By Freshly uncovered traces of the digital history of Thomas Matthew Crooks, the 20-year-old who attempted to assassinate former President Donald Trump at a July 2024 rally in Pennsylvania, reveal a yearslong online evolution marked by fixation on political violence, explicit threats toward public figures, and personal interests ranging from non-binary pronoun preferences to artwork featuring muscular women.
Investigators reviewing publicly accessible online accounts have linked Crooks to multiple profiles spanning DeviantArt, YouTube, Discord, and other platforms, drawing from a trail of email addresses and usernames dating back nearly a decade, according to The New York Post. One DeviantArt page attributed to him listed “They / Them” as preferred pronouns in its “About” section, along with a July 6 birthday and a five-year membership on the site. It remains unclear whether Crooks identified as transgender.
The details emerged just over a month after a killer with a similar profile assassinated Charlie Kirk.
The same profile displayed a mix of reposted and original material showcasing extreme violence, including images of executions and gore. A June 2023 work titled “How he lost his eye” depicted a black-clad figure shooting another against a backdrop in blue and pink—the colors of the transgender pride flag. Another piece, “Killing pedos,” showed a rifle-wielding character standing over two slain figures, one dressed in similar blue-and-pink tones.
Early posts from Crooks’ high school years reflected fervent support for Trump intertwined with virulent antisemitic and anti-immigrant rhetoric. In 2019 comments under videos, he issued graphic threats against political opponents. Responding to a clip of Trump being booed at the World Series, an account using his full name wrote: “I always believed being patriotic was lining up a bunch of socialist Jews (like the ones that booed Trump) and blasting their useless brains out with an AR.”
In another 2019 exchange beneath an MSNBC segment, he asserted: “Everyone of the trump hating democrats deserve to have their heads chopped of and put on steaks for the world to see what happens when you f–k with America [sic].” He repeatedly cited Mao Zedong’s maxim, “The only true political power comes from the barrel of a gun,” and directed threats toward members of Congress. On July 20, 2019, he posted: “I hope a quick painful death to all the deplorable immigrants and anti-trump congresswoman who dont deserve anything this countru has given them [sic].”
By 2020, amid the COVID-19 pandemic, Crooks’ ideological posture shifted. His online remarks grew sharply critical of Trump’s leadership, particularly the former president’s resistance to strict lockdowns. In February 2020, The Post noted, he wrote: “I’m pretty sure people are just racist and Trump is one of them, there does not need to be a deep state for that.” By April, he argued that Trump was “too slow and everything he’s doing now should have been done,” insisting “there wasn’t any reasonable defense for Trump.”
As his disillusionment intensified, Crooks’ posts turned increasingly violent and tactical. In August 2020, he outlined guerrilla-style attacks on authorities, writing on YouTube: “IMO the only way to fight the gov is with terrorism style attacks, sneak a bomb into an essential building and set it off before anyone sees you, track down any important people/politicians/military leaders etc and try to assassinate them.” He added that such confrontations would almost certainly be lethal, acknowledging: “Any sort of head-to-head fight is suicide, and even ambush/surprise attacks likely aren’t going to end well.”
Search histories attributed to him included repeated queries about historical acts of violence—Jack Ruby’s killing of Lee Harvey Oswald, the Oklahoma City bombing, and the Pulse nightclub massacre—alongside practical research on firing an AR-15 rapidly, constructing fertilizer bombs, and acquiring body armor.
The FBI has declined to confirm whether the accounts definitively belonged to Crooks and did not respond to requests for comment regarding the newly surfaced material.
The new release of details came after Tucker Carlson released a “deep dive” into Trump’s shooter.
Crooks’ July 13, 2024, attack at the Butler, Pennsylvania, rally left Trump with a wounded ear, killed firefighter Corey Comperatore, and severely injured two other attendees before Crooks was fatally shot by law enforcement. The newly examined digital records add further texture to ongoing efforts to understand his motives and psychological trajectory in the years preceding the assassination attempt.
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