Conspiracy theories are the orderly consolations of a disordered mind. The reality is far worse. There is no consolation, only disorder. History is one damn thing after another, but no one understands the narrative sequence in real time. The only people who think they do are the intelligence services, who see their task as managing the disorder; the lone gunmen, who want to unleash real chaos; and the media, who these days mostly land in the former camp, because at least it’s a living. However, to get close to understanding events, you need distance: dispassion and the passage of time.

Historians restrain themselves by saying, “Coincidence isn’t causality.” What a coincidence that Thomas Matthew Crooks and Ryan Wesley Routh, the lone gunmen who have tried to assassinate former President Donald Trump, had both donated to the Democratic fundraising machine ActBlue and also appeared in promotional videos. Crooks was a face in the crowd of AP students when the BlackRock investment firm filmed an ad at his high school in 2022. In the same year, Routh volunteered in a promo film for the Azov battalion, a Nazi-nostalgic Ukrainian militia.