Trump Shooter Was “Definitely” Conservative, Ex-Classmate Says

As MAGA world fuels rumors that Trump’s attempted assassin was linked with antifa or DEI, his former classmates in Pennsylvania say the shooter was a conservative.

According to The Philadelphia Inquirer, former classmates remember 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks as a mild-mannered right-winger. “He was definitely a conservative,” said Max R. Smith, one of his ex-classmates.

When remembering Crooks, a classmate described a debate in American history class. “The majority of the class were on the liberal side, but Tom, 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.”

Others echoed the description, painting him as a quiet loner, while another former student described him as “a quiet kid, not obviously political or violent in any way.”

Public records seem to back up the claim that Crooks was on the right, Crooks registered as a Republican in September 2021, the month he turned 18.

Some have also noted that Crooks appeared to be sporting a T-shirt from gun fanatic YouTube channel “Demolition Ranch.”

On Biden’s Inauguration Day, however, a 17-year-old Crooks also allegedly made a $15 donation to a “Progressive Turnout Project PAC,” which has been given much attention. As Ryan Grim at DropSite news reports, this contribution shouldn’t be given too much weight. The email-based PAC regularly spams inboxes with confusing links and flashy colors and can hardly be seen as demonstrating much about the shooter’s ideology.

The FBI has still not found a possible motive for the shooting.

Judge Aileen Cannon may have dismissed Donald Trump’s classified documents case on Monday, but not everyone was on the same legal page as the Trump-appointed judge.

Democratic lawmakers and legal scholars jointly torched Cannon’s 93-page decision, accusing the ruling of breaking precedent and effectively handing Trump everything he had been hoping for: a near-indefinite delay that erases the case from the immediacy of the 2024 presidential race.

New York Senator Chuck Schumer called for the decision’s immediate appeal, describing the ruling as “breathtakingly misguided” and ”wrong on the law.”

“This is further evidence that Judge Cannon cannot handle this case impartially and must be reassigned,” Schumer told HuffPost.

Representative Dan Goldman also joined the chorus, claiming that Cannon knew that the Supreme Court “has upheld Special Counsel appointments time and time again.”

In an interview with HuffPost, the New York representative argued that the “Trump-packed Supreme Court” had handed Trump an immunity ruling related to his time in office, but that Cannon had “manufactured immunity for him” after term had ended.

Cannon rejected the case on the basis that the Independent Counsel Act, which she claimed served as the foundation for special counsel Jack Smith’s appointment, had expired and therefore invalidated Smith’s work on the case. That notion had been elevated by just one Supreme Court member—Justice Clarence Thomas—who wrote in a concurring opinion in Trump’s immunity ruling on July 1 that “if there is no law establishing the office that the Special Counsel occupies, then he cannot proceed with this prosecution.”

Cannon began hearing arguments in June over whether Smith’s appointment to the case was constitutional, but she caught considerable flack from legal experts for taking up the arguments, including from former Trump attorney Ty Cobb, who argued that there were mountains of legal precedent behind Smith’s appointment.

Smith has the ability to appeal the dismissal, though his office has not yet announced what their next steps will be.

Donald Trump is already celebrating Judge Aileen Cannon’s decision to toss his entire classified documents case.

Trump took aim at Democrats and his court cases in a long rant, praising “this dismissal of the Lawless indictment in Florida” as a good first step that should be “followed quickly by the dismissal of the ALL the Witch Hunts,” mentioning his cases in New York, Washington, D.C., and Georgia.

The former president and convicted felon seems to be trying to tie Cannon’s dismissal of his classified documents case to any sympathy he’s gained after he was shot at a rally on Saturday. It’s more of the political opportunism that Trump is known for, continuously complaining about unfair treatment and claiming that everything is rigged against him. His supporters will probably start repeating it, especially since many of them have blamed Democrats and the left for the attempt on Trump’s life.

Cannon has long been suspected of either incompetence or rigging the case in favor of the former president and convicted felon. Trump has made no secret of his approval of Cannon and his expectation that she would dismiss the case, even hinting at it last month. Other reports seem to indicate that Cannon may have been biased toward Trump from the moment she was assigned the case. The fact that she went beyond the facts of Trump’s mishandling of classified documents and used a dubious constitutional argument to dismiss the case suggests bias, as the ruling will likely be reversed and will end up adding a longer delay.

The fact that Trump is now celebrating Cannon not only seems like a blatantly corrupt arrangement, it also shows that Trump isn’t changing his tone after the shooting.

“Getting shot in the face changes a man,” fellow Republican National Convention speaker Tucker Carlson told Axios, but it wasn’t even two full days after the shooting that Trump was back to his bombastic self.

If Trump’s post, Monday morning after one of his cases was dismissed, is any indication, his definition of unifying the country might be different from what the average person expects. Even his fellow Republicans are worried about how he will act at the Republican National Convention this week, fearing chaos from a nominee who goes off script even in normal speeches. No matter how much his speech is “toned down,” there will definitely be drama at the convention, and Trump will probably say something inflammatory.

Donald Trump and his team are pushing a so-called pivot toward unity in the wake of Saturday’s assassination attempt on the former president, and the media is absolutely eating it up—with positively no actual evidence to suggest that anything has changed.

While Trump’s allies were quick to blame Democrats and the media for Saturday’s shooting, the former president’s team has opted to go a different route, and switch up the script on his speech at the Republican National Convention. Trump is now touting the address, scheduled for Thursday, as a chance to “bring the country together.”

As a result of Saturday’s chaotic events, and early reports out of the Trump camp, many outlets are optimistically reporting a likely shift in rhetoric from the Republican candidate who has been using the same deeply divisive, violent, racist, anti-immigrant rhetoric for the past eight years.

“Trump will adopt an unfamiliar, almost benevolent posture, and call for unity in the face of tragedy,” Politico reported Monday, citing Trump’s “near-death experience,” which “would rattle and forever change even the strongest among us.”

Maggie Haberman of The New York Times said during a CNN interview Sunday that Trump seemed “completely normal” after the attempt on his life, but noted that she thought the former president might choose to recognize this as a “different kind of moment.”

Haberman pointed out that Trump hasn’t yet started selling merchandise featuring the photograph of him with blood on his face and his fist in the air, which could be a sign of a tonal shift.

But immediately after, Haberman warned against making such predictions. “Anybody who is trying to predict, number one, what the rest of this campaign looks like, or how he is going to talk about it, or how Democrats are going to talk about him, I think it is a mistake. There’s a lot we don’t know,” she said.*

Tucker Carlson certainly thinks Trump’s turn toward the light is real. “Getting shot in the face changes a man,” the erstwhile Fox News host told Axios.

In the same piece, Jim Vandehei and Mike Allen speculated about Trump’s next moves.

“He could unify America,” they wrote. “Imagine he gave a speech featuring something he rarely shows: humility. Imagine him telling the nation that he has been too rough, too loose, too combative with his language—and now realizes words can have consequences, and promises to tone it down and bring new voices into the White House if he wins.”

Similarly, Elliot Ackerman penned a piece for The Atlantic arguing that “Trump could take a different path” than the one he’s been set on for almost a decade. “Trump has called his enemies ‘bad people’ in the past, but now he’s suffered a near-death experience,” Ackerman wrote. “Sometimes that changes people.”

This kind of speculation is pure fiction, however, as Trump’s assassination attempt has only emboldened his preexisting victim complex, which has convinced him he’s the target of systemic political persecution, and not criminal prosecution. By Monday morning, when it was announced that Judge Aileen Cannon had tossed Trump’s classified documents case, the former president was back posting his same old martyred talking points on Truth Social.

“As we move forward in Uniting our Nation after the horrific events on Saturday, this dismissal of the Lawless Indictment in Florida should be just the first step, followed quickly by the dismissal of ALL the Witch Hunts—The January 6th Hoax in Washington, D.C., the Manhattan D.A.’s Zombie Case, the New York A.G. Scam, Fake Claims about a woman I never met (a decades old photo in a line with her then husband does not count), and the Georgia ‘Perfect’ Phone Call charges,” Trump wrote.

“The Democrat Justice Department coordinated ALL of these Political Attacks, which are an Election Interference conspiracy against Joe Biden’s Political Opponent, ME.”

He did include one limp appeal toward unity: “Let us come together to END all Weaponization of our Justice System and Make America Great Again!”

It took about 36 hours for Trump to abandon his call to unite a divided America and get back to talking about himself. As the Republican National Convention begins, it’s worth remaining skeptical of Trump and his team’s attempts to paint him as a changed man. Trump was desperate to widen his appeal to centrist voters long before this weekend, and he will continue to use Saturday’s violent unfoldings to distract voters from his own equally violent rhetoric.

* This story has been updated to include Maggie Haberman’s full quote.

It seems like Judge Aileen Cannon is just making it up as she goes along.

On Monday, the Trump-appointed district judge threw out Trump’s entire classified documents case, seemingly using one concurring opinion from the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling as justification to do so. In her 93-page ruling, Cannon ruled that the appointment of special counsel Jack Smith violated the Constitution—drawing outrage from legal scholars and reporters alike.

“Just to be crystal clear: SCOTUS has upheld special counsels repeatedly,” wrote Chris Hates on X. “Cannon is a district court judge, her job is to apply controlling precedent. She’s doing this because she thinks the MAGA court is on the same page as her and Trump’s lawyers and will go along.”

Instead of honoring precedent, Cannon seems to have relied on Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s concurring opinion in the immunity ruling earlier this month. In that decision, Thomas was the only judge to make the argument that the Department of Justice misstepped in its special appointment of Jack Smith. The Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals, which has struck down Cannon’s decisions in the past, will take up her decision next.  

Regardless of how the federal courts rule, Cannon will still get to hand Trump a win by continuing to delay Trump’s trial, as she has done for the past 18 months.
One person who isn’t mad? Donald Trump himself. On Truth Social, Trump wrote that the dismissal “should be just the first step,” calling all the cases against him scams, hoaxes, and “Political Attacks,” and further pressing for the  “dismissal of ALL witch hunts” against him.

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has a strong message for any Democrats in Congress who have “resigned” themselves to a Donald Trump victory: Retire.

A Sunday report in Axios about Democrats discussing Joe Biden’s prospects following Saturday’s assassination attempt against Trump included an anonymous quote from a senior House Democrat: “We’ve all resigned ourselves to a second Trump presidency.”

Ocasio-Cortez’s response on X (formerly Twitter) got right to the point.

“If you’re a ‘senior Democrat’ that feels this way, you should absolutely retire and make space for true leadership that refuses to resign themselves to fascism,” she said. “This kind of leadership is functionally useless to the American people. Retire.”

Ocasio-Cortez’s point seems to be that the anonymous Democrat’s attitude flies in the face of the message the party has tried to convey over the past several months, even years, about the right-wing threat to democracy. Ocasio-Cortez was widely criticized for calling Trump a fascist following the 2020 Democratic National Convention, and ever since, that language has become part of mainstream Democratic discourse. No Democrat who has loudly criticized the fascist tendencies of Trump should be now saying, “Well, he’s probably going to win now.”

Trump has never officially conceded losing the 2020 election, repeatedly accusing the media, courts, and voting mechanisms of being rigged against him. When Trump engages in antidemocratic rhetoric, the entire Republican Party falls in line behind him. Ocasio-Cortez has tried to back up her words with actions like initiating impeachment proceedings against conservative Supreme Court justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas. If other Democrats in Congress, no matter how senior, are now responding to Trump and Republicans with shrugs after months and years of sounding the alarm, what purpose are they serving in office?

As dawn breaks on Lara Trump’s Republican National Convention, not every GOP lawmaker is feeling entirely confident in Donald Trump’s ability not to alienate voters.

Before the assassination attempt against Trump Saturday, Raw Story asked several Republican lawmakers what they were hoping to get from the convention this week. In many ways, their milquetoast answers stood in sharp contrast to the chaotic candidate they’ve come to back.

“Stability. Simple message. Lack of drama,” Representative Don Bacon told Raw Story.

“You know, people want stability. They’re tired of chaos and the loud noises on both sides. So if our side and President Trump can communicate stability and a moderating theme, that’s what we want. Let these other guys blow it.”

“I always try to recommend it, at the least in our area in Omaha, the Midwest—we’re called ‘Nebraska nice’ for a reason,” said Bacon. “I just say in our district, people want governance, conservative governance but decency. And that’s what we want to communicate.”

The Nebraska Republican is staring down what could turn out to be an especially narrow presidential election in his state, which has only five electoral college votes to give, and three of which are distributed based on how the congressional districts vote. As a result, a step toward the middle appears to have been on his mind.

In February, Bacon co-sponsored a nonbinding resolution expressing support for IVF and commending the work of fertility specialists. While the measure itself did absolutely nothing to actually protect the right to fertility treatments, it was an attempt to signal to voters a Republican shift to the middle, or at least an ability to listen to their more centrist constituents.

Apparently, Bacon has been singing his tune about “stability” for a while.

“I remember saying that during his administration, and [Trump’s] chief of staff told me to shut up,” Bacon told Raw Story, clarifying that he was not referring to Mark Meadows.

“The more we can communicate civility and no chaos, the better,” said Bacon. “Americans are tired. We’re tired of all that noise out there.”

Representative Nancy Mace also urged Trump to make an appeal to the middle.

“I think I’ve been pretty vocal about going after independent voters, suburban women, and I’ve tried to be a really strong voice for the party, but he’s doing a remarkable job on his own,” Mace gushed to Raw Story. “He put IVF and birth control and contraception into the Republican Party platform for the first time ever in history.”

Mace was the main sponsor of the do-nothing IVF resolution earlier this year.

And Marco Rubio, a contender for Trump’s vice presidential nomination, ran a hard defense for the former president, claiming he was not at all “dysfunctional,” unlike his opponents. Trump, he said, “comes from a background in real estate and business, and it’s just a different language. And so it may seem alien to people around here, but I watched firsthand how it works, certainly, on the world stage.”

It’s unclear how the weekend’s events will affect Trump’s performance at the RNC, but it’s worth noting that in the past, Trump’s language seemed to be less entrepreneurial and more racist and violent.

Trump said Sunday that his speech, which he is scheduled to deliver Thursday, has been completely rewritten in the wake of Saturday’s shooting, which left one attendee dead and two others injured.

“This is a chance to bring the whole country, even the whole world, together. The speech will be a lot different, a lot different than it would’ve been two days ago,” Trump told the Washington Examiner.

Even as Trump turns to unity, one thing is for sure: Drama is definitely still on the schedule.

Republican lawmakers are ignoring the evidence to blame the attempted assassination of Donald Trump on anyone but themselves.

Although the gunman behind the shooting has been identified as Thomas Matthew Crooks, a 20-year-old white conservative, GOP leaders have decided to collectively attack the Secret Service—specifically, the members that are women and people of color.

Speaking to Fox News on Sunday, Representative Cory Mills was quick to divert attention away from the conservative shooter and toward the nonobvious target: diversity, equity, and inclusion hires.

“Look, I’m not sure about who the individuals are on the individual detail of the Secret Service, but I can tell you under this Biden administration, the one thing I’ve seen is massive DEI hires,” Mills, a former U.S. Army sniper, told Jesse Waters Primetime, appearing to suggest that only white men should be members of the Secret Service. “And I can tell you, when you primarily go after DEI, you end up with D-I-E.”

But Mills wasn’t the only Trump ally frustrated with a service detail that kept the former president alive.

“Somebody really dropped the ball,” Tennessee Representative Tim Burchett told Fox Sunday afternoon. “You’ve got a … DEI initiative-person who heads up our Secret Service. You know, she was working at Pepsi before this. I know she was a former Secret Service agent, but still.”

“This is what happens when you don’t put the best players in. It’s a complete failure on our part,” he said.

Elsewhere in the interview, Burchett baselessly pushed that Democrats’ focus on the violent rhetoric of MAGA Republicans—including likening Trump to Nazi leader Adolf Hitler and describing Trump’s political ambitions as fascist—was the reason behind the shooting, despite the fact that Crooks’s former classmates repeatedly described him as holding exclusively conservative ideals.

“It is a manifestation of what they brought upon us,” Burchett said. “It is not the Republicans’ fault.”

And network hosts also jumped in on the fury, including Jeanine Pirro and Laura Ingraham, who were seemingly unhappy with the women who risked their lives and bodies to create a human shield for Trump.

“You and I, in our own way, have been trailblazers in our fields,” Ingraham bemoaned. “And we support women in all we do. But when it comes to shielding the body of someone who is six foot three, and shielding him, you can’t do it if you’re five-five.”

At a time when tensions are high following an assassination attempt against Donald Trump on Saturday, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene still saw fit to immediately use violent rhetoric to describe Democrats.

In an interview on Real America’s Voice right after the shooting, Greene called politics today “a battle between good and evil.”

“Look at the views and the policies on the left. This is the party that is literally trying to destroy God’s creation,” Greene said, before going on a rant blaming Democrats for a number of conservative bogeymen, including trans rights, abortion, Black Lives Matter protests, and prison sentences against conservative figures including January 6 rioters. She was happy enough with her message that she posted a video of it the next day to her X (formerly Twitter) account.

Greene has a reputation for using extreme and bigoted rhetoric, so this initial reaction isn’t unexpected. She has called for a “national divorce,” infamously blamed California wildfires on “Jewish space lasers” back in 2018, spread conspiracy theories about 9/11, and alleged conspiracies behind school shootings. Her political party has enabled her ever since she was elected to Congress, and in some cases has even echoed her talking points. As such, she isn’t likely to receive calls to apologize from her fellow Republicans, particularly as a host of them will probably be saying the same things at the Republican National Convention this week.

But one would think that, at a time when the motive of the gunman who shot at Trump still is unclear, Greene might not want to escalate tensions and be seen as promoting more violence. But that would be out of character for Greene, and out of touch with today’s Republican Party.