Thomas Matthew Crooks came within a hair’s breadth of assassinating Donald Trump when he opened fire with a semi-automatic AR-15 rifle at the Republican presidential candidate, who was speaking at a campaign rally of thousands in Butler, Pennsylvania, July 13. Firing multiple rounds, Crooks wounded Trump, killed one person who was trying to protect his family and wounded two others before he was shot dead by a Secret Service sniper.
Crooks launched his assault from a rooftop about 400 feet from where Trump was speaking, hitting him in his right ear. Former Buffalo Township volunteer fire chief Corey Comperatore was killed and David Dutch of New Kensington, and James Copenhaver of Moon Township, are in stable condition.
As Secret Service agents moved to get Trump away from further attack, with blood dripping from his ear, he insisted they give him a moment, and he punched his fist in the air to a roar of approval from the crowd.
The FBI and the media say Crooks’ “motivations remain unknown.” But what is indisputable is that he was trying to kill the former president. In addition to his rifle, his car was loaded with explosives.
This isn’t the first time the liberals’ fury has given birth to an attempted assassination. In 2017, James Hodgkinson, a campaign volunteer for Bernie Sanders, used a semi-automatic weapon to open fire on Republican congressmen as they played a baseball game in Washington. He severely wounded Rep. Steve Scalise and injured four others before the Capitol Police shot him.
The attempt on Trump came after over eight years of concerted efforts by Democrats, liberal press outlets, the middle-class left, late-night talk show hosts and more to portray Trump as a fascist and deadly danger to capitalist “democracy.” As the November election has come nearer, and as the Democratic incumbent Joseph Biden’s campaign has stumbled, this shrill tirade has grown more and more hysterical and violent.
In 2022 Biden declared that what he termed “MAGA-Republicans,” who number in the tens of millions, are “semi-fascists” who “threaten the very foundations of our republic.” Just a few days before the shooting, Biden said the Democrats’ campaign needs to “put Trump in a bullseye.” The shooting is a reflection of the deepening political crisis racking the U.S. capitalist rulers and their two-party setup. The Democrats in particular are beset by deep differences reflected in the recent debate over Biden’s candidacy.
What really drives their hysteria is growing concern over the wide working-class support for Trump. Despite what they claim, this doesn’t represent a turn to the “far right,” any more than does the vote for the European parliament and other recent elections. It reflects the fact workers are increasingly looking for a way to fight against the effects of the crises of capitalism that the employers and their government push on their backs. The rulers fear growing class struggle to come.
Ever since Trump ran for president in 2016, Democrats and the liberal media have engaged in a frenzy of anti-Trump hysteria. They set the FBI on him, organized two impeachment attempts, held star-chamber congressional hearings to smear him, and since 2020 they have gotten prosecutors to file a series of criminal and civil cases against him aimed at driving Trump out of the 2024 elections.
This is one of the reasons the Socialist Workers Party explains, “Defending and extending the freedoms protected by the U.S. Constitution is at the center of the class struggle today.” These are freedoms won in blood that are crucial for struggles today and to come. The SWP’s 2024 campaign of Rachele Fruit for president and Dennis Richter for vice president is finding greater interest as workers increasingly see none of the bosses’ candidates has anything to offer them.
This gives the SWP’s call for a break with the bosses’ parties and forging a party of labor to fight for political power real traction.
The Republicans, the other major bosses’ party, have no better moral standing or concern for the working class than the Democrats, but have benefited from the viciousness of the Democrats’ yearslong attacks on Trump. Their national nominating convention began two days after the former president was shot.
‘Stop the dictator at all costs’
Days before the assassination attempt, Vice President Kamala Harris claimed Trump “will be a dictator.” He will “round up peaceful protesters and throw them out of our country.” She said Trump “should never again have the chance to stand behind a microphone.”
In March Democratic Rep. Vincente Gonzalez decried growing support for Trump among Blacks, Latinos and other workers. “When you see ‘Latinos for Trump,’ to me it is like seeing ‘Jews for Hitler,’” he said.
The day after the shooting, the New York Times condemned the assassination attempt. At the same time, the front page of its Sunday Opinion section ran a page-long headline that said, “He FAILED the tests of leadership and BETRAYED America. Voters must REJECT him in November. Donald Trump is Unfit to Lead.” Inside, the editors rant on the dangers of a second Trump term over four pages.
Reuters ran a July 14 article headlined “After Trump shooting the presidential race will change dramatically. And possibly violently.” It berates Trump, blaming him and his campaign for being violent, and for “fortifying the sense of grievance and estrangement his supporters already feel toward the nation’s political class.” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was enraged when Axios reported a senior House Democrat complaining, “We’ve all resigned ourselves to a second Trump presidency,” Ocasio-Cortez urged the representative to “retire and make space for true leadership that refuses to resign themselves to fascism.”
Ocasio-Cortez, Bernie Sanders and others on the left of the Democratic Party, have denounced fellow party members who called on Biden to drop out of the race after his disastrous showing in the debate with Trump.
Sanders went so far as to write in an op-ed in the Times that Biden “has been the most effective president in the modern history of our country.” Then he went on to tell Biden the only way he can win is to adopt the left’s program hook, line and sinker.
Democrats’ attempts to trample on constitutional freedoms and use the courts to drive Trump out of the 2024 race are being dealt blows. A victory was scored when the U.S. Supreme Court held the presidency has immunity from prosecution for acts in the office’s official capacity.
Another step forward was the July 15 ruling by U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon dismissing the indictment of Trump by the Justice Department’s special counsel Jack Smith. Using the anti-working-class witch hunt Espionage Act, Smith had charged Trump with illegally holding onto some allegedly classified documents when he left office.
Cannon threw the case out because Attorney General Merrick Garland’s appointment of Smith was unconstitutional. It breaches “the role of Congress in the appointment of constitutional officers,” she wrote. Smith said he will appeal Cannon’s ruling.