Trump Allies Promote Assassination Attempt Conspiracy Theories – Mother Jones

Mother Jones; Zuma

Within two weeks or more Since a gunman opened fire at Donald Trump’s campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, details have emerged about the catastrophic failure of security measures. The 20-year-old assailant, who injured the former president and three people in the crowd, killing one, had been on authorities’ radar for more than 90 minutes before attacking. He eluded law enforcement at the rally, eventually reaching an unsecured rooftop about 500 feet from where Trump was speaking. He fired at least eight rounds from an AR-15 before being shot dead by a Secret Service sniper.

Significant questions remain about the disaster, as three federal investigations continue. In the meantime, Trump’s allies continue to try to exploit the assassination attempt politically, whether by conjuring baseless conspiracy theories about the Biden administration or attacking FBI leaders, as Trump himself has long done.

Montana Rep. Ryan Zinke, a former Interior secretary under Trump, suggested on Fox News Monday that the security failure could be the result of some sort of government conspiracy. “We know there was incompetence,” he said, “but was that incompetence willful and conscious? Did you willfully and knowingly put the president in a position by atrophying security and allowing this to happen?” Zinke offered no evidence, but speculated pointedly: “That moves the assassination attempt into the realm of conspiracy — a big difference between an attempt and a conspiracy.”

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Fox News anchor on Sunday, blasted the FBI for its investigation into the shooting. Fox host Maria Bartiromo taunted him by saying FBI Director Christopher Wray had “tried to cast doubt” on whether Trump was shot when Wray testified before Congress last week that investigators were still determining whether the former president was hit in the ear by a bullet or shrapnel. (The FBI quickly clarified that it was either a bullet or a bullet fragment.)

“I think these agencies have lost the trust of the American people,” DeSantis responded. “Let’s go back to the Las Vegas shooter: We never learned anything about him.” (Hundreds of pages of FBI documents and a lengthy investigative report on the case are publicly available.) He added: “Now the FBI director is questioning what we saw on live television, which is that President Trump was shot in the ear. These agencies are failing the American people. They lack credibility.”

Conspiracy theories have proliferated on both the right and the left since the horrific July 13 shootings. But while some Democratic voters have baselessly suggested that the violence was organized to benefit Trump, few, if any, leaders on the left have done the same. (The closest they came to this theory was an aide to top Democratic donor Reid Hoffman, who later apologized.)

Many Trump insiders, however, immediately began accusing Democrats — without any evidence — of orchestrating the shooting. Among them were Congresswomen Marjorie Taylor Greene and Mike Collins of Georgia, as well as Trump’s sons Donald Jr. and Eric. Bartiromo also welcomed Eric Trump when he claimed that Democrats “will stop at absolutely nothing” and were intent on having his father assassinated: “I’ve said on this show before that I wouldn’t be surprised if they tried something even worse, alluding to exactly what happened, and I was right.” (And this was on former Fox host Megyn Kelly’s radio show, where Don Jr. said Trump’s political enemies were “now trying to kill him.”)

At the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, which began just two days after the shooting, several speakers used the episode of Trump’s near-death to declare that his survival and candidacy were nothing short of a divine miracle. The vast visual backdrop for Trump’s acceptance speech played on the theme of martyrdom, featuring the iconic photo of a bloodied and defiant Trump moments after the attack.

Threat assessment and law enforcement officials told me after the assassination attempt that partisan exploitation of the bloodshed would fuel political violence — already a serious concern before the election — by exacerbating “a really important plot point” for extremist groups.

On Monday, the FBI announced that the shooter, Thomas Matthew Crooks, began purchasing items related to weapons and bomb-making materials more than a year before the attack. He had taken firearms training courses and conducted online research on mass shootings, assassination attempts and potential targets. He planned his activities carefully and “made considerable efforts to conceal his activities,” said Kevin Rojek, the FBI’s special agent in charge in Pittsburgh.

According to the wall street journalFBI investigators have interviewed more than 450 people, including dozens of Crooks’ colleagues, family members, and former classmates. The FBI has reiterated that it has found no evidence that he was motivated by partisan or ideological reasons. As I reported five days after the attack, barring some extraordinary revelation, Crooks is more likely to fit a different, murkier pattern of motivation than many of his predecessors.

Top image: Clockwise from top: Donald Trump Jr., Ron DeSantis, Ryan Zinke, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Eric Trump, Maria Bartiromo and Mike Collins. Photo credit: Mother Jones illustration; James Manning/PA Wire/ZUMA; Paul Hennessy/SOPA Images/ZUMA; Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call/ZUMA (3); Pat A. Robinson/ZUMA; Prensa Internacional/ZUMA