Damning social media footprint suggests man who shot Trump was another 'they/them' radical

Social media comments attributed to Thomas Matthew Crooks, the dead man who attempted to assassinate President Donald Trump last year, suggest that he may have been yet another shooter captive to gender ideology and other genres of sexual perversion.

Crooks fired eight shots at Trump during a campaign rally on July 13, 2024, in Butler, Pennsylvania. While he managed to strike only the ear of the man whom Democrats characterized as a "clear and present danger," the failed assassin killed heroic former fire chief Corey Comperatore and severely injured David Dutch and James Copenhaver, who were seated behind the president.

'The threat wasn’t hidden.'

The FBI has long suggested that Crooks' motives were unclear.

Days after former FBI Director Christopher Wray testified to Congress that "a lot of the usual repositories of information have not yielded anything notable in terms of motive or ideology," then-FBI Deputy Director Paul Abbate revealed that hundreds of comments had been found on one social media account believed to be associated with the dead shooter in the 2019 to 2020 timeframe.

"There were over 700 comments posted from this account. Some of these comments, if ultimately attributable to the shooter, appear to reflect anti-Semitic and anti-immigration themes, espouse political violence, and are extreme in nature," said Abbate.

Days after Tucker Carlson shared various screencaps of posts allegedly made by Crooks, the New York Post's Miranda Devine suggested on Monday that Abbate neglected to inform Congress that a significant portion of Crooks' online interactions from January to August 2020 signaled that "he did an ideological backflip and went from rabidly pro-Trump to rabidly anti-Trump and then went dark, never seeming to post again."

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"The danger Crooks posed was visible for years in public online spaces," a source who apparently uncovered the shooter's hidden footprint told the New York Post. "His radicalization, violent rhetoric and obsession with political violence were all documented under his real name. The threat wasn’t hidden."

After reviewing Crooks' interactions across various platforms and pages including YouTube, Snapchat, Discord, GooglePlay, and Quora, the source concluded that the official narrative claiming that Crooks operated alone without a clear motive or ideology was bogus.

The shooter "was not simply some unknowable lone actor," said the source. "He left a digital trail of violent threats, extremist ideology and admiration for mass violence. He spoke openly of political assassination, posted under his real name, and was even flagged by other users who mentioned law enforcement in their replies. Despite this, his account remained active for more than five years — and was only removed the day after the shooting."

In 2019, Crooks allegedly made a number of pro-Trump, anti-Democrat remarks online, suggesting, for instance, that the president was "the literal definition of Patriotism" and stating, "MURDER THE DEMOCRATS."

In early 2020, Crooks apparently changed his tune and began deriding Trump and his supporters, defending draconian COVID-19 lockdowns, and lambasting Republicans over voter-fraud concerns, while in some instances being cheered on by an apparent member of a Norwegian neo-Nazi group.

Crooks allegedly suggested in a Feb. 26, 2020, post that Trump supporters were too "brainwashed to realize how dumb you are" and accused Trump of being a "racist" in a separate post the same day.

'This is a five alarm fire.'

Within months of his political about-face, Crooks was reportedly advocating for "terrorism style attacks" and political assassinations. At some point, Crooks also reportedly began associating with furries online.

According to the Post, Crooks reportedly began referring to himself using "they/them" pronouns on DeviantArt, an "online social network for artists and art enthusiasts" that teems with "furry" imagery depicting sexualized and anthropomorphized animals.

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A demonstrator holding an image of Crooks. Photo by Jim Vondruska/Getty Images.

The histories of two DeviantArt accounts linked to Crooks' primary email address indicate he possibly had a furry fetish, obsessing over cartoon characters with male anatomies and female heads.

Trump's failed assassin would hardly be the first radical in recent years who was immersed in trans and/or furry subcultures.

Charlie Kirk's suspected assassin was reportedly not only in a homosexual relationship with a transvestite, who on at least one occasion dressed up in a furry outfit, but was himself possibly active on a furry fetish website.

An engraving on a bullet casing linked to Kirk's assassination made reference to gay furries.

There was also the:

• trans-identifying man who shot up a Catholic church full of children in Minneapolis on Aug. 27, killing two children and injuring 30;
• male-identifying woman who planned to shoot up an elementary school and a high school in Maryland in April 2024 but was stopped in time by police — then later convicted;
• trans-identifying teen who stalked the halls of a school in Perry, Iowa, on Jan. 4, 2024, ultimately murdering a child and an adult and wounding several others; and the
• trans-identifying woman who stormed into a Presbyterian school in Nashville on March 27, 2023, murdering three children and three adults.

Turning Point USA spokesman Andrew Kolvet said of the news of Crooks' possible trans-identification and furry fetish, "This is beyond correlation, this is a five alarm fire."Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!