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~~The $15 donation was another guy with the same name. This guy was 17 at the time.~~
Snopes sez: false https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-shooter-donation/
I just want to chime in and say thank you for editing your post after finding new information. If everyone in the world was like you, this place would suck a lot less.
Not only editing but leaving the old info so people don't get confused, that's awesome behaviour.
He has the same name as a guy who donated to ActBlue?! DEM
The FEC filing for the donation matches the shooters address: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-shooter-donation
Dem too.
/s
Snopes now says true
True that it's the same person.
Which would mean false for them being different people
Everything to me just points to this being a very confused and disaffected kid who wanted to do something memorable with his life. I genuinely don't think there was much consideration beyond that. He was 20 years old, were your political beliefs as concrete and nuanced when you were that age as they are today?
I was 19 for 9/11. It solidified where I stood pretty well. I'd say 20 year olds today could easily be just as galvanized, especially with the way social media has changed things since then.
Hey we're the same age! I remember when 9/11 happened and the subsequent invasion of Afghanistan, that I didn't really know the main differences of news sources and fully understand how they leaned one way or another. I remember watching Fox News at the time, but didn't really realize that it was blatant propaganda. It wasn't until I started looking into other news sources and then looked into media biases that I started to realize just how fucked up Fox News is.
So I don't really expect most 19 or 20 year olds to really know what's trustworthy and what's not.
He's the prototypical American lone wolf shooter, it's not complicated
Everything to me just points to this being a very confused and disaffected kid who wanted to do something memorable with his life.
Used to be, a guy like this would simply shoot up a school. But now that he's shooting at our Dear Leader, its time to get serious about ~~gun control~~ ~~mental health~~ ~~violent political rhetoric~~ Tankies.
were your political beliefs as concrete and nuanced when you were that age as they are today
…yeah. To be fair, I'm 22, but I've been in the board of a local political party for over 3 years now. You could maybe make that argument for 16, but honestly, even then I was at political demonstrations.
I'd argue that your experience is an exception and not the rule. Most teenagers aren't nearly so politically involved. And at 29, I'm a very different person than when I was 20.
Yep, this is it. Before, he was an awkward kid from a backward place with no friends and no prospects. Now, his name is forever associated with Donald Trump.
Yes
It IS weird though that he tried to shoot the Rep candidate and I can't really see why, yet. We will probably hear a lot of explanations for this and I'd be curious about yours.
So far I have heard rumours about a possible inside job/secret service involvement as an explanation, because they should have been aware of him. Might be, but I personally haven't seen anything too convincing to verify or falsify this.
Another one I could see is that he wanted to vote Republican but at some point realized that Trump sucks ass to put it mildly. So he tried to somehow push the Rep party to at least get back in touch with the idea of sanity by killing him?
Other than that... make Trump a martyr somehow? Have a plot to blame it on the Dems? Mental issues?
I feel like he was unwell, and trying to apply reason to his motives will be a fool's errand.
Just because someone is unwell doesn't mean that reason can't be applied to his motives. Most mental illnesses still follow some (twisted and perverse) logic
There are two explanations which I don't find ludicrous, if you assume the shooter to be far right:
He was a Qanoner who bought the "we've gotta hunt the pedophiles" but didn't develop the cognitive dissonance to also think "but that doesn't mean Trump obviously".
He was angry about Trump trying to distance himself from Project 2025 (even though that was merely rhetoric, but an angry and radical 20 years old may not understand that).
There could be a million reasons. It seems morbid speculating.
This is quite a significant incident in the middle of an important election campaign. While some reasons for the attempt may seem insignificant (e.g., mental illness), others could turn out to be quite important moving forward (e.g., involvement of secret service, faked attempt by Trump's team etc.). Any evidence for or against any of these could have political implications and effects on the election results.
The amount of information available to the public right now is very little. More focus should be put on how the secret service let this happen.
There are three theories
Trump had people hire him to pretend to assassinate him, and he went along with it thinking it'd boost Trump's ratings (Kinda dumb and conspiratorial)
He wasn't aiming for Trump, but someone in the crowd, and Trump was hit by mistake (Given that he doesn't aim for center of mass, this makes sense)
He wanted to kill Trump, fearing he wasn't Right Leaning enough (There are already people bashing Vance not for being racist, but for not being racist enough)
Also wasn't the payment to the Biden campaign found to actually be someone else with a similar name?
Also wasn't the payment to the Biden campaign found to actually be someone else with a similar name?
The donation was to ActBlue not Biden and the FEC filing was his name at the house he lived at. It's unlikely it was someone else unless he was named for his grandpa or something and he lived with them
You can view the FEC filings yourself by going to the FEC website and search his name and zip code in the individual contribution search.
Suicide by cop.
Trump is a fascist and some small portion of Republicans still don't support fascists.
I've seen actblue ask for money for literally everything. Likely they were advertising for something conservative.
There was a “lifehack” going around a while back about making it so if you failed you had to donate to something you don’t like to motivate yourself.
This is getting weirder and weirder.
Summary since I haven't seen it in the comments yet: they cracked his phone. There was some sort of high level briefing and some info got leaked:
He either had or just googled some kind of depressive disorder (could potentially relate to motive if he was bipolar and having a manic episode or something).
He had pictures saved of the schedules for both Trump and Biden's national convention appearances. So he could have been trying to go after both of them, potentially.
Usually after 18 is when most bipolar people have their first major episode. There's really no access to mental healthcare for someone like him. You're lucky if you can see a p-doc for ten minutes. Usually you'll see a primary care physician first and there's a good chance that they're going to prescribe you antidepressants, which is like throwing gas on the fire. It takes months or years of trying different medications to find a combo that works for you and that requires a support system of people who can tell how you're doing and you have to have a willingness to be miserable for an indefinate period of time. Certain meds will make you feel better for a month or two and then they'll gradually stop working. People get frustrated and stop taking medication because it makes them feel like shit. Dropping meds completely is the worst thing, it's like dumping a 100 lb backpack that you've been carrying for months. You feel like you can jump ten feet in the air, nobody can stop you.
He had pictures saved of the schedules for both Trump and Biden’s national convention appearances. So he could have been trying to go after both of them, potentially.
That's the kind of bipartisanship that I can support.
Fash don't care about the truth. It's an ideology based entirely on lies.