Editorial by David Daniel Ball Why is there no apparent justice over the assassinations and attempted assassinations of Trump, Kirk and other conservatives?
There is procedure. There are investigations, reports, suspensions, and in the case of Charlie Kirk a murder prosecution advancing through the courts. Yet the expectation of knowledge—clear motives, full accountability, transparent evidence, and decisive consequences—is repeatedly unmet. That gap is the problem. It leaves space for distrust and for theories that fill what official narratives leave incomplete.
The Secret Service failures surrounding Thomas Matthew Crooks’ attack on Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, on 13 July 2024 remain striking nearly two years later. Multiple official reviews, including the DHS Office of Inspector General and Senate Homeland Security reports, document communication breakdowns with local law enforcement, an unsecured rooftop with a known line of sight, missed drone surveillance by Crooks, resource shortfalls, and intelligence that never reached the protective detail in time. The FBI concluded Crooks acted alone. Motive stays murky. Accountability has been limited: the director resigned, six agents received short suspensions, and no one was fired for the core planning and operational failures. FOIA releases continue to arrive heavily redacted. The public is still waiting for the fuller picture that the seriousness of the event demanded.
Charlie Kirk was assassinated on 10 September 2025 at Utah Valley University. Tyler Robinson is in custody, charged with aggravated murder, and prosecutors are seeking the death penalty. Evidence presented includes DNA, video, texts, and a note indicating he planned the attack because he had “had enough of [Kirk’s] hatred.” The case is proceeding. That is process. Whether it will deliver the sense of justice many expect remains to be seen as the trial unfolds.
An agent on Vice President Vance’s protective detail was identified after sharing sensitive details of the family’s life and travel. He was placed on leave and investigated. A second agent later faced scrutiny over alleged operational leaks. These breaches are real. They raise legitimate questions about personnel reliability inside the service charged with protecting the line of succession. They do not, by themselves, prove a broader plot, but they reinforce the sense that security around senior conservatives has been compromised in ways that receive insufficient public explanation.
Significant numbers of conservatives are unhappy with aspects of Vance’s stance on Israel. That political disagreement is not commensurate with any apparent attempt on his life or his family. Treating policy disagreement as if it explains violence confuses the two.
History is instructive precisely because past cases were not handled in ways that satisfied the demand for complete knowledge. Lincoln’s assassination involved a conspiracy; the man who succeeded is remembered, while the fuller scope and the trials that followed left later generations still arguing over details. In the case of JFK, unofficial investigators have substantiated the view that Lee Harvey Oswald was innocent and framed, and that the official narrative obscured other culprits. The Warren Commission’s lone-gunman conclusion has never closed the matter for those who examined the evidence independently; questions about the Secret Service’s performance that day and about possible broader involvement have persisted for decades. Character assassination of Nixon, and the myths that grew around it, further illustrate how official and media accounts can diverge from fuller facts. With Reagan, and again with the attempts on Trump, media framing often reduced the attackers to the category of the dangerous and the stupid. That same style of rhetoric—portraying conservatives as existential threats or moral monsters—helped create a climate in which violence against figures such as Kirk became thinkable. The existence of that rhetoric is well documented. It should not be overstated into a proven, direct causal chain for any single act; individual perpetrators still choose. But neither should it be dismissed as irrelevant to the atmosphere in which these events occur.
Perhaps Iran, China, or other actors would prefer Vance or other conservatives dead. Perhaps some voices that loudly blame Israel are themselves advancing someone else’s interest. Speculation of that kind does not answer the concrete questions that remain: why so little definitive public knowledge still exists about Crooks’ full digital record and the precise sequence of Secret Service inactivity on the day he nearly killed Trump; why key failures produced such limited personal consequences; and why compromised agents on a vice-presidential detail surface with regularity. Procedure without transparent knowledge is not justice. Until the gaps are closed with evidence rather than redactions and restrained discipline, the sense that justice has been incomplete will continue—and with it the suspicion that more remains hidden than has been shown.
