Latest assassination attempt on Trump barely made headlines — desensitized America or wise media silence?

On Sunday, February 22, 21-year-old Austin Tucker Martin, who authorities say breached the secure perimeter of President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort armed with a shotgun and a gas can, was reportedly shot and killed by the United States Secret Service. President Trump was not at his Florida residence at the time of the incident.

Christopher Rufo, BlazeTV co-host of “Rufo & Lomez,” has been surprised by the lack of public outrage about this third assassination attempt on President Trump.

“What I found so fascinating is that this story, which in any other time period in American history would be a huge national story [and] dominate headlines, seemed to pass through the news without much of a blip,” says Rufo.

But this story should be of interest to everyone, he argues, not only because “anyone who is attempting an assassination against the president of the United States represents a fundamental threat to the political order,” but also because there seems to be a strange and dangerous pattern at play.

Both Thomas Matthew Crooks, who shot President Trump in the ear at his Butler, Pennsylvania, rally back in July 2024, and Austin Martin have some striking similarities, Rufo suggests.

Both were “bookish, young, white men, glasses, had some trouble, you know, fitting into the kind of high school social order. ... The reporting indicated that at least at some point in their recent past they were pro-Trump or pro-MAGA. Then they have, for whatever reason, some psychological break, and they end up trying to assassinate the president,” he explains.

“The evidence to me suggests that online radicalization is at least a significant part of this.”

But co-host Jonathan Keeperman thinks there’s another factor fueling the recent political violence: the “copycat effect.”

Once people “see someone doing something that is getting attention, the attention-seeking person then will just go copy that same behavior because what they actually want, what they're actually after, is that kind of attention,” he says.

“And so by ignoring these people, by pushing them out of the headlines, we're actually preventing more of this from happening in the future,” he suggests.

Keeperman also ponders the possibility that by trying to sleuth around and identify what’s fueling these acts of political violence we’re actually doing more harm than good.

“We're in a fallen world with fallen people, and they're lunatics, and they commit violence, and it's terrible, and it's tragic. But maybe, actually, our insistence that there's something more to mine from this ... or there's some meaning beyond just the fact that they're lunatics, is itself a kind of conspiratorial delusion that we're enacting in order to make sense of what is otherwise insensible,” he posits.

But Rufo isn’t convinced that attention-seeking or unpredictable lunacy is the root of the political violence we’re seeing. To hear his counterargument, watch the full episode above.

Want more from Rufo & Lomez?

To enjoy more of the news through the anthropological lens of Christopher Rufo and Lomez, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.