After a lengthy battle to crack into Thomas Crook's cellphone, the good news is that the FBI has now also gotten into his laptop and the rest of his files. The bad news is that they claim to have come up with nothing more than they found on the phone. Nothing in the shooter's digital footprint at this point suggests that the assassination attempt had been planned in concert with anyone else or that it was even on his mind. Interviews have been conducted with more than 100 people who knew him in high school or at the community college he attended. Many described him as an odd, reclusive, quiet person with only a few friends, but none said that he struck them as being particularly dangerous. Of course, we're still relying on the FBI for all of this information. (ABC News)

After three days, an enigmatic portrait emerged of the 20-year-old man who came close to killing former President Donald Trump with a high-velocity bullet: He was an intelligent loner with few friends, an apparently thin social media footprint and no hints of strong political beliefs that would suggest a motive for an attempted assassination.

Even after the FBI cracked into Thomas Matthew Crooks' cellphone, scoured his computer, home and car, and interviewed more than 100 people, the mystery of why he opened fire on Trump's rally Saturday, a bullet grazing the GOP nominee's ear, remained as elusive as the moment it happened.

“He sat by himself, didn’t talk to anyone, didn’t even try to make conversation,” said 17-year-old Liam Campbell, echoing the comments of classmates who remembered the shooter in this quiet community outside of Pittsburgh. “He was an odd kid,” but nothing about him seemed dangerous, he added. “Just a normal person who seemed like he didn’t like talking to people.”

Calling Crooks "an enigma" is probably being far too charitable toward him. Anyone who can go twenty years making virtually no friends and hardly ever engaging in conversations with others is potentially displaying something known to mental health clinicians as Avoidant Personality Disorder (AVPD). This is characterized by social anxiety, heightened sensitivity to rejection, and pervasive feelings of inadequacy. I'm not a doctor, but I suppose that a person displaying those traits might possibly dream up an assassination scheme to make himself famous and allow him to feel more powerful.

Even if that's the case, however, it doesn't get us any closer to understanding why he would have chosen Trump as his target. I have assumed from the beginning that there had to be some sort of political motivation, but the witnesses who knew him said that they never heard him talking about politics on the rare occasions that he spoke. He was reportedly registered as a Republican, but when young people go down to register for the first time, their party selection may come down to little more than a coin toss if they haven't been paying close attention to politics. He also made a single contribution to a progressive political group, but it was only fifteen dollars. 

None of this information comes close to explaining the complete lack of a social media footprint Crooks left behind. It just doesn't seem possible in the modern era. An introvert who doesn't like interacting with other people should have been a prime candidate for avid social media consumption and participation because they are able to do so anonymously. Is it possible that the shooter actually had been active online using a pseudonym but the FBI hasn't been able to tie that persona to his real name yet? The guy traveled more than two hours to try to murder a presidential candidate in the middle of a rally. That can't have been an idea that he suddenly dreamed up that morning. It took a significant amount of planning and preparation.

Perhaps he was active on the dark web and hasn't been detected. That's where most of the truly awful stuff seems to originate. If not, assuming the FBI is being fully transparent with us about all of this (a significant assumption these days), perhaps this will wind up being a case of an extremely odd duck deciding to do something incredibly violent based on little more than a whim. But it just defies logic that we came that close to seeing Donald Trump lose his life because of some random twist of fate.