By Cory Franklin
9 Augustth2024
Just a few inches can irrevocably change the course of history. Perhaps the ultimate example of this is when 20-year-old would-be assassin Thomas Michael Crooks narrowly missed Donald Trump on television in Butler, Pennsylvania in July. America should be deeply grateful that just a few inches saved the country, and not in a “we love Donald Trump and we still have the big man” kind of way – the gratitude should be there whether you think Donald Trump is the savior or the devil incarnate. Either way, the United States narrowly escaped a terrible fate.
Consider this: Given the Secret Service’s utter inability to protect Trump, a televised killing by millions of people – without the Zapruder film – would have guaranteed conspiracy theories about government collusion for decades. The country would have been more divided than at any time since the Civil War.
It seems inconceivable that any agency, particularly the Secret Service, could be so inept. The roof of the building where the shooter was located was considered to be outside the target area, even though it was clearly within firing range and offered a clear view of the target. Allegedly because of the slope of the building’s roof, no agent was sent to the roof, even though agents were on other sloped roofs. There were local police officers in the building when the shooter scaled the wall to the roof. The Secret Service, which was ultimately responsible, left the details of the actual crime scene to the local police, then blamed them after the fact.
Crooks sent a drone over the area, presumably to find the best firing vantage point. An hour before the shooting, he scouted the area with a rangefinder and was identified as a potential threat. The Secret Service was aware of his presence, a photo of him circulated, but a subsequent ground search found him missing. Several people actually saw the shooter with a gun as he crawled across the roof and notified police at least a minute and a half before he began shooting. Despite the obvious threat, no one from the Secret Service took the initiative to get Trump off the stage. He began speaking as the elusive shooter aimed his weapon – while police snipers watched and waited. All of this is the result of incompetence.
Simply put, a young man with murderous intent who was reportedly a mediocre shot in high school was able to smuggle a gun in plain sight, evade professional law enforcement and the Secret Service for a significant amount of time, and fire eight shots. Trump narrowly escaped the fatal shot by turning his head at the last minute. He was grazed, another man was killed, and two more were injured before the Secret Service, with utter ruthlessness, immediately “silenced” the shooter.
It would be charitable to describe the Secret Service’s mistakes as amateurish. Perhaps the last straw was the agency director’s admission that they had no radio recordings of the incident. But she refused to fall on her sword, and it was only the threat of impeachment that forced her to resign in a Biden-like manner (I won’t, I won’t, I won’t, OK, I will). Just another case of irresponsibility by the US government.
But now imagine a counter-narrative – an alternate story – that came just a hair’s breadth from becoming reality. Trump doesn’t turn his head at the last moment and is assassinated in front of millions. Following the pattern of the JFK assassination, for which there was far less incriminating evidence than here, millions would believe that a conspiracy involving the government took place.
If Trump had been killed, at least half the country would never have believed that the Secret Service could be so incompetent as to let a young boy with a rifle get so close and shoot unhindered. Those people, and perhaps millions more, would be convinced that the Secret Service was involved in the assassination.
From this they naturally conclude that the political party responsible – in this case the Democrats – planned, ordered or simply approved the operation to eliminate this troublesome candidate in America.
It is difficult to imagine the damage this would do to the social fabric of the country. It is entirely possible that there would be outbreaks of violence. Lest this sound impossible: feminist author and journalist Naomi Wolf, who is not averse to spreading conspiracy theories, has already written that she believes the Secret Service, under the auspices of the president’s wife, was involved in the assassination. Wolf didn’t even need the shooter to successfully substantiate her accusation. As far-fetched as that may sound today, if millions had witnessed Trump being hit in the head by a bullet, it wouldn’t sound so unlikely.
And of course, in any successful conspiracy, the killer cannot be allowed to live — the conspiracy requires that he be killed. Silencing him is essential. Compare the assassination of JFK to the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan. The reason there are so many conspiracy theories surrounding JFK is that Lee Harvey Oswald was killed by Jack Ruby. Had Oswald survived and made it to trial, most of the questions about what happened would have been answered and there would be fewer conspiracy theories today. (This was another example of history being altered by a tiny fraction of the time-space continuum. Ruby, who had no idea where Oswald was before shooting him, had less than two minutes to coincidentally show up at exactly the right spot. If Ruby’s errand at a nearby Western Union had been delayed by even those two minutes, Oswald would have been safely transported out of prison.)
When John Hinckley shot Ronald Reagan in 1981, the circumstances were remarkably similar to the recent Trump case. A mentally disturbed young man was able to approach his target, fired three shots, and narrowly missed the president. At the time, the newly elected Reagan was a polarizing partisan figure and the world situation was unstable; assassination was not a wild fantasy. But the truth was more prosaic and apolitical: the would-be assassin was neither a foreign actor nor a domestic terrorist; it was 25-year-old John Hinckley who wanted to impress actress Jodie Foster. This sounds unbelievable if you don’t know the facts.
Why were there no major conspiracy theories? Simply because the Secret Service captured Hinckley alive and the facts quickly came to light.
Despite knowing Crooks’ whereabouts and weapon during the Trump assassination attempt, the Secret Service did not kill him until after he shot Trump. A conspiracy theorist would point out how convenient it was for the Secret Service to kill the gunman only after the successful assassination attempt—and not before, when he clearly had the chance.
All in all, we know that there was no conspiracy in the attempted assassination of Trump. The government was just a bungler, and the most likely motive at this point is that Thomas Michael Crooks was a disturbed young man who probably wanted to commit a spectacular crime, knowing full well that he could not escape and would die by “suicide by cop.”
It is much easier to draw these conclusions dispassionately because a bullet missed the fatal end by a hair’s breadth. Fortune spared America from riots and a possible uprising by people who would suspect a conspiracy after their candidate was assassinated. Regardless of political persuasion, Americans should be thankful that if it had not been for a few inches, history could have been very different. For now it is nothing more than a thought experiment.
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Cory Franklin was the chief of the medical intensive care unit at Cook County Hospital in Chicago for over 25 years. He is the opinion editor of the Chicago Tribune and writes freelance medical and non-medical articles. His work has also appeared in the New York Times, Jerusalem Post, Chicago Sun-Times, New York Post, Guardian, Washington Post, and excerpted in the New York Review of Books. Cory was also Harrison Ford’s technical advisor and one of the models for the character Ford played in the 1993 film The Fugitive. His YouTube podcast, Rememberingthepassed, has had 900,000 views to date. He published Chicago Flashbulbs in 2013, Cook County ICU: 30 Years of Unforgettable Patients and Odd Cases in 2015, and most recently co-authored A Guide to Writing College Admission Essays: Practical Advice for Students and Parents in 2021. Dr. Franklin is the author of the forthcoming book “The COVID Diaries 2020-2024: Anatomy of a Contagion As It Happened.”
