On Saturday July 13, 2024, 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks borrowed his father’s AR-15 style rifle and parked himself atop a building near the Butler Farm Show Grounds in Butler, Pennsylvania, from which he fired eight bullets in the direction of former President Donald J. Trump. This being 2024, we can reasonably conclude from the myriad of cameras present — television, phone, and whatnot — that this happened. We also know for a fact that Trump’s ear was bloodied by something (possibly a bullet, shrapnel, or glass), that three other people were struck by Crooks’ bullets, and that one of these bullets killed 50-year-old Corey Comparatore. Finally, it is an incontrovertible fact that Thomas Matthew Crooks is dead.
Why Crooks did this is still under investigation, though it does appear he acted alone. How he evaded Secret Service to claim such an advantageous perch has prompted furious finger pointing within the long-embattled agency. What, if anything, this means for the upcoming presidential election will be grist for pollsters, but never, in a truly tangible sense, settled.
This is the current, unbiased state of play for level-headed human beings. But this being a high-profile, attempted political assassination, and since no one’s gotten off a shot at a U.S. president since John Hinckley, Jr. (inspired by Jodie Foster and Martin Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver”) struck Ronald Reagan in 1981, the conspiracy theorists among us are a-Twitter with all manner of explanations for what all of us know we saw.
And, as expected in this age of deep fakes, some of them are claiming that we did not see what we saw. Look deeper, they say, and reality tears apart to reveal an elaborate lie. The whole thing was staged, they say, just like in Tim Robbins’ 1992 mockumentary “Bob Roberts.”
What does Tim Robbins think about this? He thinks it’s pure idiocy.
Robbins rails against theorists’ deranged mindsets
In Robbins’ political satire, his conservative, folk-singing U.S. Senate candidate is the target of a failed assassination near the end of a hotly contested campaign. An investigative journalist (Giancarlo Esposito) who has been dogging Roberts throughout his run is initially fingered as the gunman, but he does his own legwork and discovers that the gun was fired into the ground. This was a set-up, and it works. Roberts pulls ahead in the polls and wins the election.
In the real world, however, as X née Twitter bubbled over with laughably implausible theories comparing isolated-out-of-context particulars of Crooks’ actions to the staged shooting in “Bob Roberts,” the actor-writer-director grew agitated to the point where he could no longer bite his tongue. On July 14, he tapped out the following on the Elon Musk-owned platform:
“To anyone drawing a parallel between my film Bob Roberts and the attempted assassination of Trump, let’s be clear. What happened yesterday was a real attempt on a presidential candidate’s life. Those that are denying the assassination attempt was real are truly in a deranged mindset. A human being was shot yesterday. Another killed. They may not be human beings that you agree with politically but for shame folks. Get over your blind hatred of these people. They are fellow Americans. This collective hatred is killing our souls and consuming whatever is left of our humanity.”
Will this throw cold water on these ridiculous claims? Is Fox News a legitimate news organization?
November is both agonizingly far away and frighteningly close
While I think a good many people — like asylum seekers who had their children taken away from them due to Trump’s family separation policy or women being forced to carry unwanted pregnancies to term in the wake of the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v Wade — have very good reasons to abhor Trump, I understand Robbins’ disgust over his movie being used to obscure reality. Again, we don’t know Crooks’ motive yet, and we can’t predict the future, but for those of us desperate to defeat Trump and avert the authoritarian overreach proposed via Project 2025, this kind of nonsense is an infuriating distraction.
Fortunately, these theories don’t seem to be gaining any traction yet, but it’s been less than a week since Crooks’ actions and we live in wildly disorienting times. Who knows where we’ll be tomorrow, let alone come November? In the meantime, if you want to get your political paranoia on, Alan J. Pakula’s “The Parallax View” is available to stream for free if you have a Kanopy subscription through your local public library. That would be an excellent outlet for your political frustrations. For those curious about Trump’s just-announced running mate J.D. Vance… well, maybe steer clear of “Hillbilly Elegy.” And if you need a Robbins fix, there’s always “The Shawshank Redemption,” which just might get you feeling hopeful about humanity again.
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