Trump, outrage and the modern era of political violence

WASHINGTON — Within days of former President Donald Trump vilifying immigrants on national television with false stories about Haitian migrants eating pet dogs and cats in an Ohio town, someone began threatening to blow up schools, City Hall and other public buildings, forcing evacuations and prompting a wave of fear.

Days later, authorities said, a man who described himself online as a disaffected former Trump supporter made his way with a semiautomatic rifle to the former president’s Florida golf course, evidently looking to take a shot. He was thwarted only when an observant Secret Service agent spotted him and opened fire first.

And so it goes in 2024. In the space of less than a week, the once and possibly future commander in chief was both a seeming inspiration and an apparent target of the political violence that has increasingly come to shape American politics in the modern era. Bomb threats and attempted assassinations now have become part of the landscape, shocking and horrific, yet not so much that they have forced any real national reckoning.

“One of the things I’m most concerned about right now is the normalization of political violence in our political system. It’s on the increase,” Rep. Jason Crow, D-Colo., a member of a bipartisan task force investigating the July 13 assassination attempt against Trump, said in an interview. “Now we’re on the second one in as many months and it just shows the extent to which this has become pervasive.”

President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris both issued statements condemning the latest incident, but the campaign continued uninterrupted. Barely four hours after Trump was hustled into a motorcade away from the golf club for his protection, his finance team sent out an email to its fundraising list with a button to click to make a donation. “My resolve is only stronger after another attempt on my life!” Trump said in the email. Harris’ fundraising emails continued as well.

Trump, who as recently as last week’s debate with Harris blamed Democrats for the shooting at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, that struck his ear in July, attributed Sunday’s attempt to the president and vice president as well, arguing that the arrested suspect was acting in response to their political attacks.

“He believed the rhetoric of Biden and Harris, and he acted on it,” Trump told Fox News on Monday. “Their rhetoric is causing me to be shot at, when I am the one who is going to save the country, and they are the ones that are destroying the country — both from the inside and out.”

Even as he complained that the Democrats had made him a target by calling him a threat to democracy, he repeated his own assertion that “these are people that want to destroy our country” and called them “the enemy from within” — certainly language no less provocative than that used about him.

Indeed, within hours, his campaign emailed a list of quotes from Biden, Harris and other Democrats attacking Trump with phrases like “a threat to our democracy” and a “threat to this nation,” without noting that just last week during the debate the former president said “they’re the threat to democracy.”

One of Trump’s most prominent and vocal supporters went so far as to question why Biden and Harris have not been targeted for murder. “And no one is even trying to assassinate Biden/Kamala,” billionaire social media owner Elon Musk wrote online.

Musk later deleted the post and called it a joke, but the White House pushed back. “Violence should only be condemned, never encouraged or joked about,” said Andrew Bates, a White House spokesperson. “This rhetoric is irresponsible.”

American history has been marked by periods of political violence before. Four sitting presidents have been killed in office, and another was shot and seriously wounded. A former president likewise was shot and survived, and plenty of others who lived in the White House have been targets. But two attempts on the life of a former president within two months still stands out, especially in the heat of an election in which he is a leading candidate for his old job.

Perhaps the closest analogy might be when President Gerald Ford survived two assassination attempts in a little over two weeks in 1975. More hauntingly, though, the efforts to kill Trump recalled for many 1968, when the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy were gunned down two months apart. Those assassinations came during a moment of broader violence in American streets amid a sense of fraying societal bonds, something that worries many leaders today too.

At the heart of today’s eruption of political violence is Trump, a figure who seems to inspire people to make threats or take actions both for him and against him. He has long favored the language of violence in his political discourse, encouraging supporters to beat up hecklers, threatening to shoot looters and migrants lacking legal residency status, mocking a near-fatal attack on the husband of the Democratic House speaker and suggesting that a general he deemed disloyal be executed.

While Trump insists his fiery speech to supporters on Jan. 6, 2021, was not responsible for the subsequent ransacking of the Capitol, he resisted pleas from advisers and his own daughter that day to do more to stop the assault. He even suggested that the mob might be right to want to hang his vice president and has since embraced the attackers as patriots whom he may pardon if elected again.

Trump does not pause to reflect on the impact of his own words. Just last week, his false pet-eating accusations against Haitian migrants during his debate with Harris were quickly followed by bomb threats that turned life upside-down in Springfield, Ohio, and he did nothing to discourage them. After 33 bomb threats, Ohio’s governor said Monday that law enforcement would conduct daily sweeps of schools in the town.

Asked by a reporter if he denounced the bomb threats, Trump demurred. “I don’t know what happened with the bomb threats,” he said. “I know that it’s been taken over by illegal migrants, and that’s a terrible thing that happened.”

Trump’s critics have at times employed the language of violence as well, though not as extensively and repeatedly at the highest levels.

The former president’s allies distributed a video compilation online of various Trump opponents saying they would like to punch him in the face or the like. Some of the more extreme voices on social media in the past day have mocked or minimized the close call at the Florida golf course. Trump’s allies often decry what they call Trump Derangement Syndrome, the notion that his critics despise him so much they have lost their minds.

Anger, of course, has long been the animating force of Trump’s time in politics — both the anger he stirs among supporters against his rivals and the anger that he generates among opponents who come to loathe him. Predictions that he might rethink that after he narrowly escaped death in Butler proved ephemeral. By halfway through his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention five days later, he was back to himself.

But it is a measure of how much political violence has become a part of modern American culture — not accepted, perhaps, but more and more expected — that the latest incident may make no more difference than the first. The shock from the shooting in Butler wore off relatively quickly as attention turned to other developments. The shock from this one may not last any longer.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

© 2024 The New York Times Company