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lite.cnn.com - on gopher - inofficial
ARTICLE VIEW:
After tragedy in Minneapolis, Trump officials join a cherry-picked rush
to judgment
Analysis by Aaron Blake, CNN
Updated:
2:38 PM EDT, Sat August 30, 2025
Source: CNN
Eleven days after an assassination attempt against Donald Trump last
year, then-FBI Director Christopher Wray testified in front of
lawmakers who were hungry for information.
But he was circumspect. Yes, the shooter targeted Trump, but Wray
wasn’t going to sit there and speculate or draw inferences about his
motive.
A congressman asked Wray, “do you and your team know the motive of
the shooter or have any idea what could have driven it?”
Wray responded: “Well, ‘know’ and ‘have any idea’ are two
very different things.”
When a Republican asked him if Democrats’ rhetoric played any role,
Wray balked: “Respectfully, I don’t think it’s appropriate for
me, as the FBI director, to be characterizing or engaging in public
commentary on specific people’s rhetoric.”
That was then; this is now.
In keeping with the second Trump administration’s , top officials
leapt this week to attach a mass shooting at the Annunciation Catholic
School in Minneapolis that killed two children and injured more than a
dozen others to the left – both implicitly and explicitly.
They did so even as the known picture of the shooter Robin Westman’s
words painted of Westman’s beliefs and possible motives.
Perhaps most striking of all was Wray’s successor as FBI director,
Kash Patel.
While Patel didn’t ascribe a motive to Westman, he cherry-picked . He
said that Westman “left multiple anti-Catholic, anti-religious
references,” spoke of “hatred and violence toward Jewish people”
and said “Free Palestine,” and wrote “an explicit call for
violence against President Trump on a firearm magazine.”
Patel said the crime was being investigated as not just terrorism, but
a “.”
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem , noting Westman wrote “Where
is your God?” and “Kill Donald Trump” on her weapons and
ammunition.
Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard was more explicit about
Westman’s motive, saying it was “anti-God sentiment that motivated
the shooter.”
What do those things have in common? They happen to align with groups
and people Republicans have set themselves up as protecting – and
have accused the left of attacking. Along with citing Westman’s
references to Trump, the intimation is clearly that this was an attack
motivated by leftist ideology.
But the shows this is a highly selective reading. It suggests the
shooter could have been influenced by a host of extremists with varying
and even often right-wing views. Westman expressed hatred towards a
whole host of groups, including ones that could be coded as allies of
the left.
Westman wrote racial slurs against Black and Hispanic people and an
epithet for gay people, as well as “Nuke India.” Westman appeared
to celebrate anti-Muslim terrorists from Norway and from New Zealand.
Westman cited the cases of anti-government, white-supremacist
extremists Randy Weaver and Timothy McVeigh and the Branch Davidian
standoff in Waco, Texas – cases that became rallying cries on the far
right.
Westman also appeared to celebrate those who attacked Christian
institutions and Jews. But the common thread seems to be the
celebration of hatred and massacres of many kinds.
It’s a hodge-podge of potential motivations that suggest an ideology
that isn’t neatly pinned down.
Trump administration officials and others have also gestured at the
fact that Westman was transgender. Patel seemed to make a point to call
Westman “the male subject,” despite Westman having taken legal
steps to transition and live as a woman, according to court documents
from 2019 and 2020. Noem said Westman “was a 23 year-old man,
claiming to be transgender.”
They weren’t necessarily saying that was relevant, but they were
certainly making a point to say it. And that too fed into right-wing
allegations that trans people are more likely to commit such
atrocities.
There is no supporting , though. The perception seems to owe in large
part to people falsely claiming previous mass shooters were
transgender, often shortly after the shootings. This happened after
school shootings in , in 2022 and last year, among others. Even
Thursday, Donald Trump Jr. that the shooters had been transgender.
Conservative media figures, especially on Fox News, were happy to
connect the dots more explicitly.
“The left is weaponizing trans kids and turning them into culture
warriors, and they’ve been turned loose against the church, schools,
and Trump,” Fox host Jesse Watters . “You see it, I see it.”
Republican Rep. Byron Donalds of Florida on Fox host Laura Ingraham’s
show that night: “This is about mental health issues that the radical
left refuses to acknowledge, comes from their crazy ideology, which is
damaging so many children in the United States who are now becoming
young adults.”
Ingraham responded: “Mutilating their bodies and their minds.”
Even the idea that Westman was necessarily targeting Catholics appears
speculative. Yes, this was an attack on a religious school. But it also
happens to have been a religious school that Westman attended.
And to the extent we’re taking Westman’s words at face value,
Westman explicitly said that wasn’t a motivation.
“,” Westman wrote. “The message is there is no message.”
The episode highlights a kind of rush to judgment has become especially
common on the right. Trump and his allies have attached his would-be
assassin, Thomas Matthew Crooks, to the left, despite Crooks having
been a registered Republican and there . It was a similar story with
the and the .
The lure of attaching these people to the other side based on
incomplete and often-wrong information is apparently too tempting.
But usually this isn’t done with an assist from top administration
officials who are supposed to be circumspect about prejudging a case.
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