Trump shooter’s final thoughts as he pulled the trigger

Graham Greene would have written a novel on this unanswerable question. Did Thomas Crooks die believing he had killed Donald Trump?

As the first shot whizzed by, Trump grabbed his ear, immediately saw blood on his hands, and fell to the ground. And in the 26 seconds between Crooks’ first shot at the former president and the moment the Secret Service took aim and killed him, it’s conceivable that Crooks thought his mission was accomplished.

A week after the attempted assassination and hundreds of interviews later, no motive for the shooting has emerged. Searches of police computers and phones suggest Crooks may have simply been looking for a high-profile target while scrolling through news stories about President Biden, Attorney General Merrick Garland and former President Trump.

His classmates described him as a classic loner who kept a low profile and sat alone at school lunches. His motive, like several other school shooters, seemed to have been in part to gain notoriety.

As The Daily Beast reported last week, one of the drives assassins have in common is a desire for fame. They are also usually white and act alone. Crooks was 20. Three of the four previous assassins of U.S. presidents were also in their 20s. Stage actor John Wilkes Booth was 26 when he shot President Abraham Lincoln in 1865. Anarchist Leon Czolgosz was 28 when he killed President William McKinley in 1901. And U.S. Marine veteran Lee Harvey Oswald was 24 when he assassinated President John F. Kennedy in Dallas in 1963.

And yet very little was known about them until the Secret Service released the Exceptional Case Study Project in 1999. After studying 83 assassins and attackers, authors Robert Fein and Bryan Vossekuil concluded: “There are no accurate descriptive or psychological profiles of assassins.”

There is no evidence that Crooks’ shooting was politically motivated. He was a registered Republican but had once donated $15 to Act Blue. His mother, like his father, is a consultant and a registered Democrat. Crooks Sr. and Thomas’ older sister are libertarians.

However, we do know that he carefully planned the shooting. On Friday, the day before the rally, he spent much of the day at the shooting range. On Saturday, he went to Home Depot at 9:30 a.m. to buy a ladder, and in the afternoon he bought 50 rounds of ammunition. According to Fox News, investigators said he drove to the rally in his Hyundai Sonata. He left behind two simple explosive devices, a bulletproof vest, and a drone he may have used earlier in the day.

As he lay on the roof of the warehouse, focusing the scope and pulling the trigger of his father’s rifle, he saw Trump’s immediate reaction. He had probably spent hours imagining this exact moment. Trump’s fall to the ground must have seemed like the cruel realization of his plan.

He missed his target by half an inch. The intelligence service, trained for such eventualities, acted with great precision. But in those final moments of his life, amid the shouting and chaos, did Crooks believe he had succeeded? The thought is terrifying and a grim testament to the depth of his delusions.

As we grapple with the aftermath, the question remains a nagging footnote: Did Thomas Crooks breathe his last with the conviction that he had changed the course of history?

Joanna Coles is Chief Content Officer of The Daily Beast and former Chief Content Officer of Hearst Magazines.