014 to 2020, but have declined recently. Nearly all were perpetrated by men on the far-right. Mass killings by the left are essentially non-existent – the only recent exception was the Congressional Baseball Shooting of 2017 (all such crimes in the U.S. are distinguished by capitalization) when 66 y.o. James Hodgkinson shot U.S. Rep. Steve Scalise and six others, before himself being shot and killed by Capitol and Alexandria, Virginia police The perpetrator, homeless and unemployed at the time of the shooting, was a Bernie Sanders supporter who despised Trump and other elected Republicans. Given that Thomas Crooks was Republican and demonstrated no animus toward Trump, it would be a mistake to place him in the same category as Hodgkinson.
The psychopathology underlying these shootings is not well understood. For some time, motiveless killers were thought to suffer from low self-esteem and otherwise debilitating insecurity and depression. Crooks himself searched online for the term “major depressive disorder” in the days before his assault. The psychodynamic theory is that the fame accrued by a mass or celebrity killing functioned as compensation – a kind of self-medication — for an otherwise debilitating depression and sense of self-loathing.
More recently, however, motiveless murder-for-fame has been linked to narcissistic personality disorder, often combined with depression. The narcissist typically displays grandiosity, attention-seeking behavior, lacks empathy and is hypersensitive to criticism. The theory is that those with inflated but unstable egos are more likely than others to lash out against individuals or groups that appear to pose a threat. They may externalize blame for any failures or harms they have experienced, and respond violently to a loss of face. Narcissism has been closely correlated with school shooters. The two Columbine killers, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, were classic, pathological narcissists. The first wrote in his diary: “I would love to be the ultimate judge and say if a person lives or dies—be godlike.” The second wrote: “I know we’re gonna have followers because we’re so fucking God-like”. Similar utterances have been found in diaries and online postings by other school shooters and mass murderers. Crooks, a bullied and spotty incel, launched a drone to provide himself a God’s eye view of the rally grounds. Then he climbed onto an elevated perch, hid behind some trees, and tried to make himself into a god.
The rise of narcissism in celebrity culture and social media — validated by former President Trump — may portend more such mass acts of violence in the future. It’s probably fair to say the recent near assassination was a matter of one narcissist gunning for another.
God and Providence
For a while, it looked like Crooks had handed the election to Trump on a platter. The latter’s apparent heroism – rising to shake his fist at the would-be assassin – would erase the memory of decades of recklessness, criminality and corruption. Where Biden was feeble, Trump appeared strong; bloodied by an assassin’s bullet, he rose to his feet and exhorted his followers to “fight, fight, fight.” Just days later, Trump, bandaged ear spotlit, strode onto the floor of the Milwaukee Convention Center to accept his party’s nomination for president. Hundreds of rapturous delegates wore bandages on their own ears in worshipful emulation, and chanted Trump’s new mantra, “fight, fight, fight.” (On television, it looked like a convention of Van Gogh impersonators.)
Trump was exultant: “I’m not supposed to be here tonight,” he told the audience at the Republican National Convention. “I stand before you in this arena only by the grace of almighty God.” The words recalled those of another narcissist uttered almost exactly 80 years earlier, on July 20, 1944. That’s when Adolf Hitler, significantly more diabolical than Trump but equally lucky, walked out of the Conference Room of his eastern bunker, the Wolf’s Lair, having survived a powerful bomb placed by coup plotters led by Count Claus von Stauffenberg. Hitler was euphoric: “More proof that Providence has chosen me for my mission – otherwise, I would not still be alive.” Ten months later, he was dead and Germany defeated. Trump’s denouement will be far less consequential but appears to be approaching. With any luck, it will arrive by the ballot box and not from a gun.
