The Assassination Attempt in My Backyard
A shooter tried to kill Donald Trump but murdered someone in my community instead. Are we taking this political violence seriously?
This past week, Bethel Park resident Thomas Matthew Crooks stationed himself with a gun on top of a roof in Butler, Pennsylvania and tried to kill former President Donald Trump. This was a tragic moment for the country, but it hit me uniquely. Personally.
When I saw “a fairground in Butler, Pennsylvania” in the news I thought: “is everyone in my life okay?” I grew up 30 minutes from Butler. My family operates businesses in Butler. I spent swampy summers going to those very fairgrounds, looking at prized pigs and playing carnival games. I also thought, “Are any of the influencers I know from MAGA world and my doctoral research there? Are they okay?” My humanity and the humanity of others was the first thing that occurred to me.
It turned out that plenty of folks I grew up with or who work with my family were at the rally. Most tragically, my family was connected to Corey Comperatore, the man who was killed by Crooks. I can’t say we were even acquaintances, so much as people inhabiting the same community ritual spaces, recognizing each others faces. Corey spent Friday evenings at our family dirt car race track selling 50/50 raffle tickets for the fire station where he volunteered. The speedway hosted his candlelit vigil this past week (if you’d like to watch it, see Dirt.TV, a car racing streaming platform we operate).
As I spent the week doing rapid response rumor research for my new job (unaffiliated with this Substack), I kept checking in with folks back home. The resounding feedback I got from everyone across the political spectrum was one of care, of concern: “We don’t want this violence here.”
This was different from the fringe groups’ messages or political frames I saw on the Internet. It made me ask, “Are we really taking the possibility and consequences of political violence seriously?”
Checking-In On People
I reached out to folks around my hometown community, trying to get a pulse on what they were feeling. I heard words like: bewildered, dumbfounded, terrified.
Meghann Campbell, a friend from middle school, shared her anxieties of living in a city still reeling from the Tree of Life synagogue shooting in 2018. She said, “With my kids one day going to school, I’m terrified that our political landscape on both sides is creating a reality that statistically could affect my children. It’s awful that I know to keep my eyes open and know where the random exits are throughout major stores and public places.” Pittsburgh has always felt like a close knit town, not like the kind of place where there is nationally-visible political violence. But here we are. Meghann reflected, “Now I personally know people who were at shootings or who knew people that were victims.”
Another family friend told me how her daughter and grandson had been standing next to the building where the shooter was stationed. Their own property is visible from the aerial photos of the fairgrounds. “Who would have thought that this would happen almost in our backyard?” She told me that in the aftermath of the shooting, Route 68 was shut down, pointing out that my uncle’s favorite ice cream shop had closed for the day.
I caught up with someone who works at the family dirt track where Corey Comperatore sold raffle tickets. He expressed he wasn’t so political, but had gone to the rally with a friend who watches a lot of Newsmax and Fox. Some minutes before the shooting, he snapped a photo (above) of the flag whipping on itself in strong wind. Was it an angel? he asked. The event left him bewildered, but also impressed by the bravery of the man who just got shot and yet was still asking “Let me get my shoes” — which the audience could hear from the live mic on the podium.
The death of someone in a small community reverberates fast and far. In Butler, everyone is kind of connected somehow — by family or business or public school. The mayor is a retired teacher, a Democrat in a Republican stronghold. The politics of Western PA don’t always paint some rosy portrait, but they do indicate a kind of functional pluralism that I haven’t found too often that inspires me. The vigil was somber, with a few hundred folks present. Friends, community members, and religious figures spoke, honoring the deceased even as the news cycle moved on. Extra security was hired and of course there was some anxiety if more violence would occur.
Mostly, everyone asked, Is this real? Is this really happening here?
Three Unserious Approaches to Political Violence
I spent the week trying to process everything going on, with feelings of sadness, anger, and resentment floating unmoored and undirected in my mind. As someone who has lived in countries with recent histories of political violence or war, I kept fixating on what struck me as three un-serious approaches to the threat of more political violence in America.
“It’s Only a Few:” Some folks tend to write off “lone-wolf” shooters or committed militia-men as some kind of anomaly. They say, “Well there are more of us than there are them.” The latter part is certainly true: most people just want peace. But this position can forget that most violent conflicts usually begin with just a few committed extremists… or even just someone broken enough to act on their own. Is our society so lonely, so unsatisfied, so chock-full-o-easy-weapons-and-anger that this stochastic violence indicates something irreparably broken, or just a freak accident? If we write off violence as isolated, we risk forgetting that it is a systemic problem. Easy access to guns are certainly part of this equation (as many gun safety adovcates immediately pointed out), but other variables are also front and center. In a democracy, it is our problem and the fault isn’t just “them.” We must take seriously that yes, political violence may only be perpetrated by a few. But they may be our neighbors. They are part of us.
“We have to prepare for civil war!” Then there are the folks I’ve heard recently who casually suggest “there is gonna be a civil war so I’m getting prepared.” Certainly we’ve all thought “civil war!?” at a certain point in the past few years, but have you prepped for it? I usually hear this civil war chatter through the grapevines of older men with their cell phones clipped to their belts, who have time and pensions to spend. Or I hear it from social media influencers who make money or fame via attention with salacious content. This conversation always strikes me as some kind of deluded anticipation for a Hollywood-style civil war, set to the tune of a WW2 movie — Wagner playing in the background. The idea that a Boomer with guns is going to reset the country with some kind of History Channel inspired militia strategy just feels incredibly unserious to me. It seems blind to the human cost of war — the trauma, the death, the material stakes — that we should not joke about. Why prepare for war, when you can try to prevent it? Why turn up the heat? And also, I have doubts that a real civil war will look like it does in the movies.
“Donald Trump is Hitler.” Finally, there are the media types and Democrats who wring their hands and make comparisons that Trump is Hitler or that he will bring about WW2-era fascism. There are certainly policies and positions that could take America down a path to illiberalism (celebrated by some) should Trump get elected — you can read about Project 2025 and decide for yourself. However, if you truly think that Trump is Hitler and respond as party leadership by continuing to put up an octogenerian who appears to be struggling with mental decline, are you taking this threat seriously? Creatively? Conversely, many on the Right would claim this rhetoric is also incendiary speech — I think about this a lot. When does “playing it safe” move from being an asset in leadership to its core failure?
The Odds, Not the Stakes
Politics is a betting game. Are you going to play the odds, how you probabilistically could win, or the stakes, what is really on the line?
In the days that followed the shooting, I watched the jubilant Republican National Convention on social media, with a different micro-influencer speaking in support of Trump every hour. The video of an Orthodox Jewish student who is suing Harvard for Anti-semitism hit my Jewish WhatsApp groups. In my pop-culture focused Instagram, I saw White pro-wrestler Hulk Hogan rip off his shirt to reveal “TRUMP VANCE 2024” and Black hip-hop artist Amber Rose speak. Both addressed their fandoms about their support for Trump. If you were a fan of something, or a part of some kind of identity group, you found some micro-influencer you knew who was celebrating Trump, giving you permission as well.
One-thousand miles away, President Joe Biden battles Covid, hidden from site as the press speculates whether or not he will step down.
For years, Biden has been seen as the “stop-gap” to the end of democracy by many on the left. Only a mature statesman with experience could unite us and save us. This was playing it safe. Obviously, this strategy worked at first. Biden had indicated he would one-term president during his 2020 campaign. For the most part, Biden’s presidency has benefited American manufacturing, infrastructure, and jobs — despite ongoing inflation, rising housing prices, and two devastating, expensive foreign conflicts. However, the “play the odds” strategy did not keep apace with the moving political terrain.
Simply put, it is hard to appear stronger than a man who emerges from a Secret Service scrum alive, fist aloft and bloodied, after an assassination attempt. Trump is almost comically lucky (as this X post details). Despite legal attempts to hold him accountable, even when he is found guilty of felonies, Trump wins a Supreme Court case that could potentially offer him immunity, gets a documents case dismissed, survives an assassination attempt, and manages to cement the Republican party as the party of MAGA in a convention fit for a movie. Trump is a man not just playing stakes, he might just be holding up the whole casino.
If Democrats really believed that democracy was at stake, is it wrong in thinking that this “playing it safe” with Biden was actually not playing what is indeed at stake? Playing the odds in a moment like this indicates a lack of imagination or simply just a lack of energy, organization, and will. Perhaps it is because the folks in power are too far away from the material consequences of failing. Perhaps it is because the main consequence the elites will face is just a loss of power. Perhaps it is as simple as they don’t know what to do either.
Again, we are left with us — back on the farm, the block, the town.
Moving Ahead
I will be writing more about this in the coming weeks as I talk to folks in my community, collecting stories and reflections about this disturbing event. I will continue to process this, helping you to overcome this “failure to communicate” by bringing in other personal and expert knowledge. I’m also eager to hear from academic experts on civil wars and de-escalation.
Mostly, I’m going to keep talking to everyone — across the political spectrum. I’m moving forward with a profound commitment to peaceful democracy and preventing more political violence. To me, it is no joke. I’m completely serious.
For me, this begins with remembering our humanity.
This has been updated to fix the typos that Substack failed to point out to me with little red squiggles.