Still stuck on stupid, Dave?
While some Trump allies have sought to blame Democratic rhetoric for the shooting, no classmate has described him as ever speaking negatively about the former president.. Myers, who said he had known the shooter since elementary school, said Crooks “never acted, like, by any means, a political revolutionary.”
Campaign finance records show that in January 2021, as a 17-year-old, Crooks gave $15 to the Progressive Turnout Project, a pro-Democrat political action committee, Axios reported. However, records show that he later registered as a Republican and voted in the 2022 midterm elections. This November would have been the first presidential contest for which he would have been old enough to participate.
Crooks was certainly not a liberal, according to at least two former classmates.
“I would almost put money on the fact that I probably had seen him wear a Trump shirt or something along the lines of that beforehand, which is why this is so shocking to me,” Paige Updegraff told Pittsburgh public radio station WESA.
Max R. Smith, another classmate who took a history course with the shooter, told The Philadelphia Inquirer that Crooks would talk about politics but never said anything that would suggest he hated Trump.
“He definitely was conservative,” Smith said. “It makes me wonder why he would carry out an assassination attempt on the conservative candidate.”
Smith noted that, in class, the teacher would often ask students to take a side on a political issue being debated. Crooks always sided with the right.
“The majority of the class were on the liberal side, but Tom, no matter what, always stood his ground on the conservative side,” he said. “That’s still the picture I have of him. Just standing alone on one side while the rest of the class was on the other.”
