COME FOR THE CONSPIRATORIALISM, STAY FOR THE TRUMPIAN SELF-SOOTHING

I'm sure you're aware of this Truth Social message from President Trump:

As John Light of Talking Points memo notes, even Trump's fellow Republicans don't think there's anything pointing to a conspiracy in the newly revealed information about Thomas Crooks, the shooter in Butler, Pennsylvania, on July 13, 2024:

The New York Post reported yesterday that “a trove of documents” [was] provided by law enforcement to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-IA) as part of his investigation into the assassination attempt. But the documents sound like they simply add details to what we already knew: Crooks was really into guns, and didn’t talk to people much.

Grassley himself seemed to tell NBC yesterday that there wasn’t new information about a plot. “We don’t know anything about the motivation [of] why [Crooks] wanted to kill Trump,” he said.

FBI Director Kash Patel yesterday also seemed to throw cold water on the idea of any plot. “We found no evidence that [Crooks] was literally even speaking to any other human being other than his parents who he resided with,” he told the Senate Judiciary Committee.

And in July of last year, Trump sounded as if he was satisifed with the information on Crooks that he'd received from the FBI:

TRUMP BLASTS "BIGGEST SCANDAL IN U.S. HISTORY"

“Obama was seditious… trying to lead a coup… biggest scandal in the history of our country” — @POTUS responds to @brianglenntv on Thomas Crooks & Biden’s auto pen. pic.twitter.com/a2FmlADR7p

— Real America's Voice (RAV) (@RealAmVoice) July 22, 2025

Well, they've reported to me and they've told me things, and they really say they haven't found anything that was abnormal.... They went into him in great detail. They gave me the whole thing. And what can I do? They say that it was just a nut job that was looking to do this. And I spoke with the FBI, the new FBI. I spoke to the FBI. If it was the old FBI, I wouldn't have believed a thing they said because the old FBI under Comey was crooked as hell.

But now Trump says the news information points to a Democratic conspiracy.

And of course he would want to believe that, for an obvious reason: If Democrats wanted him "out of the Election," that means they thought he was a uniquely popular candidate, the candidate they'd have the hardest time beating.

But he wasn't. The runner-up in the 2024 primaries, Nikki Haley, would have been harder for Democrats to beat than Trump, as Politico noted in December 2023:

Polls clearly suggest Haley is a stronger general-election candidate than Trump, with Haley leading Biden by 4 points in the latest RealClearPolitics averages while Trump leads the president by 2 points and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis leads by 1 point. Some polls even show Haley with gaudy, double-digit leads over Biden — including a Wall Street Journal poll released hours before this column published that showed her a stunning 17 points ahead of Biden (Trump led the president by 4).

It's not clear who would have been the Republican nominee if Trump had died that day. Two days after the shooting, Trump announced that J.D. Vance would be his running mate, a choice he'd presumably made before the Butler rally. (On July 11, 2024, Axios reported that Donald Trump Jr., who's close to Vance, was scheduled to speak before the VP nominee at the upcoming Republican convention, leading to speculation that Vance was his father's pick.) In any case, the GOP nominee would have entered the race with a fair amount of goodwill after a Trump assassination, and with none of Trump's baggage. Whether it was Haley, Vance, or someone else, I think the Republican nominee would have been tough to beat under those circumstances.

If you think Vance would have been too uncharismatic to win, remember that the uncharismatic Lyndon Johnson won the Democrats' last genuine landslide in 1964 as the man who rose to the presidency in the wake of John F. Kennedy's assassination.

But Trump needs to believe he was uniquely electable among Republicans, so of course he says the shooting was a Democratic plot.


(Note: I'm choosing not to go down the conspiracy rabbit hole regarding what happened in Butler. Crooks shot three people, one of them fatally. If this was a fake assassination attempt, it was a fake using real bullets.)