Co-anchor Bill Hemmer tried to keep the Trump martyrdom going, though.

As I’ve previously written, Fox News and its MAGA buddies wasted no time weaponizing the Trump shooting in order to blame the left. Despite a complete lack of evidence. In fact, the shooter turned out to be a registered Republican.

Now, four days later, Fox’s own expert told viewers that Trump shooter Thomas Matthew Crooks likely acted out of a desire for notoriety, not political philosophy. Guest Robin Dreeke’s website bio states, “As a Marine Corps Officer and retired FBI Special Agent, he served as Chief of the Counterintelligence Behavioral Analysis Program where he honed his skills in Recruiting Spies and Behavioral Assessment.” In other words, this is a guy who knows how to analyze and interpret behavior like Crooks’.

On today’s America’s Newsroom show, Dreeke specifically discounted any political motivation.

DREEKE: All we have to really go on is what we know and observe and people try to really fit the narrative politically into this and when we don't see a lot of narrative that's anti-Trump necessarily, we have to look at what we do know.

We know he's been bullied extensively throughout his life and a motivation for - not necessarily assassination but murder is loathing. Loathing towards those people that he feels have disenfranchised him. So, one of my conjectures on this is possibly that he was trying to impress the people that have bullied him his entire life. And so kind of like the Hinckley case, where you had John Hinckley tried assassinating Ronald Reagan. It wasn't about anti-Reagan. It was about trying to impress Jodie Foster in this deranged mentality. So, I'm thinking that it might be more of that.

…

We can hypothesize that the reason why they are finding rudimentary explosives in the car and some sort of rudimentary detonator with him was that he was going to try to maybe have a distraction to get off that roof so he could go back to this group that has bullied him his entire life and saying, “Look at me.” Because a lot of times when people have tried assassinating or killing celebrities, it's about the moment where they look good themselves. So, this is not necessarily an anti-Trump. issue. I think it was more of a “look at me” issue.

Bill Hemmer tried to keep the politicization alive. “Maybe this whole idea about being bullied is just too much of an easy out,” he said. "Maybe he was just really good at covering his tracks. Because at this point, it seems like that's a possibility.” Hemmer did not point to a single shred of evidence that that might be the case.

Dreeke diplomatically swatted that theory away.

DREEKE: It’s definitely a possibility. But when you look at - again, I like looking at behavior arcs and starting from an early age, we're looking at a behavior arc of not just being bullied but being separate from everyone else, not having a lot of footprints anywhere.

So, it's not like he's got all these online rants. He's got some gaming, intercourse on Discord and things like that, but there's not a huge amount of footprint. With other people we've seen throughout time, we've seen that they've have manifestos, they have lots of big “Fs” rants. And so what happens is, is that those become escalations towards the event that they're going to do.

In this case, we're not seeing a lot of this. It's hard to imagine that a 20 year old had the forethought years ago to cover his tracks in the eventuality he was going to do this. So I think this was more of something he was going to try to do to get notoriety.

Dreeke’s audio had been lost at the outset of this interview, before this video began. Interestingly, co-anchor Dana Perino paraphrased his previous comments, which we did not hear, saying “loathing, a victim mindset, access to weapons, those three can be a deadly combination.” Not surprisingly, nobody mentioned the role of Crooks' access to an assault rifle when Dreeke returned. No doubt that's because it would not only go against gaga-for-guns MAGA but it would also take away from the political exploitation of the shooting.

It’s too much to hope that Fox will apologize to Democrats for blaming them for the shooting. It’s probably too much to hope that most, if any, hosts will pay any attention to this authoritative and very persuasive explanation. Just like they ignored – or worse – their own reporters’ findings that the 2020 presidential election was legitimate. I suspect the "news" channel will just tweak its propaganda away from the left, as a whole, and squarely onto President Biden and his administration for "allowing" the shooting to happen.

I will be keeping an eye out.

Meanwhile, you can watch a MAGA Fox meme get demolished below, from the July 17, 2024 America’s Newsroom.