The Very Real Threats Politicians Face

When Jeff Flake woke Sunday morning to news of an attempted political assassination in America, his first thought was not again.

The former Republican senator, who now serves as the U.S. ambassador to Turkey, has had a career haunted by violence. In 2011, his friend Gabby Giffords, a fellow Arizonan then serving in Congress, was shot in the head while talking to constituents outside a Tucson supermarket. A few years later, a gunman opened fire at a park in Virginia where Flake was practicing with other Republicans for the next day’s congressional baseball game. Flake himself was not shot, but he still vividly remembers certain details from that day. Hiding in the dugout as he used a belt to apply a tourniquet to a wounded congressional aide. The sound of the gunshots. The blood on his clothes.

In a phone interview Sunday, Flake told me he couldn’t get those memories out of his head as he watched and rewatched clips of the shooting at Donald Trump’s rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, over the weekend. “That pop pop pop brought it back for me,” Flake said.

In the days following the attempt on Trump’s life, a wide range of leaders and pundits have responded with variations of the same line: “Political violence has no place in America.” As an aspirational statement, it’s a good one. But as a factual assertion, it’s manifestly untrue. The Butler shooting fits an alarming pattern of violence targeting U.S. government officials, as my colleague David A. Graham recently detailed. To hold public office in America today is to know that people could very well try to kill you.

[From the September 2017 issue: Jeff Flake’s gamble]

Political assassinations are hardly a new phenomenon, and anyone who has worked in a congressional office or governor’s mansion can tell you about the protocols they’re taught for dealing with death threats. But when Flake was starting his congressional career in the early 2000s, he used to tell his staff not to worry about such dangers. “I would cavalierly dismiss them and say, ‘Suck it up, this comes with the job,’” he told me. That ended after Giffords was shot. He realized the threat was real, and not just for him but for his staff, his family, even his supporters. The tenor of our national politics—the heightened “temperature,” to use the preferred metaphor of the moment—makes this reality hard to ignore. “I never take it lightly,” he said.

The sheer number of close calls in recent years is similarly hard to ignore. For me, this fact was underscored as I looked back over the political figures I’ve profiled for this magazine and realized that a large share of them have been targeted for violence. There’s Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who had a man planning to kill the judge show up outside his home in Maryland before turning himself into the police at the last minute. There’s former Vice President Mike Pence, who had to be rushed from the U.S. Capitol Building by Secret Service on January 6, 2021, as a violent mob called for his hanging. There’s Senator Mitt Romney, who narrowly escaped that same mob and went on to spend $5,000 a day on private security for his family.

It would be naive to think that this ever-lingering prospect of violence has no effect on the psychology of elected leaders. When Romney spoke to a hostile crowd at the Utah Republican Convention in 2021, he told me, he found himself wondering if he was safe. “There are deranged people among us,” he said. And in Utah, “people carry guns … It only takes one really disturbed person.” When our political leaders live in fear of violence from their own constituents, isn’t it only a matter of time before those fears start to influence governing decisions? Romney told me he personally spoke with Republicans in Congress who wanted to vote for Trump’s impeachment and conviction after January 6, but who chose not to because they feared for their families’ safety.

[Tyler Austin Harper: A legendary American photograph]

The enduring image from the most recent act of political violence in America is likely to be one of defiance—Trump, his face bloodied, his fist raised, bravely facing his supporters moments after bullets had flown at his head. Already, that image is shaping the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. When the nominee appeared triumphantly in the Fiserv Forum on Monday night, a bandage over his right ear, delegates greeted him by raising their fists in solidarity.

But those performances of strength belie the undercurrent of fear many political leaders surely feel in this moment. Flake left elected office in 2019, and has spent the past three years overseas, where he tends to look at the plague of U.S. political violence through a global lens. (He recently announced that he would leave his post in September.) “I was just talking to Turkish friends today—this is not what they expect from the United States,” he told me. “There’s a real sorrow. They can’t look to the U.S. as this stable democracy that rights itself. They’re hoping that it will, but boy, it’s tough right now.”