The Assassin Amid the Undesirables

On the abiding despair of the failed Trump assassin’s post-COVID, private equity–looted nursing home

BY MAUREEN TKACIK JULY 18, 2024

It is hard to know why Thomas Crooks, a nerdy community college student with a 3.8 GPA six weeks away from starting college at Robert Morris University, threw his life away all for a failed attempt to blow off the head of Donald J. Trump.

He was a social outcast, but of a degree that recalls 1980s teen movies. He hadn’t dropped out from school or society. He seemed like a “good sport,” dutifully boasting on camera about his “ten-inch penis” for some classmate’s idea of a prank. He attended one of those anachronistic schools where the guidance counselor knows who sits with whom in the cafeteria and the beloved football coach is also the beloved AP economics teacher and the star of a BlackRock commercial. He met weekly with a community college math nerd book club. Female acquaintances described him as “sweet,” and everyone agreed he was “intelligent.”

He had yet to be identified as a threat by that confluence of the school district, the health care system, and the carceral state that typically—and inevitably, ineffectually—flags the sort of troubled young men who shoot up schools. Which is, of course, the type of troubled young man he now appears in hindsight to probably have been.

What’s noteworthy, then, is the extent to which Crooks has spent his life veritably ensconced in that nexus of the health care system and the carceral state, charged with processing troubled and/or otherwise unwanted souls. His parents are both certified behavioral health counselors, his father for the psychiatric bureaucracy of the Western Pennsylvania health care monopoly UPMC; online reviews suggest it is, like pretty much every provider of mental health care, overburdened and short-staffed. One comment reads, “This place doesn’t care if anybody dies on their hands as long as they get paid.”

https://prospect.org/health/2024-07-18-assassin-amid-undesirables-trump-shooter/