Donald Trump’s would-be assassin, Thomas Matthew Crooks, died at twenty, which means he was born in September of 2003. For the youth, there is nothing remarkable about this fact, but if you’re even a decade older, you remember these as science fiction years. The millennium promised the psychic break from 1 to 2, dates scrawled in notebooks that would leap miraculously back from /99 to /00, everything possible in two stark, space capsule zeroes. Like anyone inexorably aging and self-aware, I’ve been pondering generations, and what it means to have found consciousness in a particular interval of history. Born two years after the destruction of the Twin Towers, Crooks was eleven when Trump descended the golden escalator. This meant, for nearly half his life, he was subsumed into the life and myth of Donald J. Trump, American President, that his waking moments of intellectual maturity—whatever he could achieve, in these alien years before he tried, very desperately, to insert himself into history—were hardened, bent, and fired by a political leviathan unlike any other who has trundled across our land. Trump, like Andy Warhol, Elvis Presley, and even Lee Harvey Oswald, is indisputably American. This I began to think as the news raged across the backyard barbeque where I was when Crooks’ bullet nearly blew apart Trump’s skull; Trump is our inheritance, and he is what this titanic empire, as glorious as it is savage, has naturally disgorged. Trump is America’s demented world-spirit. Of course he would, bloodied, pump his fist.
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