Shots ring out. Donald Trump reaches for his ear, then crouches, trying to get under the line of fire. Secret Service agents seem to hesitate, then rush the stage, as rifle shots are returned by agents on a roof nearby. “The shooter is down,” an agent says, as Trump is telling the agents trying to move him away that he needs his shoes. Then, as they get him to the edge of the platform, Trump stops the agents. He stands, his fist in the air. “Fight, fight, fight!” he tells the crowd, which yells back: “USA! USA! USA!”
That Donald Trump was nearly assassinated at a campaign rally over the weekend is almost unsurprising in an age of superheated political rhetoric. But the fact that the Secret Service didn’t prevent it from happening is truly shocking.
A 20-year-old man named Thomas Matthew Crooks scaled the roof of a glass factory near the site of the rally and fired a rifle at the former president, wounding Trump’s ear before Crooks was shot dead by law enforcement snipers. He also killed one person in the crowd and wounded two others critically. Crooks, who worked in a nursing home, had materials for bombs in his car and in his parents’ house.
Right now, Crooks’ motive for the shooting is unknown and his political ideology is unclear. He was a registered Republican, but three years ago, when he was 17, he donated $15 to a left-leaning PAC.
He doesn’t seem to have left a manifesto, according to the FBI, and though they have cracked the encryption on his phone, they have so far found nothing that indicates why he tried to kill Trump.
Based on satellite imagery, Crooks was located only 140 yards away from Trump on top of that factory building, which was outside the security perimeter where people are scanned for weapons with metal detectors and are sometimes patted down.
That relatively short distance isn’t one for which someone needs expert sniper skills in order to hit a target. Basic training for US Army recruits includes a requirement that they hit a human-shaped target at 150 yards with the military version of the AR-15-style rifle that the gunman was allegedly using.
How could someone with a rifle get that close to the former president? That is the question that Americans are asking.
Trump has said that he believes he was saved only because he turned his head to look at an electronic display, with the result that his ear was grazed by the bullet rather than anything worse. On Truth Social, Trump wrote that it was “G-d alone who prevented the unthinkable from happening.”
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