Trump backers in Congress and online are going to great lengths to show how easy the assassination attempt against former President Donald Trump was, staging detailed recreations and making visits to the scene.
While they are doing it to criticize the Secret Service’s performance and dispel myths about the assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania against the former president, the effect is them bragging about how they too could have capped Trump.
At a hearing, Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle faced blistering commentary from Congress over her agency’s failures, including one extended rant from a Texas representative who boasted that he popped Trump almost every single time he tried it.
“I was lying prone on a sloped roof at 130 yards at 6:30 at night,” Fallon said, describing his efforts to replicate the conditions of the Trump assassination attempt while noting that he had no training on an AR-15 and had not fired that particular gun in six years.
“And I didn’t know what scope [the shooter used],” Fallon added, saying he tried two options each eight times.
“You know what the result was? 15 out of 16 killshots!” Fallon shouted, targets of his successful attempts behind him. “That’s a 94% success rate. And that shooter was a better shot than me. It is a miracle President Trump wasn’t killed … It wasn’t the roof that was dangerous, it was the nutjob on top of the roof.”
Fallon’s roof reference was a dig at Cheatle’s comments in the days after the attempt where she claimed that the Secret Service did not place anybody up on the roof gunman Thomas Matthew Crooks used because it was sloped “at its highest point,” which was a “safety factor.”
Another lawmaker went to the site of the shooting to bash Cheatle’s claim.
“It’s not that steep at all,” said Rep. Eli Crane (R-Ariz.). The former Navy SEAL showed himself on the rooftop of the building where Crooks took his shot. “We just had a 70-year-old man back here climb up on the roof easily.”
Pro-Trump YouTubers are also reenacting the assassination, with some of them filming detailed recreations of the shooting, including clipping mock-ups of Trump in the ear with bullets.
Brandon Herrera, who goes by The AK Guy, and narrowly lost a Republican primary runoff in Texas’ 23rd Congressional District this year, made a video recreating the shooting with a ballistic dummy wearing Trump’s signature Make America Great Again hat. Some of Herrera’s other popular videos recreate the assassinations of historical figures like Abe Lincoln, John F. Kennedy Jr, and Martin Luther King Jr.
“A shot like this is not only difficult to stage, but given the equipment pretty damn well impossible,” Herrera said, saying that he wanted to dispel conspiracy theories that Trump had willingly been shot in the ear from 130 yards away.
Herrera replicated the ear shot on the ballistic dummy from closer in to show that an AR-15 round can clip an ear without doing more damage to the entire head.
Mike Jones, a gun Youtube who runs the Garand Thumb channel, also recreated the shooting to debunk conspiracy theories about it.
Jones pushed back on the same idea, explaining that the type of gun Crooks used wasn’t capable of the kind of accuracy needed to take that risk.
“Your typical AR-15 … will have about a 2-3 inch circle that it can reliably fire into at a hundred yards,” Jones said. “Being that Thomas was using a [lower-grade] AR-15, that’s probably closer to the 3 inch mark … At 140 [yards], that’s going to be approximately 4.5 to 5 inches … so when we talk about a shot that’s going to be piercing the ear, that is mechanically for the weapon, going to be impossible to make that shot.”
In the video, while trying to hit the dummy in the ear, Jones repeatedly hits it in the head, noting he “put a round through former President Trump’s head.”
There are guns, Jones said, which can make that shot. But an AR-15 like the one Crooks used?
“Absolutely not,” said his videographer. It had to have been an act of God to just miss him like that, which made sense Jones added, because Trump was going to be the next president.
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