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By Joshua Rhett Miller
Senior Reporter
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The would-be assassin who shot at former President Donald Trump fits the mold of prior presidential killers throughout a bloody U.S. history, experts told Newsweek.
While the motive behind Thomas Matthew Crooks' attack remains unclear, presidential historians said they see similarities within the 20-year-old Pennsylvania man and previous gunmen who killed or tried to assassinate sitting or former presidents.
Matt Dallek, a professor of political management at George Washington University, said most of the presidential perpetrators were mentally ill people who had easy access to firearms and encountered lapses in security.
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"So, it's hard to discern a pattern that applies to each instance—there's always some outliers—but I think there's some commonalities at least to most of them," Dallek said. "Many of them—not all—but a number of them had absorbed ideas, you know, many a deep-set hatred of government or elites or what they saw as the 'rich and powerful.'"
Others at the chaotic epicenter of plots to kill 11 presidents—dating to the botched shooting of President Andrew Jackson nearly 200 years ago—believed the commander-in-chief represented a threat to democracy or the U.S. Constitution, Dallek said.
Richard Lawrence, an unemployed house painter originally from England, tried to kill Jackson on January 30, 1835, but his two guns jammed, allowing bystanders to cut short the first known attempt to kill a U.S. president.
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Lawrence, who moved to Washington decades earlier, later started to believe he was an heir to the British throne, leaving only "King Andrew" standing in his way, according to the Senate Historical Office. He was judged insane and was kept in various asylums for the rest of his life.
Other would-be presidential assassins, including John Hinckley Jr., who tried to kill President Ronald Reagan in 1981, were compelled to act in part by "celebrity," Dallek said.
"Not as in famous, like go onto a reality TV show, but I think there was something in the culture of celebrating almost or paying attention to people who had done really horrible things," he said. "It allows someone who is mentally ill who feels powerless to become instantly recognizable the world over....I think that seems to be an element in some of these cases."
Hinckley, now 69, was found not guilty by reason of insanity and spent decades under psychiatric care until June 2022 when a federal judge ruled he was no longer a danger to himself or others.
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Dallek said presidential assassins were more frequently "reflections" of the current political landscape.
"They're drawing on language and ideas that they've picked up from somewhere that then leads them to want to kill a president," he said.
As investigators probe what motivated Crooks to act, another commonality between him and prior presidential attackers is the "safe assumption" he was mentally ill, Dallek said.
"He was 20 years old and had access to an AR-15—a very high-powered rifle," the historian said. "A lot of people who took shots or threatened the president should never have come within a hundred feet of a firearm and yet they had very powerful weapons. And in many cases, legally acquired. So, the country being awash in guns is absolutely a factor in many of these assassination attempts."
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Crooks' father, Matthew Crooks, reportedly bought the rifle used in Saturday's attack in 2013 at an outdoors chain in West Mifflin, Pennsylvania. Repeated attempts to reach the 53-year-old licensed counselor and his relatives were unsuccessful.
Larry Cook, an author and presidential historian, said Crooks' failed attempt to kill Trump marked the 11th U.S. president targeted by an assassin. Four presidents—Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield, William McKinley and John F. Kennedy—have been killed.
"Before Saturday, the number was 10," Cook told Newsweek. "We're all witnessing history at this point. This is something that your kids and your grandkids, and their kids and their grandkids, are going to hear about if they hear anything about presidential history."
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Cook said it's difficult to distinguish whether the latest assassination attempt is the product of an extremely polarized landscape or the actions of a disturbed individual with a high-powered weapon.
"It's somewhere in the middle," he said. "Obviously, it takes a deranged individual to do this no matter what's going on in the country. Who knows how much this particular person was influenced.
"Unless you're living in a bubble, you've got to be influenced by politics in some way if you watch TV, go on social media or on your phone. So, you've got to think this person was probably exposed at least to all the rhetoric from both sides and everything that's going on in this country."
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