A millimeter to the left, and Donald J. Trump would have been shot in the face and a former U.S. President would have been assassinated.
That’s the reality of it all because that was the intention of a 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks, a man from a community just one hour from downtown Wheeling. Not in New York City, or Chicago, or Los Angeles, but just up interstates 70 and 79. Just up by South Hills Village. In Bethel Park, a borough of more than 30,000 people where Peter’s Township and Mount Lebanon are nearby neighborhoods.
That’s right, this one is much closer to home than any of us likes to admit, and that’s because we enjoy believing those nasty, hateful, awful, and ugly tragedies “never happen around here.”
Instead, his right ear was injured by one of the five shots fired by Crooks, but one person (husband and father of two, Corey Comperatore) was killed and two were critically injured (now in stable condition) in an act of “political violence.” That’s the same term used to describe the killings of former presidents Abraham Lincoln, James A. Garfield, William McKinley, and John F. Kennedy, what took place with the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.
Political violence.
Like Kent State, the desegregation of public schools in Alabama, and yes folks, like the Civil War, and domestic terrorism. We don’t know Crook’s “Why” or everything about his preparation just yet, and we also don’t know how the gunman remained undetected by Secret Service until he took his clear shots.
What we do know is if Trump had not moved his head when he did, the former president would be a dead former president, and we also know Crooks was, truly, a child who believed his way was the right way to improve at least his world view.
Folks on both sides of the political aisle are now calling for a “toning down” of the rhetoric and dialing back the aggression, and that’s a very good idea right now. But what we need to take away from what took place just up the road near Pittsburgh is the fact Thomas Matthew Crooks appeared to have learned that, in politics, one should push it way across the line and worry about apologizing for it later.
Well, Crooks can’t do that, now can he?
