Over the past three years, the US has witnessed a surge in violence which has seen toxic discourse infect its body politic.
In America, we resolve our differences at the ballot box … not with bullets. The power to change America should always rest in the hands of the people, not in the hands of a would-be assassin.
So said the president of the United States, Joe Biden, in an Oval Office address to the nation the day after the attempted assassination of his rival in November’s presidential election. The shockwaves from Donald Trump surviving an effort to kill him at a campaign event in Pennsylvania on July 13th are still being felt across the US and around the world.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation said it had picked up on increasing levels of violent political rhetoric being expressed in the aftermath of the assassination attempt. And, contrary to Biden’s insistnce that there is ‘no place in America for this kind of violence’, Katie Stallard, a fellow of the Wilson Centre in Washington DC, believes: ‘The attack on Donald Trump was shocking, but it wasn’t unprecedented by American standards, and it wasn’t entirely unforeseeable.’
Disturbing trend
The Trump assassination attempt follows a disturbing trend in the US of extremists embarking on violent plots to silence their perceived opponents. Pete Simi of Chapman University and Seamus Hughes of the University of Nebraska examined threats against political candidates between 2013 and 2023. They found that ‘over the past 10 years, more than 500 individuals have been arrested for threatening public officials. And the trendline is shooting up.’
Over the past three years alone, the US has witnessed a surge in violence linked to a darkening political landscape, which has seen combative and toxic discourse infect its body politic. The Capitol riots in January 2021 were preceded by a speech from the then president, Trump, where he told an assembled crowd the November 2020 presidential election had been ‘stolen’. Following this address thousands of the president’s supporters marched on the Capitol building. The ensuing mayhem resulted in a violent riot and the deaths of five people, including a police officer.
In October 2022, Paul Pelosi, husband of the then speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy, was attacked in his home and bludgeoned with a hammer by the far-right conspiracy theorist David DePape. DePape’s plan was to find Pelosi herself, hold her hostage and ‘break her kneecaps‘. Trump would later mock Mr Pelosi at a Republican campaign event.
In September 2023, Trump sparked fury with a ‘social media’ post criticising the former chair of the joint chiefs of staff, Mark Milley. On his ‘Truth Social’ platform, the former president, angered by revelations that Milley had taken a phone call with Chinese officials after the January 2021 riots, wrote: ‘This is an act so egregious that, in times gone by, the punishment would have been DEATH!’
Worrying positions
Polling by Robert Pape from the University of Chicago sheds new light on the worrying positions some Americans have towards the utility of political violence. This survey of more than 2,000 people found that 10 per cent of respondents viewed the use of force as ‘justified to prevent Donald Trump from becoming president’. This would equate to 26 million adults if the findings were applied to the whole population.
Within this mix of increasingly dangerous political rhetoric and violence is America’s ‘guns epidemic‘. According to the FBI, the weapon used by the would-be assassin at the Trump campaign rally, Thomas Matthew Crooks, was an AR-style rifle purchased by his father.
Pape’s survey also found that 7 per cent of respondents supported the use of force ‘to restore Donald Trump to the presidency’. Of this group, which would equate to 18 million adults, around 45 per cent owned guns, 40 per cent thought the people involved in the Capitol attack were ‘patriots’ and 10 per cent were militia members or knew someone who was a militia member.
The reaction to the Trump assassination attempt by some of his most prominent congressional supporters has bordered on the reckless. The Ohio senator JD Vance—since selected by Trump as his vice-presidential nominee—said Biden bore responsibility for the attack. He asserted that the president’s campaign speeches had ‘led directly’ to what transpired in Pennsylvania.
Other GOP elected officials have gone further with wild and dangerous rhetoric. The Georgia congressman Mike Collins posted on ‘X’ that ‘Joe Biden sent the orders’ and called for the Republican district attorney in Butler County, where the assassination attempt took place, to ‘immediately file charges against Joseph R Biden for inciting an assassination’.
Heightened concern
There is heightened concern as the summer of political conventions by the Republican and Democratic parties get under way. Jacob Ware, a research fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, has written that these large gatherings ‘boast the largest collections of party members and leaders throughout the entire election cycle and could therefore attract individuals or groups with a vendetta’.
Many across the US, and beyond its shores, will hope the Trump assassination attempt will lead to tempered introspection and reasoned political debate. But others justifiably fear the event could serve as a catalyst for deeper polarisation and further acts of violence.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence
Richard is a visiting research fellow at Queen's University Belfast. His research examines 21st-century American domestic politics and foreign policy.