Ask yourself why a rich successful guy, facing very minor charges (unlawful entry; curfew violation) stemming from his effort to overthrow the government, came home to Georgia and apparently blew his brains out. “There’s blood everywhere,” his wife told 911, and there certainly would be if he used one of his SKS-45s to do the deed.
Judging by his house, the dude could have afforded excellent lawyers who would almost certainly arrange things so that he’d have to pay some eminently affordable penalty or something… So what the hell?
Let us speculate.
One possibility is that he was so devastated by his failure to destroy America that he saw no further reason to live. The event itself was heady stuff; he felt part of a righteous revolution. But within hours Nancy Pelosi – who should by rights have been dead by the end of the day – was not only alive but still presiding over the house. The anguish that settled upon him on his return to intolerable normalcy overcame him.
Another possibility is simply that this man, like his idol, is mentally ill. His violent extremism held off the inevitable violent suicide for awhile (there are several effective ways to off yourself; ask yourself why this man chose the absolute bloodiest, visiting piercing trauma upon his family as they discovered what he did to his head) by establishing a cult within which he could “normalize”and play out his fantasies. The failure of the cult’s attack on democracy shattered this man’s tenuous hold.
Another possibility goes the other way: shame. When the party’s over, and you see precisely the damage you’ve done to yourself and the people you love — hey, maybe even the country you love — you feel overpowering shame.
January 12th, 2021 at 1:26PM
A solid, perhaps more solid perhaps not, fourth speculation.
What you can see now, of what he’d done, is only the surface. It is entirely possible that a rich, rabid Trump fan who got it together to travel to the Capitol that day had done more in funding stuff, conspiring to do violent acts etc., which, he was not too deranged to understand, would likely be excavated. GPS is so accurate that a phone could easily place you in the building. The internet is full of stuff that’s hard to scrub. And the shiny, pastel heaven of Tea Party Jesus, with nolle pros and pardons coming out of fountains had pretty clearly disappeared.
Your second possibility – mental illness, though likely short of legally exculpating – is not inconsistent with any of the others – even shame – sometimes the mentally ill are ashamed of what they do when in a mental clearing.
January 12th, 2021 at 1:45PM
Greg: That possibility had occurred to me too – I should have included it. A rich rabid Trumper is likely to have done – have had the capacity and means to do – SO much more than the insurrection itself. Make him just paranoid enough to obsess over its revelation – and throw in maybe respectable local business associates already beginning to freeze him out/ridicule him – and you’ve got a recipe for self-slaughter.
By the way – a small point but maybe worth mentioning — as Fuckface himself apparently noted with dismay, the people who ransacked Congress were close to the lowest of the lowest class America has to offer. NOT working class, necessarily – yahoos with money, many of them, but just the lowest of the low culturally, and very graphically so. I’m thinking that people like this guy – who with his McMansion clearly had pretensions – might have been made to feel very embarrassed by their associates back home for being part of the mob.
Hey, maybe his workplace was so embarrassed they fired him. Not good for business. We’ll find out as the story unfolds.