Brandeis Stories

July 16, 2024 • Humanities and Social Sciences

In the days since the attempted assassination of former president Donald Trump, speculation around the motives of the 20-year-old shooter has been swirling. Jytte Klausen, the Lawrence A. Wien Professor of International Cooperation at Brandeis University, studies extremism, domestic and international terrorism, and how individuals become radicalized. While it is easy to view the shooting of a former president and presidential candidate as political, Klausen said it appears that the shooting was similar to many others in the United States; undertaken by an individual who was socially isolated, had something to prove – and had access to a high-powered weapon.

Violence has been part of the political landscape in the United States from its beginnings. The attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 was perhaps the most notable episode in recent history. Do you see the assassination attempt as a continuation of that kind of violence?

It appears that the shooter, twenty-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks, had no political motive. I suspect he wanted to show the world that he was capable of a daring masculine act. Conspiracy theories will fly. Democrats are already being blamed for creating the acrimonious context that enabled an attack on Trump. What we do know is that Crooks was a registered Republican and had a fascination with gun culture. He was smart but socially inept. And he was a lonely, bullied boy in high school, who was made fun of because he was a skinny “nerd,” that’s how classmates describe him. 

But he was also a gun nut. He wore camouflage clothing and tried out for the varsity rifle team in high school, and failed because he was a what a classmate described as  “a comically bad shot” Events show that he learned to shoot nevertheless. He joined a rifle club and on the day of the assassination attempt, he wore clothing that is sold by a YouTube channel that promotes guns as a way of life. 

We have in recent years seen the development of an online culture instructing young men in how to take control and become hyper-masculine heroes through acts of physical and psychological transformation. Alex Jones made millions selling steroids online telling men to bulk up. Andrew Tate has done the same with his “Hustler University” which is available on Discord, a gaming site that Crooks appears to have used sporadically. My hunch is that Crooks was acting out a fantasy. He picked Trump because the event was nearby and accessible to him, and because Crooks knew he would get maximum attention.

In the 1960s, the U.S. saw a series of assassinations: Medgar Evers, President John F. Kennedy, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy. In the 1980s, President Ronald Regan was shot, but there was not a similar succession of additional attacks on political figures. What factors do you think created the successive assassinations that occurred in the ‘60s, and do you think those factors exist today?

The 1960s were a dark chapter. Marxist groups were planting bombs. Neo-Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan killing demonstrators. FBI overreach and illegal infiltration of anti-war and civil rights groups. Yes, even as I do not think Crooks is part of a conspiracy, he is part of a trend. I think we face very difficult challenges with respect to threats against political leaders. I’d add the 2017 shooting attack on a congressional baseball game in Washington DC, at which Steven Scalise, a Louisiana Republican, was severely injured. And then there is the shooting of Gabby Giffords, an Arizona Democrat, in 2011. Both of these were what we call mass shooting incidents. Six people died in the Giffords shooting. 

Elected officials face a constant barrage of threats. So do journalists, by the way. A lot is explained by the ease by which such threats may be fired off via social media. Most hateful communications do not result in violence. But sometimes violence comes out of nowhere. Politics has become wrapped up with violence so much that it is a deterrent to democratic engagement.

You study domestic terrorism and the development of extremist views. So far, the gunman in this case does not appear to have been involved in extremist or terrorist groups. What questions do you think investigators should be asking at this point?

 Questions will be asked about what the parents knew and did not know. The rifle used in the attack was purchased and registered to the father. Was the gun stored responsibly? How could the parents not know about the bomb making material and the already fabricated bombs that reportedly were found in their home? 

Every shooting incident is usually accompanied by shocked and surprised statements from classmates and neighbors, employers and family members. We nevertheless know that shooters nearly always have provided clues to their intentions before they act. The clues are often ignored or not put together in a way that provides a full picture to the observer. In the past, prosecutors and courts have been unwilling for the most part to blame parents and spouses for not stopping a tragedy. That has started to change. 

The parents of an eighteen-year-old man, who killed ten people in a supermarket in a black neighborhood in Buffalo, New York, in May 2022 are subject to lawsuits from survivors. The young man wrote in his diary that he had to act imminently because his parents were starting to suspect he was planning to do something. This April, a Michigan court sentenced the parents of a teenager who killed four students at his high school in 2021 to ten years in prison for providing him with a gun and FOR not having prevented him from taking it to school. 

There will also be an investigation into how Crooks got onto the roof of a building close enough to the podium where Trump was speaking to be within shooting range. And we still do not know how the bystanders—one of whom died—were shot. Did Crooks shoot those people—or were they shot by the Secret Service?