One Month After Butler

One month ago today, a bullet, one of eight fired by a 20-year-old assassin, hit the ear of Donald Trump and nearly turned our national life upside down. Stunningly, what we don’t know about this shattering incident continues to outpace what we do know.

The misinformation moguls at Google set the tone for this. From the very beginning, the search engine’s algorithms made it difficult to learn more about the attack. No autofill for the obvious search terms. Searches that returned information about the (tragically many) assassination attempts in U.S. history, but not the assault on Trump.

Almost immediately, folks on the left, who regularly accuse us of “conspiracy theories,” questioned whether the shooting was real or staged by the MAGA crowd. One in three Biden supporters admitted to thinking this. Some voices absurdly chimed in that Trump supposedly had a ketchup packet in his collar that he allegedly “popped” while Secret Service agents shielded him on the floor of the stage.

This kind of noise on the Internet was seriously amplified when FBI director Wray volunteered the view on July 24 that Trump may have been struck by shrapnel and not a bullet. This forced the FBI to promptly backtrack and clarify that Trump was indeed struck by a bullet and that shrapnel is, in fact, part of a bullet.

We are a month out from the near tragedy in Butler, and we know virtually nothing more about the shooter, Thomas Matthew Crooks, or how such a Keystone Cops hash was made of presidential-level security that morning.

Sen. Chuck Grassley’s office now reports obtaining a copy of the logbook of the range where Crooks practiced target shooting at a distance of 200 yards. Crooks had practiced there 43 times in the past year, and the log shows both the FBI and the Secret Service practiced there as well. Probably a coincidence. But don’t hold your breath for a “mainstream media” reporter to win a Pulitzer Prize for ferreting out the full truth.

Unfortunately, we’ve seen a pattern of the FBI and other agencies grooming or otherwise exploiting unstable people, only to arrest them later when they do something violent.

Maybe the hardest lesson of our times is how little change follows these dramatic events. In the aftermath of Butler, a cacophony of voices, many of them people who have been screaming that Trump is “Hitler” and a threat to our democracy, suddenly called for “toning down” the rhetoric.

But bursts of reason like this (there was a brief flurry of it after a deranged devotee of Bernie Sanders gravely wounded Rep. Steve Scalise and shot at 20 other GOP House members in 2017) never seem to last long. Even conservative Fox News hosts join in, urging Trump to stick to policy arguments, which, of course, he does when he describes violence in our streets, open borders, and our declining economy.

But the left can’t help themselves. Joe Biden had plenty of time to rest on the beach and plan his return to the public eye for an interview with CBS News’ Bob Costa, who is no flamethrower. What did the “toned-down” Biden do? He told Costa:

“Every other time the Ku Klux Klan has been involved, they wore hoods so they’re not identified . . . Under his [Trump’s] presidency, they came out of those woods with no hoods, knowing they had an ally. That’s how I read it. They knew they had an ally in the White House. And he stepped up for them.”

This is toning it down? This is avoiding blunt invitations to gunmen? Tim Walz for his part added to the cacophony immediately in his stump speech, taunting Trump, saying of a prospective Harris-Trump debate, “And how often in the world do you make that bastard wake up afterwards and know that a Black woman kicked his a**, sent him on the road?” Imagine the fury if a GOP candidate had said something like this.

The Harris campaign followed up immediately with debunked claims that President Trump had praised neo-Nazis in Charlottesville as “very fine people.” Even the liberal Snopes fact-check machine dismissed that one.

The Democrats’ ticket at this point is a cynical enterprise, counting on our national memory getting ever shorter and our media aiding the amnesia. Their candidates are new, their policies are reinvented, but their rhetorical venom is visceral and unchanged. As we stagger on, still in the dark about many aspects of the nightmare in Butler, they are counting on unaccountability to carry the day.