Lack of motive in Trump attack frustrates public, but fits a pattern

In the week since the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, details have emerged about sniper positions and Secret Service agents, witnesses and warnings.

But the answer to the biggest question remains elusive: Why?

So far, investigators say, they have found little evidence of an ideology driving the shooter, Thomas Matthew Crooks, a 20-year-old nursing home aide who was killed at the scene. The information gleaned from his phone, family and friends doesn’t offer a motive, national security analysts say, and the absence of a quick explanation has left room for the rapid-fire spread of partisan and conspiratorial theories shaping how millions of Americans view the attack.

Barring a breakthrough in the investigation, Crooks appears poised to join a string of high-profile attackers with no discernible ideological driver, or with influences from a mixed bag of beliefs. That outcome is frustrating for a nation struggling to make sense of the event, analysts say, but it fits into a pattern of bloody episodes that defy categorization along a traditional left-right spectrum.

“It’s hard, because when you go after a political target, you do assume political motive,” said Daniel Byman, a terrorism researcher the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a national security think tank.

Investigators haven’t produced evidence showing an ideological motive that meets official definitions of terrorism, Byman and other analysts say. Authorities typically explore other theories, too, including mental illness or a quest for notoriety. The lack of conclusive findings has been difficult to accept for many Trump supporters, who have embraced the idea that he was targeted by an enemy of the MAGA movement - a claim repeated this week by speakers at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee.

Since the shooting, conspiracy theories have proliferated - on the right and left - as every aspect of the incident is examined by self-appointed sleuths. The scraps of information released so far have been spun into elaborate hypotheses involving Biden administration coverups, foreign plots and demonic spirits.

“It’s very unsatisfying, psychologically, to say, ‘Stuff happens and we don’t know why,” Byman said, adding that without a motive, “people fill the void with their own conspiracy theories that increase polarization and decrease trust in institutions.”

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Attacks without clear motivation aren’t unusual and have increased, researchers say, in part as a reflection of the ideologies that swirl together on social media and gaming platforms, creating a toxic soup of grievances with no cohesive political agenda. Authorities have cited unclear or overlapping beliefs in recent plots or violence where, for example, white nationalism melded with misogynistic “incel” subcultures, or when a member of a satanic neo-Nazi group invoked Islamist militancy in what the Justice Department called a “a diabolical cocktail of ideologies.”

In 2022, an attack on Paul Pelosi, husband of then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), was carried out by a hammer-wielding man who had been involved in nudist activism and Green Party support before more recent racist rhetoric and expressions of hatred toward Democrats, according to analysts who have studied his writings. As with Trump’s would-be assassin, extremists and partisans quickly stepped in to exploit the vacuum where a clear-cut motive would be.

The deadliest recent example was the 2017 mass shooting at a country music festival in Las Vegas that killed 60 people and injured hundreds. To this day, it’s unclear precisely why 64-year-old Stephen Paddock opened fire on concertgoers. The FBI has released a trove of documents that showed he had a serious gambling habit but never declared a motivation for the rampage. Paddock killed himself before authorities reached him.

Aaron Rouse, who led the FBI’s Las Vegas office when it investigated the attack, said the public should be patient while investigators pursue every possible lead, which will probably take months.

“As a society, we’re kind of preprogrammed for a TV culture that there’s an event, then a resolution, and it has to make sense,” Rouse said. “People have to have patience and realize there’s not a grand cabal behind every event.”

During the Las Vegas probe, Rouse said, he was surprised to learn from FBI officials who study mass shootings that roughly 20% of the time, a gunman doesn’t want anyone to know their motive or reasons.

“Some of them don’t provide a manifesto or a recording,” Rouse said. “They don’t tell people, and that’s what we had in Las Vegas, and it was incredibly maddening.” Rouse’s team eventually concluded that the gunman was a person with a troubled past who didn’t handle disappointment well.

Authorities say Crooks fired an AR-style rifle at Trump from a rooftop outside the rally security perimeter, killing one person in the crowd and critically injuring two others. He was then fatally shot by the Secret Service. Trump was injured, emerging from the attack with a bloodied ear.

FBI agents combing through the details of Crooks’s life have found little in the way of ideology or politics to explain his attempt to kill Trump just days before the former president again became his party’s White House nominee. Crooks had conducted online searches for information related to Trump and Biden, and had photos of both men saved on his phone, according to lawmakers and others briefed on the investigation.

Investigators have also determined that the gunman visited the site of Trump’s rally nearly a week in advance, those people said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss details that have not been made public by the FBI.

According to state records, Crooks was registered as a Republican, though campaign finance records show that someone with his name and street address gave $15 to the Progressive Turnout Project, a Democratic voter-turnout organization, in January 2021.

In addition to Trump and Biden, the shooter had photos of Attorney General Merrick Garland and a member of the British royal family saved on his phone, two people familiar with the probe said. He had searched for information about major depressive disorder, the rally in Butler, Pa., and the Democratic National Convention scheduled for August. The gunman also searched online for information about teenage mass shooter Ethan Crumbley and his parents, according to a person familiar with a briefing law enforcement officials gave to lawmakers earlier this week.

“He had a range finder and a backpack,” Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) said after a briefing Wednesday, in a statement that called for Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle to step down.

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With no signs of a political motive or a foreign element, investigators are focusing on the psychology of the gunman. But there, too, there is not much to go on, other than that he had searched the internet for information about depression.

While many have assumed the motives behind Saturday’s shooting were rooted in the heated rhetoric of a presidential campaign, a 1997 Secret Service study of American assassins and would-be assassins of public figures found that “attackers and near-lethal approachers of public officials rarely had ‘political’ motives.”

Karl Schmae, a retired FBI supervisory agent, said the most relevant comparison to Crooks may be John Hinckley Jr., who tried to assassinate President Ronald Reagan in 1981.

Before that shooting outside a Washington hotel, Hinckley had stalked President Jimmy Carter. Investigators concluded he wanted to shoot a president to try to impress an actress.

“John Hinckley was a troubled guy and he just wanted notoriety,” Schmae said. “There was nothing in particular about Reagan other than killing him would make Hinckley famous.”

Given the level of security around a former president and the mode of attack, Crooks surely knew he was embarking on a suicide mission, said Gina Ligon, who leads a federally funded terrorism research center at the University of Nebraska at Omaha and has written extensively about political violence.

“It certainly looks like someone who didn’t necessarily want to survive the attack,” Ligon said, but who sought “to do it in a way that’s remembered.”

Ligon said there were still too many unanswered questions to conclude that Crooks fit the profile of a “lone wolf,” a term that some researchers criticize as overlooking the role of online networks in radicalizing people to violence.

“Nobody acts alone - except the Unabomber,” she said.

Ligon and other analysts pointed to Crooks’s use of an AR-style rifle, his T-shirt from a brand popular in gun circles and the homemade explosive devices authorities discovered in his car and home as indicators of influences from a wider “ecosystem.”

Ana Velitchkova, a sociologist at the University of Mississippi who studies political violence, said what little is publicly known about Crooks meshes with research suggesting that attacks are more likely under certain conditions, such as when individuals “hone their violent skills.” The gunman was a member of the Clairton Sportsmen’s Club, a shooting club in Clairton, Pa., which through an attorney has condemned the attack as a “senseless act of violence.”

With so few clues, “we might never know what exactly triggered Crooks to shoot at Donald Trump,” Velitchkova said in an emailed response to questions.

“Nothing in Crooks’s reported profile seems out of the ordinary: no extremist ideology, no mental health issues, no struggles at school, no family issues,” she said. “Instead, Crooks appears to have been a ‘normal’ young man in today’s America.”

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Perry Stein contributed to this report.