Trump Shooter Thomas Crooks Emerged From a Lonely America

The 20-year-old who tried to assassinate former President Donald Trump left no political manifesto and very little detail about himself online.

Still, more details could emerge that will help the country understand why Thomas Matthew Crooks scaled a building near the campaign rally in Pennsylvania and opened fire, grazing Trump’s ear and killing a spectator. For now, the anecdotes that have surfaced in press reports paint a portrait of a smart and isolated young man, a loner fitting into a familiar mold for Americans: that of a mass shooter.

“Particularly school shooters in the United States,” said Samuel West, a professor who studies the psychology of violence at Virginia State University. “This is, to my knowledge, the first one of these sorts of events where all of these features seem to point to someone who might have been a school shooter, but what he did was far different from that.”

Social isolation is a top indicator shared by the small number of young men who have committed highly public shootings in the U.S., according to West’s research.

And loneliness is a defining characteristic of the accounts of Crooks shared by his former classmates and neighbors.

He “sat by himself, didn’t talk to anyone, didn’t even try to make conversation,” Liam Campbell, a 17-year-old neighbor, told the Associated Press.

“He just wanted to stay by himself,” Jim Knapp, his former guidance counselor, told The New York Times.

Max Smith, another classmate the Philadelphia Inquirer interviewed, described a mock debate course Crooks participated in, where a teacher had students stand on opposite sides of the room to signal their position on issues.

Most of the class stood on the liberal side, but Crooks, “no matter what, always stood his ground on the conservative side,” Smith said. “That’s still the picture I have of him. Just standing alone on one side while the rest of the class was on the other.”

Crooks’ political leanings are unclear. He registered as a Republican in Pennsylvania but was too young to vote in 2020. Crooks donated $15 to a progressive political action committee on the day President Joe Biden was sworn into office.

FBI agents said they are investigating the shooting as an assassination attempt and as a potential act of domestic terrorism. The agency has yet to publicly identify an ideological or political motive.

“We have intelligence analysts working from our field office in Pittsburgh, working feverishly to attempt to identify any motives behind why this was done,” FBI Special Agent Kevin Rojek said at a press conference.

According to multiple press reports, Crooks had searched the internet for information on Trump’s Pennsylvania rally as well as the upcoming Democratic National Convention in Chicago, and FBI officials told lawmakers in congressional briefings on Wednesday that his search history also included “major depressive disorder.”

In the absence of a clear motive, Biden urged people to wait until investigators finish their work before jumping to conclusions. But if the past is any indication, it’s not certain the public will ever have a solid explanation.

As an analog, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas has reportedly pointed to the 2017 massacre at an outdoor concert in Las Vegas, the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history. That 17-month federal investigation could not find any motive beyond the gunman’s suspected desire to “attain a certain degree of infamy.”

“By some definitions, this was a mass shooting, not just an assassination attempt on the president,” said Dr. Garen Wintemute, an emergency medicine physician at UC Davis and director of the California Firearm Violence Research Center. “The shooter is a young male. White. Used an assault-type rifle. And we’re learning about the possibility of social isolation. All of those things fit.”

But he added that these common denominators apply not just to mass shootings but violence in general and also self-harm. “It’s important to stress,” Wintemute said, “most fatal violence is suicide.”

Americans have become more isolated over time. Last year, the U.S. surgeon general released a report warning of an epidemic of loneliness, with about half of adults surveyed reporting measurable levels of loneliness, even before the COVID-19 pandemic. Isolation is bad for a person’s health and society because lonely people — especially young men — are vulnerable to the appeals of extreme groups.

Wintemute, concerned by a spike in gun sales around the 2020 election that did not subside, surveyed Americans’ willingness to engage in political violence for the last two years. In 2022, almost a third of people he surveyed considered violence to be usually or always justified to advance at least one political objective. That dipped in 2023 but was still at around a quarter.

Wintemute’s findings led him to write an opinion column last month in which he said that the country’s drift toward violence this year “will not correct itself” as the election approaches and that the majority of the public who reject political violence “need to make our opposition known, over and over and as publicly as possible.”

“We’re losing a sense of community,” he told KQED. “We’re becoming isolated. Given our findings and what’s going on in the news, I’ve been expecting on a daily basis that there would be an outbreak of political violence. And to be honest, just counting it lucky at the end of every day that it didn’t happen.”

Last weekend, it did.

“Nobody predicted that it would be Donald Trump in a small town in Pennsylvania, with a 20-year-old kid using an AR-15,” Wintemute added. “But that something would happen — the people who knew most about the topic took it as a dead certainty.”