ARGUMENT: POLITICAL VIOLENCEA Uniquely Perilous Moment in U.S. Politics

Assassins believe that they can change the course of history. And although the U.S. presidential election is less than four months away, it is safe to say that Saturday’s attempt on Republican nominee Donald Trump’s life will likely impact its outcome. The United States is both already too politically polarized and too imbued with violence for it to be otherwise.

Bruce Hoffman and Jacob Ware write in Foreign Policythat this is but the latest violent incident targeting an elected official or candidate in the United States in recent years.

In 2017, a self-professed supporter of Sen. Bernie Sanders attempted to murder Republican members of Congress at an early morning baseball practice and managed to wound six people, including then-House Majority Whip Steve Scalise. In 2022, a far-right Canadian conspiracy theorist broke into Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s home and seriously injured her husband. Supreme Court justices are not immune from such threats, as displayed in 2022, when a California man angered by the court’s expected decision to overturn legalized abortion stalked Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh to his home. And the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, of course, also involved a prominent assassination threat, with the crowd baying to “Hang Mike Pence.”

Moreover, the idea that we have entered a global era where political assassins are again in fashion has been clearly supported by the recent attacks on the lives of elected officials literally around the world—in Argentina, Britain, Haiti, Japan, and Slovakia, among other places. Indeed, the attack on Trump occurred during an election cycle that, we have long argued, was always highly likely to be accompanied by violence.

Hoffman and Ware write that to find a similarly unsettled time in the U.S. polity, one would have to go back to the 1960s. They continue:

This latest assassination attempt, 91 years after Roosevelt’s survival and 43 years since President Ronald Reagan survived a shooting in Washington, D.C., comes at a moment when an already polarized nation faces an escalating spiral of political violence. Right now, factions of the United States’ militant left are gearing up for mass protests at the Democratic National Convention while the movement continues to ratchet up protests over the Israel-Hamas war and Israel’s existence more broadly.