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Despite what you may have thought, heard, or read, Saturday evening’s sniper attack on Donald Trump wasn’t the first time someone attempted to cause him physical harm during a campaign rally — it was the third. But as far as I can remember, it was the first time that high-ranking opponents expressed sympathy and support for America’s most reviled man.

In March 2016, Secret Service agents stopped bearded radical rich kid Thomas DiMassimo as he attempted to bum-rush the stage from behind while Trump was giving a stump speech at an Ohio airport.

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At a June 2016 Trump rally near Las Vegas, Michael Steven Sandford, who later claimed he wanted to kill Trump before he was elected president, tried grabbing a Las Vegas cop’s Glock pistol but was subdued by local police.

In early June in this column, I’d expressed admiration for the fact that no matter what they throw at him, Trump always emerges “bloody, but unbowed.” Now he has to go top himself and survive bullets shot at him during a week where dwarfish masturbation instructor Dr. Ruth Westheimer, faggy fitness guru Richard Simmons, and legendarily bitchy actress Shannen Doherty died — and no one had even tried to kill them.

I had planned to write about other things for this column, namely:

• Duke Medical School alleging that the notion of punctuality is entangled with “white supremacy culture.”


• The total implosion of Oakland, California.


• Mentally unstable boxer Ryan Garcia checking himself into rehab after catching flak for dropping N-bombs on a livestream.


• A new documentary alleging that Abraham Lincoln was gay.


• Joe Biden introducing Volodymyr Zelensky as “President Putin,” then hours later calling Kamala Harris “Vice President Trump.”

I’d spent most of Saturday afternoon outside in the face-melting Georgia heat tending to some household painting projects. At 6:57 PM EST — when the week was only five hours from being over and I was certain that nothing else of note would happen — I came in, sat in front of the computer, and was ready to cover these stories when a friend sent me a message that Donald Trump had been shot at a rally in my home state of Pennsylvania.

So much for the rest of the week’s news.

I squinted at my computer into the wee hours of Sunday morning, poring over all the coverage as it came in.

As woefully familiar as I am with confirmation bias, the freedom that anonymity gives people to be maliciously psychotic with no consequences, the fact that American culture has become politically poisoned although few people seem to realize it, and that everyone these days is an expert although hardly anyone seems to know a goddamned thing about anything, I braced myself to be abused by word-torrents of people claiming that they were certain that not only did they know exactly what happened, they also know why it happened and what it all means.

I was not immune from at least suspecting that the whole event may have been part of a government operation. The shooting occurred on the weekend before the Republican National Convention and a couple weeks after the ill-fated debate with Donald Trump where Joe Biden cracked open his own skull, only for moths to fly out.

The Secret Service’s performance was inept enough to suggest that they may have allowed Trump to be shot, or maybe the Secret Service is merely catching up with the rest of the American populace, who have spent the entire 2020s in a long-distance Marathon of Incompetence. The footage of the shooting, captured as it was by thousands of smartphones, will be analyzed and scrutinized just like the Zapruder tapes were, and in the long run, no one will be the wiser because we live in a world where it’s nearly impossible to convince anyone of anything they weren’t already willing to believe.

The FBI has identified the shooter as 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks of Bethel, Pennsylvania. It’s unclear whether the feds saw fit to scrub Crooks’ entire social-media history before revealing his identity, but from the little that’s available, Crooks was an honors student who’d been allegedly bullied in high school. He also was a registered Republican who’d donated $15 to the Progressive Turnout Project, a pro-Democratic fundraising organization. Photos of his corpse showed him wearing a Demolition Ranch T-shirt, which references a pro-firearms YouTube channel. He also left no manifesto, or at least none that they’re disclosing, so there is no clear picture emerging as to his political leanings nor his motivations.

For now, those on the Right who’d been hoping that the shooter would have been a transgender antifa member driven to bloodlust by nine solid years of TRUMP IS LITERALLY HITLER rhetoric will wind up disappointed.

Same goes for those on the Left who had a whole bushel of smug “I told you so’s” ready to hurl at Trump supporters they’d been scolding for years about how Trump’s reputedly “violent” rhetoric would inevitably result in violence because, well, Trump was the target here. Before Crooks was identified, this didn’t stop a despicably sadistic subset of tweeters from causing “HOW DO YOU MISS” and “THEY MISSED” to temporarily trend on X.

Nor did an anti-Trump bias prevent early coverage from the legacy press to hesitate from referring to the attack as either a shooting or an assassination attempt. An early CNN headline: “Secret Service rushes Trump off stage after he falls at rally.” And one from the Associated Press: “BREAKING: Donald Trump has been escorted off stage by Secret Service during a rally after loud noises ring out in the crowd.”

In short, the shooting, Trump’s iron-testicled response, and nearly all the reactions to it were predictable.

The only thing that I found surprising was that it made Trump a sympathetic figure to those who’d previously hesitated to so much as concede that he’s human.

On Saturday night, goober-faced Colorado State Representative Steven Lezell Woodrow posted on X:

The last thing America needed was sympathy for the devil but here we are.

But even Woodrow’s Democratic colleagues scolded him for his insensitivity toward a man that almost no Democrat or self-identified Leftist in the world had shown the merest compassion ever since he declared his candidacy for president in 2015, and he deleted the post.

In a public statement, Joe Biden said he was “grateful to hear that [Trump’s] safe and doing well.” Barack Obama wished Trump a “speedy recovery.” Bill Clinton wrote:

Violence has no place in America, especially in our political process. Hillary and I are thankful that President Trump is safe, heartbroken for all those affected by the attack at today’s rally in Pennsylvania, and grateful for the swift action of the U.S. Secret Service.

At least publicly, Trump’s high-profile foes were forced to acknowledge that when you shoot Donald Trump, he bleeds.

Trump’s shooter failed to make him a martyr.

Trump’s reaction to almost being killed made him a hero.

More importantly, nearly all his sworn enemies’ graciousness toward him in the hours that followed the assassination attempt made him into a human.

In many ways, a humanized Trump is far more dangerous to the status quo than a demonized Trump.