Waving the bloody t-shirt
By 
Don’t you love farce?
After a failed assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump at Saturday’s rally, conservative commentator Candace Owens has begun selling T-shirts with the image of Trump raising his fist with his ear bleeding. . .
Shortly after the shooting, Owens took to X, formerly Twitter, on Saturday to share a link to a T-shirt she is selling of the image of Trump in the moments after the shots.
“Just threw out all my son’s Superman and Batman memorabilia. Replacing it with bloodied Trump photos and figurines. Don’t @ me,” Owens wrote on X with a link to her website selling the shirt.
According to Owens’ website, Club Candace, the shirt features the image of Trump raising his fist with his ear bleeding with the words “For God and Country” written across the shirt along with “Candace” written as a signature against the backdrop of the American flag.
At the time of publication, the shirt is being sold as a pre-order and is priced at $30.
It seems quite likely now that Thomas Crooks had no strong ideological motivation or goal for trying to assassinate Donald Trump. Searches of his computer and his phone have turned up nothing, while people he knew seem unaware of his political beliefs, if any.
The picture emerging of Crooks is of an intelligent loner/misfit — the classic paradigm for the incel mass shooter who is one of the defining figures of the age.
He seemed to stand out when they were freshmen, dressed in wide-legged jeans and SpongeBob T-shirts, Ms. Grooms said. She said some students teased him about his hygiene and awkward, solitary bearing.
“Those other kids would always say, ‘Hey, look at the school shooter over there!’” Ms. Grooms said. “They would tease him about his poor hygiene, his body odor. He was an easy target.”
Crooks had spent the two years after high school getting an associate’s degree in engineering science from the local community college, which he received in May. He was also working as a dietary aide at a nursing home during this time.
It’s easy to see Crooks as a characteristic figure of the profound alienation found among so many young people in the social media age, in which somehow cyber-connectivity simply exacerbates the lack of actual human contact.
Crooks was someone with his whole life ahead of him . . . which I imagine may have been the thought that made him pull the trigger.