Crooks & Liar: Notes on the Trump Rally Shooting
What we felt and why we felt it.
I did not want to write about the Trump rally shooting. There are more important topics, frankly: Project 2025 remains a dire threat; Trump’s selection of Peter Thiel puppet JD Vance as his running mate is dangerous—to our democracy and the rough beast at the top of the ticket; the traitor Mike Flynn and his acolyte Ivan Raiklin, Trump’s self-styled “Secretary of Retribution,” continue to promote violence; Aileen Cannon, clearly in the bag for Trump, threw out the documents case.
No, I did not want to write the Trump rally shooting. But in sorting out my own thoughts and processing my own feelings about the ugly events of this past Saturday night—I prefer not to dignify the attempt to kill the hatemongering rapist with the “a” word—I am compelled to do so.
So: friends, readers, countrymen: lend me your ear.
I. “STAGED”
I was at a birthday party on Saturday night. We’d only been there 20 minutes when my phone started blowing up: Someone tried to shoot Donald Trump. When I announced this to the partygoers, the first question on everyone’s lips was also the first question that went through my mind: “Is this real, or did he fake it?” Texts came in, all asking variations of that same question. On the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, “STAGED” was trending. Prominent accounts tweeted speculation that the incident, which went down at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, was the MAGA version of the Reichstag fire. Trump’s troll brigade sprung into action, demanding that the authors of those tweets should be subject to the same financial penalties exacted upon the vile Alex Jones for spreading lies about the Sandy Hook massacre being a false flag.
Here’s the difference: the skeptics who doubted the veracity of Trump’s mishap, whether publicly on social media or privately in DM, were not recklessly trafficking in conspiracy theory; they were merely calling bullshit on a legendary bullshitter. That’s a totally reasonable position.
Trump lies about everything, all the time. He always has. The guy cannot open his mouth without lying. If the reports of his ear being hit not with a bullet but with shrapnel from the teleprompter are accurate, he even lied in his official statement about the attempt on his life. The first chapter of my book Rough Beast, “Dishonest Abe: Lies, Damned Lies, and Stuff Donald Says,” is a long compendium of his lies—paragraph after paragraph of horseshit. “[T]he annihilation of truth,” I wrote, “is Trump’s greatest achievement as president—his lone success.”
Donald is the FPOTUS Who Cried Wolf. He is a Bizarro George Washington: he cannot tell the truth. And so when he finally is honest about something—because whatever the initial doubts, the shooting itself was very real—of course we don’t believe him. Why should we? He has done nothing to earn our trust. This is the same soulless ghoul who lied to the American people about the coronavirus during the pandemic; hundreds of thousands of us died of covid because of his lies. And yet we were expected, on Saturday night, to ignore his long history of egregious mendacity and take the immediate reports at face value. And if we did not, we were vilified by MAGA, which trades in lies 24/7, for doubting the account of a serial liar.
Do you remember what Trump said at CPAC two years ago, about the horrific plot to kidnap the Governor of Michigan that the FBI foiled? He said: “It was a fake deal. Fake. It was a fake deal. Gretchen Whitmer was in less danger than the people sitting in this room right now, it seems to me.”
Donald Trump was in less danger on Saturday night than the people sitting in the stands right then, it seems to me. Two of them are in the hospital. One of them is dead. Trump was on the golf course the next day.
II. “American Carnage”
For decades now, Republicans in Congress, and the Senate GOP specifically, have, ahem, shot down all of the many Democratic attempts at meaningful gun reform. The corrupt Supreme Court, in Heller and again in the recent bump stock decision, has reliably backed the gun nuts. AR-15s remain legal to purchase. In many states, an 18-year-old can buy an assault rifle but not a case of Miller Light or a pack of Camels. That is madness, and we all know it.
Other than his name—which should have given us the headline “CROOKS SHOOTS AT CROOK,” but didn’t because the New York Post is a Rupert Murdoch joint—there is nothing special about the would-be Lee Harvey Oswald of Western PA. He is a young white male, a loner, a gun fetishist, a registered Republican, and, based on the photos of him circulating in the press, an incel. He borrowed a legally-acquired weapon of war from his father and used it to kill innocent people. This is a character and a story we’re all too familiar with.
What happened on Saturday in Pennsylvania happens all the time in this blood-soaked, firearm-happy, graveyard of a country. It happens in schools, in churches and synagogues, in movie theaters, in shopping centers. It happens in cities like Las Vegas and Orlando and Pittsburgh, and in suburbs like Newtown, Connecticut and Parkland, Florida and Littleton, Colorado. It happens to our neighbors, our friends, members of our families. It happens, and keeps happening, because Republicans do nothing in the wake of a mass slaughter but tweet out “thoughts and prayers” and warn against “politicizing” the shooting. Blood—Shining-elevator amounts of blood—is on their hands.
(These are the same politicians who are now suggesting that God Himself reached out His hand and spared Trump—while He ignored the innocent rallygoer who perished that night. Reality check: if Donald has a Guardian Angel, his name is Lucifer.)
The most remarkable thing about Saturday’s shooting is not that Trump was the target of an attempt on his life, but that, because the Secret Service was on hand and dispatched Thomas Matthew Crooks right quick, there was only one fatality.
In his 2017 inaugural address, Trump observed that “Americans want great schools for their children, safe neighborhoods for their families, and good jobs for themselves” but that “for too many of our citizens a different reality exists.” He continued:
Mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities, rusted out factories, scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation, an education system flush with cash, but which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of all knowledge, and the crime, and the gangs, and the drugs that have stolen too many lives and robbed our country of so much unrealized potential. This American carnage stops right here and stops right now.
That, too, was a lie. The carnage did not stop. Trump saw to that personally. And in a second term, as Project 2025 makes clear, it will only get worse. Donald could snap his tiny fingers right now and have the Senate approve one of the gun control bills—but he won’t. He is an arsonist who lives to throw gasoline on fires. And his whoremaster Vladimir Putin would rather we keep shooting each other, because it makes the United States an international embarrassment.
But we were asked on Saturday night to ignore all of this and show sympathy for this monster—to keep him in our own thoughts and prayers—even though he is, as both the head of the Republican party and a recidivist instigator of violence, a primary author of this persistent but preventable American carnage.
III. “I Could Be One of the Diers”
Four years ago, at a presidential debate, Donald Trump tried to kill Joe Biden—and I don’t mean that figuratively. According to his own chief of staff, Trump had covid—this was in 2020, before the vaccine was developed, and catching the virus could be a death warrant—and knew he had covid, but went to the debate anyway, shaking Biden’s hand and breathing on him like Puff the Magic Dragon. That may not be as dramatic as firing a pistol at point blank range into a president’s head and then jumping on to the stage shouting “Sic semper tyrannis!,” but it’s still an assassination attempt—not that anyone took it seriously. Mark Meadows, who revealed this information in his memoir, subsequently walked it back, saying Trump had tested positive but it was a false positive (which, incidentally, isn’t something that happens much with a non-rapid test). I’m not so sure.
As Benjamin Hart wrote last month in New York Magazine:
The debate took place at Case Western Reserve in Cleveland on September 29, [2020], several weeks before any COVID-19 vaccine became available. The conditions reflected that precarious moment: Only 300 audience members were allowed at the event, and the Cleveland Clinic, which partnered with Case Western Reserve on the debate, instituted safety measures including social distancing, masking, and proof that candidates and their entourages had tested negative for COVID.
Such protocols were obviously necessary. Three days earlier, the White House had held an event celebrating the unveiling of Trump’s Supreme Court pick Amy Coney Barrett. Guests at the event blithely mingled with one another indoors sans masks, the still-very-much-untamed pandemic be damned. The results were grotesquely predictable: The party was likely a superspreader event. Six days later, and three days after the debate, on October 2, Trump announced that he and First Lady Melania had tested positive for COVID, and a wave of Republican legislators and White House staffers who had attended the event also fell ill. And Trump did not have a mild case. He spent three nights at Walter Reed Hospital, receiving experimental therapies, and it later emerged that he was sicker than his staff let on. As he memorably put it at the time, “I could be one of the diers.”
This is one of many, many abominable things Trump has done that have vanished into the memory hole. Heck, it’s not even the most notable time he was involved in a political assassination attempt! On January 6, 2021, remember, Trump “expressed support” for his army of MAGA besiegers hanging his own vice president, Mike Pence. Read that last sentence again, because the media has completely normalized putting a hit out on a VP.
But we are asked to open our hearts and let bygones be bygones because Trump suffered an injury which treatment required nothing more than Neosporin and a Band-Aid.
IV. “Fight, Fight, Fight”
No one has done more to ratchet up the anger and hatred in the United States than Donald Trump—in the 21st century for sure, and probably in my lifetime. He foments violence. He cultivates it. He cheers it. He lusts for blood.
Jenny Cohn posted a damning thread Saturday night, a few hours after the incident, showing some of the many times Trump reacted heartlessly to violence visited upon someone he doesn’t like, or openly admired a violent act, or threatened someone with violence. He’s done this kind of thing so many times that, frankly, I’d forgotten a lot of it.
Trump is a black hole of grace. There is no decency in him at all. This is the same asshole who said that John McCain was only a famous “war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.” What kind of disrespectful jerk says something like that? Answer: the kind who calls our military veterans “suckers and losers.” (And if you don’t think Trump said that, I’ve got some Trump Media & Technology Group stock to sell you.)
Just his remarks at a California Republican event about Paul Pelosi—Nancy Pelosi’s husband, who was hit in the head with a hammer by a home intruder—should have banished him from polite society forever: “We’ll stand up to crazy Nancy Pelosi, who ruined San Francisco. How’s her husband doing, anybody know? And she’s against building a wall at our border, even though she has a wall around her house—which obviously didn’t do a very good job.” There was Trump the insult comic, making tasteless jokes at the expense of a wounded old man, while his audience of deplorables yukked it up. These people are bullies—all of them bullies. Since when do the American people admire bullies? Do MAGA folks really not understand what he is?
Meanwhile, President Biden twice addressed the Trump rally shooting. He didn’t sound dementia-addled. He didn’t trip on his stutter. He came across as the kind, decent, empathic human that he is. He called the wife of the rallygoer who was killed (Donald did not; he went golfing instead). He ordered his campaign to pull down its ads for the next week, which is what the bigger man does. Trump is not, can never be, the bigger man.
I can’t pretend to know how Trump would have behaved if the situation were reversed—if President Biden were the one being shot at. Given his history of being a petty dickhead—this is the guy who cut off medical insurance to his own nephew’s family out of spite, leaving his nephew’s chronically ill son without proper coverage—my guess is that he wouldn’t rise to the occasion. He’s not capable of that. And he still isn’t, despite Tucker Carlson’s insistence that being “shot in the face changes a man.” (That may well be true, but Trump did not get shot in the face.) Probably Donald would have responded the exact same way he did when the Secret Service agents were whisking him away on Saturday: He’d pump his fist like an overgrown Augustus Gloop and yell “Fight! Fight! Fight!”
V. “Trump Chaos Fatigue”
The most irksome part of the rally shooting is that it forced us all to once again pay attention to this bloated orange bag of venom. Like all dictators, Trump demands all of our attention all the time. There is no let-up, no relent. No safe spaces. It is the sick mentality of a serial rapist, which Trump also happens to be.
The rally shooting reminded us of what an unpleasant experience life during the Trump years was. It’s not going to win him the election, as his fanboys have proclaimed. Quite the opposite.
As my friend LB put it, “Trump Chaos Fatigue is a real thing, and we survived four solid years of it—with all our spirits assaulted every damn day, and I forgot the very specific feeling of this affliction until this past stupid weekend, and I don’t want this future for me or anyone else.”
And like all dictators, Trump is a boring person. He’s boring. I’ve written hundreds of thousands if not millions of words about him since 2016, but as a novelist, I would never put him into a work of fiction, because he’s such a dull character.
When JFK was shot, the world ground to a halt. Americans wept, and followed the story with grave concern, and on live TV, watched Jack Ruby murder Lee Harvey Oswald. A cottage industry developed around the Kennedy assassination. Sixty years later, it remains the subject of endless fascination.
When I announced to the other partygoers on Saturday that someone tried to kill Trump, there was a merry cheer. Everyone wondered for a minute or two if the event had been staged, as discussed. But before the Duran Duran song on the stereo finished playing, they all forgot about it and moved on. I was the only one at the party paying attention, and only because I felt like I had to. No one else gave a shit. Even the “was it staged” angle was not compelling enough for anyone to consider for more than the length of “Hungry Like the Wolf.”
A friend summed it all up beautifully in a text the next day: “The thing is, I don’t believe him—but I also don’t CARE. He’s broken the social contract so badly that I actually don’t have the energy to care what’s true or untrue with him.”
Despite what MAGA might think, we don’t want Trump killed. We just want him to go away and leave us in peace.
Photo credit: Still shot of the CNN feed. Thanks to Gal Suburban for the title.
This is your very best piece on politics and trump. I feel the fatigue from him and from his stupid ignorant racist cult he feeds on. From the politicians that grovel before him for power, rather than decency and the super wealthy donors, of his ilk, that want to run the world their way and own it all and do it with their control of the trumps and Putins of the world, who make it easy.
You may not have wanted to write about last Saturday evening's incident, but I for one am grateful that you did, Greg. IMO, it is vital that we get reminded constantly of not only that the liar lies, but how his lies negatively affect and will affect us if he is elected again.
As my dear departed dad used to say: Don't go away mad, just go away.