July 14: The Survivor

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The Big Story

At around 6:15 on Saturday evening, roughly 10 minutes into a Trump campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, a small town 35 miles outside of Pittsburgh, an assassin came within an inch of changing the course of American history. Shots rang out; Trump put his hand to the side of his head and dropped to the ground.  

The shots, we learned later, were fired from a sniper’s rifle from a rooftop around 130 yards from Trump’s podium, outside the secure zone of the rally. The following graphic from The New York Times offers a visual:

The first shot, fired before Trump had a chance to react, was the potential kill shot. A photograph from Doug Mills of The New York Times captured the bullet in midflight:

The Washington Post reported Sunday that a municipal police officer, responding to reports of a suspicious person in the area, climbed on the roof of the gunman’s building, but dropped down after the gunman aimed his rifle at him. The gunman then began opening fire. Perhaps it was the distraction from the police officer, or the light wind, or Trump’s decision to suddenly turn his head, but the first bullet missed, grazing Trump’s ear but otherwise leaving him unharmed:

Within seconds of the first shot, Secret Service counter-snipers located and killed the gunman, 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks of nearby Bethel Park, Pennsylvania. Little is known about him as of the time of our writing. The gun was purchased in his father’s name. Explosives were found in his car and home. According to former classmates, he was a loner who was relentlessly bullied and would wear hunting outfits to school. Records show he was a registered Republican who, nonetheless, made a $15 donation to the liberal ActBlue political action committee on Joe Biden’s Inauguration Day in 2021. A former classmate told The Wall Street Journal that “he never outwardly spoke about his political views.”

Crooks missed his target, but he managed to squeeze off several rounds; one struck and killed a man in the crowd, 50-year-old Corey Comperatore. Consider, for a moment, what you may have read in the past nine years about the sort of person who goes to a Trump rally, especially in a place like Butler, PA. They are paranoid, conspiratorial, full of rage against “elites” and “the Other,” likely bigots—and probably sexists and antisemites, too. Or else they are objects of pity: the alienated, the left-behind, ruined by OxyContin and trade with China and declining church attendance. So who was Corey Comperatore? A retired volunteer fire chief whose last act on earth was to shield his wife and daughter from gunfire. A liberal neighbor, who described Comperatore as a “very good person,” told The Washington Post, “I know he was a Trump guy and he knew I was a Biden guy but we never let that come between us.” Near him in the crowd was an emergency-room physician who rushed to administer chest compressions. There was nothing he could do; it was a head wound. 

We will learn more in the coming days about the shooter and his motives, and about the security failures that allowed an assassin to come within an inch of killing the former and potentially future president. But we can say now, with complete honesty, that what was most remarkable was Trump himself. Seconds after nearly being shot, and surrounded by a Secret Service detail attempting to whisk him away to safety, Trump, blood streaming down his face, rose and pumped his fist to the crowd, urging his followers to “Fight! Fight! Fight!” Associated Press photographer Evan Vucci was on hand to capture this:

 The bloodied cheek, the fist raised in a gesture of courage in the face of death, the American flag in the background echoing Joe Rosenthal’s photo of the Marines raising the Stars and Stripes over Iwo Jima—all immediately transformed, via Trump’s intuitive political genius, into a symbol of defiance against the vast machinery of wealth and power that has spent the better part of a decade attempting to humiliate him, bankrupt him, jail him, take his balls and now literally kill him, only for it all to fail; only for Trump to rise, looking for all the world like a prizefighter standing in the ring, his own blood now mingled with that of his supporters, and shake his fist and vow to fight ... It’s the sort of image that makes you understand what Hegel meant when he called Napoleon “the world-spirit on horseback.”

Several commentators, in the immediate aftermath of the attempt, spoke of divine intervention—that we were witnessing a man chosen and protected. And indeed, there was something inarguably primal about the scene. As Peter Nimitz put it on X, sort of joking but not really:

Perhaps it was all random chance, pure blind luck. Certainly, there are rational explanations for what happened. The shooter missed. Trump seized the moment. The emotion of the spectacle prompted a mini-preference cascade, enabling high-profile elites—Elon Musk, Bill Ackman—to finally violate the taboo against Trump support and publicly declare their endorsements. But chance, or luck, or fate, or God, made a decision. And as Cormac McCarthy wrote in a not-so-different context, “it is a dull man indeed who could reckon so profound a decision without agency or significance either one.”