“He was probably a pretty sick guy,” President Trump correctly concluded about his would-be assassin in a Sunday night “60 Minutes” interview on CBS about the Saturday night attack on the White House Correspondents’ Association annual gathering. “A man with a lot of problems,” the president added later in the interview.
“I wasn’t worried,” the president said. “I understand life. We live in a crazy world.”
“Look, you have sick people, and you have to mitigate the risk,” President Trump concluded. He’s right, of course. But how?
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President Trump also flashed some justifiable anger at the 20-minute mark in a 40-minute interview, when Norah O’Donnell repeated the slanders in the would-be assassin’s manifesto. There are so many excellent questions that could be asked in a 40-minute interview that this was an abuse of time that, while predictable, should trigger a shake-up at “60 Minutes.” It is not hard to interview the president in a responsible fashion.
The decision to quote a crazy person’s libel in front of that enormous audience is a massive failure of editorial judgment, and another incredible unforced error by legacy media that just cannot read the national room.
That decision ranks with former CNBC Chief Washington Correspondent John Harwood’s epic fail in a 2016 debate when he asked then-candidate Donald Trump whether his run for the White House was a “comic book version of a presidential campaign,” a dropping of the mask that may have ultimately forced Harwood to move to another network in 2019.
Many credentialed journalists seem to lose their professionalism when talking to Trump. It’s remarkable how they can’t resist trying to “score” a moment on him and use that time to, who knows, do something crazy like ask questions about the battle with Iran?
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The questions about the motives of assassins and would-be assassins and their “manifestos” do not interest me. It takes only a diseased mind and enough money to acquire a weapon to grasp at infamy after scratching out ramblings from a disfigured reality. What they write is of some interest, but not much. Lunatic scribbles are just clues to the origin of the psychosis.
What would be interesting — and does not appear to have appeared anywhere … yet — is a serious review of all the unbalanced-past-the-point-of-violence people. Where are they coming from, and what characteristics in their past do they share?
These are not “ordinary” criminals seeking money or using violence from impulse or because of a criminal enterprise. They are a small subcategory of the mentally ill, the vast majority of whom cannot function well in society, but exist on its margins, noticed only when their conditions leave victims in their wake.
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This subcategory is perhaps best classified as “statement” people, though the “statements” are incoherent.
From Columbine to this weekend’s third major attempt to kill President Donald Trump — and this time much of his Cabinet — there have been dozens of nightmarish plots to kill either large numbers of innocents who are strangers to the criminal or public figures, many but not all of them accompanied by “manifestos.” There have also been ambuscades where the shooters took their “agendas” to the grave and whose “motives” or self-proclaimed “agendas” are either unknowable or have not been released to the public.
There are enough murderers involved in their own heads, in some kind of macabre theater, that the question should have been answered by the FBI or some other serious students of violence years ago: What do they have in common? What happened to them to knock them off the ordinary highways of human development? Or, perhaps, what was missing from their lives? Gun control activists have their explanations, but they do not reach this category of killer or would-be killer.
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The second set of questions is what to do about the widespread mental illness that permeates society and spreads at the speed of the internet. “We are living in a different world with the internet than we had years ago, but even years ago it was pretty dangerous,” President Trump told “60 Minutes.”
“The internet, maybe more than anything else, has radicalized some people. It’s made them mentally sick,” the president said, returning to the general issue and not the specific ramblings of an unbalanced individual. He also praised the benefits of the new world before concluding: “It’s a different age. It’s a very different time.”
Joseph Loconte, author of the excellent “The War for Middle-earth: J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and the Gathering Storm, 1933-1945,” charts how two of the most widely read and influential writers of the last century lived through a dozen nightmare years. The stories of their experiences do not provide answers to our current dilemma, but they do provide some relevant observations.
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Both men were veterans of World War I, and Loconte had chronicled their experiences in that vast charnel house in a 2017 book, “A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War: How J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis Rediscovered Faith, Friendship, and Heroism in the Cataclysm of 1914-1918.” Loconte returned to the subject of the two men and their specific experiences in the prewar and war years of World War II in November of last year.
“Every age has its own outlook on the world, a mixture of clarity and blindness,” Loconte observes in “The War for Middle-earth.” “Yet the moral blindness of the twentieth century represented something new, something entirely novel: ideologies that threatened to destroy the foundations of civilized life.”
“Tolkien and Lewis believed that only an outlook rooted in the ancient truths could resist it,” Loconte continued before borrowing from Lewis. “The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books.”
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Loconte’s study of these men and their friends and their collective, incredible awareness of the approach of an eruption of world-shattering violence includes fascinating glimpses of life at Oxford and Cambridge in the war years, but its focus is on how two men of genius anticipated and then responded to the horror of the twisted and frothing declarations and practices of the killers who drenched those dozen years in the blood of millions.
In our recent history in America, there are so many strands of violence — much of it rooted in views of politics untethered to reality — that it is possible to find evidence for any theory you would like to claim. No theory accounts for them all or even most of them. But has anyone done pattern recognition based on their biographies?
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What are they doing, for example, at Quantico, where the FBI studies serial killers and other categories of crime at the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime? One “study” of “right-wing extremism” from the Center was removed from the Department of Justice’s website for unknown reasons, but it is still available online and does not reach the question of patterns in development.
Last year, the Center for Strategic and International Studies published a study of left-wing extremism by Daniel Byman and Riley McCabe that, while interesting, does not do the deep dive into the individuals who attempted or carried out the violence.
The tempting, all-purpose answer for busy people is simply to do what the president did: blame radicalization via the internet. That is true but tells us nothing at all about the commonalities, if any, among the would-be Oswalds. The fear of a “Minority Report” culture that prejudges idiosyncrasies as threats may inhibit the research.
Still, what dots have never been connected about factors in the upbringing of the actors that tip the unbalanced into the land of the “statement” killers? If there’s a serious study of that topic, link to it in the comments. But if there isn’t, perhaps the Bureau or somewhere in the academy, some researchers will take note of the gap.
Hugh Hewitt is a Fox News contributor and host of “The Hugh Hewitt Show” heard weekday afternoons from 3 PM to 6 PM ET on the Salem Radio Network, and simulcast on Salem News Channel. Hugh drives Americans home on the East Coast and to lunch on the West Coast on over 400 affiliates nationwide, and on all the streaming platforms where SNC can be seen. He is a frequent guest on the Fox News Channel’s news roundtable, hosted by Bret Baier weekdays at 6pm ET. A son of Ohio and a graduate of Harvard College and the University of Michigan Law School, Hewitt has been a Professor of Law at Chapman University’s Fowler School of Law since 1996 where he teaches Constitutional Law. Hewitt launched his eponymous radio show from Los Angeles in 1990. Hewitt has frequently appeared on every major national news television network, hosted television shows for PBS and MSNBC, written for every major American paper, has authored a dozen books and moderated a score of Republican candidate debates, most recently the November 2023 Republican presidential debate in Miami and four Republican presidential debates in the 2015-16 cycle. Hewitt focuses his radio show and his column on the Constitution, national security, American politics and the Cleveland Browns and Guardians. Hewitt has interviewed tens of thousands of guests from Democrats Hillary Clinton and John Kerry to Republican Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump over his 40 years in broadcasting. This column previews the lead story that will drive his radio/ TV show today.
