(The Economic Collapse Blog)—I am still in shock. When I first learned that Donald Trump had been shot, I literally had difficulty processing the information. I watched footage of the shooting over and over, and honestly I am still trying to put the pieces together. The Secret Service is supposed to be far better at protecting our leaders than this. If Trump had not shifted his head at the last moment, he would have almost certainly been killed. Sadly, firefighter Corey Comperatore was not so fortunate. He was killed by one of the bullets that the shooter fired. Trump was hit in the ear, but we are being told that he is doing just fine. But how long will it be before someone else tries again?
What we just witnessed is truly, truly horrible. No matter how you plan to vote, we should all be united in denouncing political violence.
For years, many of our political leaders and many in the mainstream media have been using extremely inflammatory language to denounce Donald Trump, and this has caused emotions to run extremely high.
It was only a matter of time before all of that inflammatory language inspired someone to commit an act of great violence.
The following are 8 things that we know about the man that shot Trump…
#1 It is being reported that the shooter is a 20-year-old male named Thomas Matthew Crooks…
Authorities have identified the gunman involved in the attack against former US President Donald Trump on Saturday as 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks, who was killed by Secret Service agents at the scene after the shooting.
The FBI named Crooks in a statement early Sunday morning, identifying him as a resident of Bethel Park, Pennsylvania – about 35 miles south of Butler, where Trump was holding his rally.
Crooks fired on Trump while perched on a nearby building rooftop outside the rally’s security perimeter, before being killed by the Secret Service, according to law enforcement officials.
Just like John Wilkes Booth and Lee Harvey Oswald, Thomas Matthew Crooks has three names.
Is that just some sort of bizarre coincidence?
#2 We are being told that Crooks used “an AR-style rifle” to shoot at Trump…
Law enforcement sources told CBS News that Crooks, from Bethel Park, Pennsylvania, had been armed with ‘an AR-style rifle’.
There are some that are claiming that this was a highly advanced rifle that was extremely expensive. I have not been able to find any official verification of this yet.
#3 Apparently the “AR-style rifle” was originally purchased by the father of Crooks…
Two law enforcement officials told The Associated Press that investigators believe the weapon was bought by the father of Thomas Matthew Crooks, who’s been identified as the shooter, at least six months ago.
#4 The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Crooks also had “explosive devices” in his vehicle…
Authorities found explosive devices in the car of the man who officials say tried to assassinate former President Trump, according to people briefed on the investigation.
The car, which Thomas Matthew Crooks drove, was parked near the Trump rally in Butler, PA, on Saturday.
Police received multiple reports of suspicious packages around near where the shooter was, authorities said, prompting them to dispatch bomb technicians.
#5 Crooks was employed at a nearby nursing home and he successfully passed a background check when he applied…
Crooks worked as a dietary aid, a job that generally involves food preparation, at Bethel Park Skilled Nursing and Rehabilitation, less than a mile from his home. In a statement provided to USA TODAY on Sunday, Marcie Grimm, the facility’s administrator, said she was “shocked and saddened to learn of his involvement.”
“Thomas Matthew Crooks performed his job without concern and his background check was clean,” Grimm said. “We are fully cooperating with law enforcement officials at this time. Due to the ongoing investigation, we cannot comment further on any specifics. Our thoughts and prayers go out to Former President Trump and the victims impacted by this terrible tragedy. We condemn all acts of violence.”
Preparing food at a nursing home is kind of a dead end job for a 20-year-old that is just starting out in life. This may have fed into any feelings of desperation and depression that he was feeling.
#6 Crooks was a registered Republican, but his only political donation was to a group “working to increase voter turnout for Democrats”…
Crooks is registered to vote as a Republican in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, according to county voter records. His voter registration status has been active since 2021.
Federal Election Commission records show that in January 2021, Crooks made a $15 donation to the Progressive Turnout Project, a group working to increase voter turnout for Democrats.
#7 His uncle was interviewed by the Daily Mail, and he said that Crooks and his family were “very private” people…
Crooks’ uncle Mark Crooks told DailyMail.com he hadn’t seen the gunman or his parents in years, and described them as ‘very private’.
‘I haven’t seen that part of my family in years,’ he said. ‘Honestly it’s been so long I don’t think much about them
‘It’s a shame. The kid is like a stranger to me. They’re private and they don’t reach out to anybody any time.’
To me, this is an incredibly important detail.
He could have had very serious emotional problems that nobody knew about in advance.
Also, those that are detached from society are the easiest to set up if someone was inclined to do that.
Following the shooting, many liberals were extremely upset that Crooks missed his target.
For example, one young woman posted a video that rapidly went viral in which she very loudly expressed her displeasure that Trump was still alive…
‘We were a second away, we were a centimeter away from half of the problem being gone and you missed,’ Celeste, who goes by cele2t3, screamed in a TikTok video.
Driving in a car, Celeste shared her initial reaction to hearing the sudden news.
‘I just found out about this sh**, it just happened, I haven’t even had a second to process.
She screams at the top of her lungs: ‘You’re telling me somebody finally had the ba**s to bring a “pew pew” and it missed?!’
Yes, there are really people out there that think like this.
In fact, a field director for Mississippi Congressman Bennie G. Thompson was quickly fired after she suggested that Crooks should have gotten some shooting lessons before making his attempt…
Marsaw, 61, the president and vice president of a local NAACP in Natchez, Mississippi, has since deleted the post and her account, but screenshots have been reposted across social media.
She shared: ‘I don’t condone violence but please get some shooting lessons so you don’t miss next time ooops that wasn’t me talking.’
In a follow up post, she said: ‘That’s what your hate speech got you!!’
Marsaw has since been fired from her position. ‘I was made aware of a post made by a staff member and she is no longer in my employment,’ Thompson said.
From this point forward, Trump will need to be very careful.
I think that it is probably just a matter of time before someone else tries again.
In my entire lifetime, no politician has been hated as much as Donald Trump.
I don’t understand why the left hates him so much, but they do.
For a very long time, I have been warning that this would be the most chaotic election season in our history, and over the last few weeks things have certainly gotten really crazy.
But we still have more than three months to go until election day.
Unfortunately, I think that there will be a lot more twists and turns before this thing is over.
Michael’s new book entitled “Chaos” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can subscribe to his Substack newsletter at michaeltsnyder.substack.com.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
