We Don't Know What We Want Except To Kill

We used to think "radical centrists" was a joke, but it turns out they're real, and they have guns.

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After both of Trump’s assassination attempts, the culture war grifters were practically salivating to do what they do after virtually every public act of gun violence nowadays, assuming they acknowledge them at all: figure out Which Side the gunman belonged to. Was he trans? Did he drive a Dodge Ram with a Punisher skull sticker on it? Which of the potential killer’s cultural signifiers would best prove that I was right all along?

Given the incentives, it’s almost a miracle that both would-be assassins were so politically unquantifiable — such that no one has been able to convincingly pin one or the other to a particular binary. Thomas Crooks, the barely-out-of-high-school kid who shot off a tiny crumb of Trump’s ear and killed a Trump rally audience member in Pennsylvania, was a registered Republican, but who had also donated to Act Blue (a PAC that raises money for Democrats). Classmates described him as conservative, a loner who wore hunting clothes to school. His cell phone included searches for Trump and Biden, as well as the director the FBI, Merrick Garland, and members of the British royal family. Some of his classmates said he was bullied, others that he wasn’t, though most agreed that he was more or less a depressive loner.

Seems like he kind of just wanted to kill someone important. Probably in order to feel important himself. But he’s dead now so he won’t ever get to explain it to us (assuming he even could, or that we’d believe him, if he even was alive). I will probably forget his name before I finish writing this post.

Then there was Ryan Routh. Two days after Trump railed against immigrants onstage in Tucson — “the Venezuelans have big AK-47 supremes, it’s a supreme; where the hell do they get these guns?” — Routh (a natural-born American) stuck what was initially reported to be “an AK-47-style rifle” (it was actually an SKS, for you gun pedants out there) through a fence at Trump International Golf Course in West Palm Beach. Secret Service agents fired at him and he fled in a Nissan SUV with stolen license plates before eventually being identified and apprehended.

Routh, who was captured alive, leaves behind a far more extensive media footprint than Crooks. From receiving a “law enforcement Oscar” for chasing down a rape suspect in 1991 when he was 25, to trying to build a skate park for his son in 2004, to railing against graffiti in a letter to the editor in 1995, Routh was clearly a guy who wrote a LOT of letters to the editor. And he seemed to have a preternatural ability to just be milling around in places that reporters went to interview bystanders. He also had a history of traffic stops, passing bad checks, and tax evasion, and in 2002 got into a standoff with police after he fled a traffic stop and was convicted of possessing illegal explosives. There were more than a 100 criminal counts against him in North Carolina alone. Later he moved to Hawaii, where he wrote even more letters to editors, and later became obsessed with the war in Ukraine. He even went there to try to recruit troops to fight against Russia. He was interviewed plenty of times about that.

Politically, he’s even more baffling. Routh voted for Trump in 2016, but had turned against him by 2020, variously expressing support for Bernie Sanders, but also Vivek Ramaswamy, Nikki Haley, and Tulsi Gabbard; as well as donating to Gabbard, Andrew Yang, Elizabeth Warren, Beto O’Rourke and Tom Steyer. He wrote a book. It focused largely on Ukraine, but also expressed anger at Trump for pulling out of the Iran deal. He seems about as politically confused and contradictory as one might expect of someone who had donated to Andrew Yang. Above all, Ryan Routh seems like a crazy guy, with multiple police standoffs and terrorism-related incidents on his record who was nonetheless free to keep doing weird shit until he finally did something weird enough to get him locked up for an extended period of time.

I used to think Donald Trump was the ideal embodiment of all the worst stereotypes other countries have about Americans: tacky, obsessed with money, rich but without taste, loud but inarticulate, essentially impervious to high culture, functionally illiterate, incapable of enjoying food, sex, nature, music, poetry, etc. and basically transactional to the core, a bombastic, self-obsessed human abacus. So many things about him feel like a reaction, a symptom of a disease or of a collective moral failing.

We’re now far enough along in the Donald Trump political project to study the reactions to him. And if Donald Trump is a cruel caricature of all of Americans’ worst qualities, the people who try to kill him seem like fitting avatars for the undecided voter.

What do we want? Lots of stuff! Contradictory stuff! Stuff that will make us feel important! We love Trump! We want to kill Trump!

We want our collection of bespoke bugaboos exacerbated by algorithmically delivered video infotainment and the death of mass media addressed by someone! Above all, we’ve been driven mostly insane in a place without a functioning mental health apparatus (to say nothing of a physical health apparatus). And we’ve been conditioned to believe that the best way to solve problems is with bombs and guns. We are confused yet zealous. We figure we must be important though we’re not sure why. We don’t know what we want except to kill.