Puzzling anatomy of Trump's would-be assassin

Remember Thomas Crooks?

How quickly we move on, to our detriment.

Crooks is the 20-year-old man who tried to kill Donald Trump. For a time, we all wanted to know his name.

You can blame his transience on social media, and you wouldn't be entirely wrong. You can try to rationalize that by saying social media is not real life. But for some, like many in Crooks' generation, social media is where life is lived, for better and often for worse. 

Trump was not yet at a hospital before social media platforms were awash in dark humor. Memes ran rampant. Some were gleeful that Trump had been shot, many were angry even if that meant Trump became a hero. Some threw shade at people taking the matter seriously, at our politics in general, at the idea that this was something to worry about.

The apathy was obvious, the desensitization to violence alarming. And then the circus moved on, the attempted assassination of a past and possibly future president reduced to a TikTok sideshow that flares and quickly fades. Now we're several hundred trends removed from the shooting in Butler, Pennsylvania just eight days ago.

Mainstream media, too, seems to be moving on. Now the shooting is being parsed for its impact on the campaign and specifically on Trump himself, and for what it reveals about Secret Service failures.

And now we're starting to lose sight of Crooks and, more importantly, the urgency to understand what brought him to that rally with murderous intent, placing him in the company of so many others who have committed similarly dark and violent acts.

Social media might well be part of the toxic broth in which young men like Crooks are cultured. But what else is in it? It's important to keep asking questions and searching for answers.

So we grasp at shards of what we want to call evidence. This post. That tweet. The politics of the parents. The bullying in the school cafeteria. The way he dressed. The music he listened to. The way he sat by himself.

Crooks searched online for both Trump and President Joe Biden, looked up rally dates for both, and had on his phone photos of Attorney General Merrick Garland and a member of the British royal family. Was the shooting political?

He searched online for information about Michigan high school mass murderer Ethan Crumbley and the parents who bought him a gun, and for lessons in how to make explosives. Did he want to go out in a blaze of glory?

He searched online for information about major depressive disorder and treatment for it. Was he going through the kind of crisis that often precipitates mass shootings?

The vacuum of certainty was briefly filled by a post on a gaming site alleged to be from Crooks saying he would be making his "premiere" on the day of the shooting, but it was soon shown to be a fake account and the grasping for answers continued.

He had been bullied in school, but graduated from community college in May with an associate degree in engineering science. He was kind. He was quiet. He was a loner.

He might have had father issues. So did rocker Bruce Springsteen and painter Paul Cezanne. Ernest Hemingway had problems with his mother. None of them tried to shoot their way out of their problems. Crooks' home was filled with guns. Do we need more homes filled with guitars, paintbrushes and pens?

What, in other words, goes into the stew that makes young men like Crooks? How do we make sense of the random clues? What enables them? What triggers them? What is the balm?

So much is unknown and will remain so, if we cast Crooks and his like aside as just another fleeting spectacle.

Columnist Michael Dobie's opinions are his own.

By Michael Dobie

michael.dobie@newsday.commwdobie

Michael Dobie is a member of the Newsday editorial board.