The Case for Calming Down

It took several hours to identify the corpse of the man who shot Donald Trump’s ear last weekend and murdered a firefighter in the crowd behind him. During those hours, the fate of the presidential race and perhaps also the world depended on what investigators found. Iran had promised reprisal for Trump’s 2020 assassination of Qassem Soleimani and, according to CNN, had recently redoubled its efforts. If the name of the assassin had come back as distinctively Persian, the United States and Iran might be at war right now. If the assassin turned out to be an antifa agitator, or even just an outspoken Biden-Harris fan, I would worry about Trump fans eager to repay blood with blood.

None of this happened. In fact, the motive and politics of the assassin—a 20-year-old from Bethel Park, Pennsylvania—turned out to be a bit of a riddle. Reports suggest that he was not fanatical about anything. He registered to vote as a Republican. He once gave money through ActBlue, a liberal fundraising site. A professional pollster would have tagged him as a potential “undecided” voter, if he hadn’t just tried to kill one of the candidates. He sounds like a sad, friendless type, a victim of bullies. Maybe his was a case of suicide–by–Secret Service.

If so, that would complicate the claim that the shooting shows we have entered a new age of political violence. There is, granted, some reason to fear that we have. My colleagues David A. Graham and Adrienne LaFrance suggested as much this week, and David Frum wrote that violence has “stained every page of American political history.” The January 6 riot, which included acts of political violence endorsed by Trump himself, are strong evidence in their favor, as was the murder of Heather Heyer at a political rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017. Even one punch thrown in a political brawl, to say nothing of a life taken, is cause for alarm and condemnation.

[From the April 2023 issue: The new anarchy]

I must be this magazine’s house optimist, because even after the weekend’s attempted murder, I remain mostly sanguine. When I read the pages of our recent political history, I am impressed at how lightly blood-spattered they have been. This optimism is a comfy posture, and I recommend it, because it is the accurate reading of the statistics on political violence, and because pessimism is its own enemy, and has a way of encouraging the very doom that it predicts.

If words were deeds, the case that we’re in a new era of political violence would be easy. “There is much, much more heightened rhetoric in the last 10 to 15 years,” Thomas Zeitzoff, a political scientist at American University, told me this week. “It heightens the stakes, and now both Democrats and Republicans see 2024 as the existential election.” A May 2024 CTC Sentinel report by Pete Simi and co-authors found that, from 2013 to 2022, federal cases of threats against public officials rose from 38 a year to 62.

Another colleague, Anne Applebaum, recently called this “the language of assassination.” The language of assassination is still far preferable to actual assassination. In a podcast yesterday, Rachel Kleinfeld of the Carnegie Endowment noted that “America has very little violence right now. We have lots of threats.” (She expressed grave concern that those threats would ripen into something much worse.) Measuring change in actual political violence is not simple, Zeitzoff told me. Assassinations are easy to track, but they are so rare that just one or two will show up as a huge jump in the data. Other violence is hard to classify with precision (sometimes politicians get punched for nonpolitical reasons), and the true count might be obscured because law enforcement varies in its success at busting criminal gangs before they strike. Judging from the Global Terrorism Database, political violence in the U.S. ticked upward slightly in 2020, the last full year on record. But the trend is hardly decisive.

As long as we are working from anecdotes, I come with some of my own. To spend any time at all covering politics overseas, as I have, is to notice that political violence in America, far from being ubiquitous, is extremely rare. My first reporting gigs were in Asia. In 1999, on my first day covering Cambodia, my editor sent me out to cover a political rally and told me that if someone threw a grenade toward the crowd, I should not try to outrun it, because I probably wouldn’t have time. “Instead dive away,” she said. “It might blow off your feet, but it won’t kill you.” In Bangladesh, I was advised to stay off the streets because one party had called a general strike, and if I defied it and drove into central Dhaka, its members would throw bricks at my car and set it on fire. These were normal news days, not exceptional ones. Not once have I attended an American political event where I thought I might have to choose between my life and my extremities.

Latin America is even worse, and in extreme cases the violence reaches levels where even a successful assassination is barely news. In the 2019 electoral season in Colombia, 364 candidates for elected office were physically attacked, and 91 of them were killed, according to one report. Other countries are milder, but in Mexico, political offices are firebombed, and in a bloody campaign in Brazil, then–future President Jair Bolsonaro was stabbed. As for gentle Europe: throughout the ’60s and 70’s, street violence and bombings were commonplace. Terrorists kidnapped and murdered a former Italian prime minister in 1978. Even now, violent street clashes happen in Berlin on a ritualized annual basis. (The upshot of these events is mostly fun and beer drinking and property damage, but see how much fun you have if you try to defend your property.) In 2016, the British parliamentarian Jo Cox was shot and stabbed to death by a white supremacist. Two months ago, the prime minister of Slovakia was shot five times by a man who disagreed with his politics.

I realize that “we aren’t Colombia yet” is hardly reassuring. But it’s not just the quantity of American violence. It’s the quality. In many places, the violence is perpetrated by people closely tied to the movements in whose name they are killing. In the United States, the perpetrators are notable for their social isolation. The man who shot Democratic Representative Gabby Giffords in the face in 2011 was so disturbed, he was barely fit to stand trial. The left-wing activist who shot Republican Representative Steve Scalise was a violent screwball, unaffiliated with any extremist groups. The would-be assassin who shot Trump had social challenges too, and current reporting suggests that those challenges contributed to this crime as much as any political belief. (The best counterexample, where violence was perpetrated by those close to a mainstream group, is the aforementioned January 6 attack on the Capitol.)

[Derek Thompson: Stop pretending you know how this will end]

The data are not as tidy as one might like. “We are definitely missing a good database,” Jacob Ware, who studies terrorism at the Council on Foreign Relations, told me. “The government should be tracking these numbers [of incidents of political violence], but doesn’t have a uniform mechanism or even definition.” Under these circumstances, one should hesitate to state with confidence that America is politically violent and getting worse.

I feel that it isn’t and fear that it is. But I’m also wary of letting that fear guide me. When Trump stood up, in his now-famous bloodied pose, and yelled “Fight,” he did so under what I assume was the reasonable belief that he had been shot by a political opponent who represented a movement—and that their attack was to be met with equal vigor. An unfounded belief that violence has become the coin of the realm of American politics has a way of convincing people that to engage in politics, one must be prepared to engage in combat. We should be cautious about accepting such beliefs, before the data force us to do so.