Trump Targeted Again Amid Rising Tide of Political Violence

Politicians and partisan fanatics spur each other to extremes in what they see as a struggle against evil.

If politicians loudly and publicly insist their opponents are existential threats to democracy who seek to impose a dictatorship, they run the risk that people will take them seriously. Particularly unhinged or hate-filled followers may choose to lash out at what they've been warned are dangerous political enemies—even to the point of attempting to assassinate opposition leaders like Donald Trump. Twice.

Trump is guilty of his own overheated rhetoric, of course. But so far, he's been the one on the receiving end of those who take such language seriously. Well, Trump and regular people caught up in political tensions and a rising tide of violence have been on the receiving end. The very real risk is that people who perceive a need for bloody action against candidates and movements who might win the upcoming election will feel more desperately motivated to action once the ballots have been counted.

Familiar Apocalyptic Rhetoric

"@POTUS Your campaign should be called something like KADAF. Keep America democratic and free. Trumps should be MASA …make Americans slaves again master. DEMOCRACY is on the ballot and we cannot lose," Ryan Routh, the more recent of the two would-be assassins who targeted Trump, posted on X earlier this year.

Democracy is on the ballot? That sounds familiar.

"We must be stronger, more determined, and more committed to saving American democracy than MAGA Republicans are to — to destroying American democracy," President Joe Biden insisted in a September 2022 speech ostensibly intended to challenge Trump's demagoguery, but which ended up just offering a different brand of authoritarianism.

That came after he accused Trump supporters of "semi-fascism."

"Donald Trump is a threat to our democracy and fundamental freedoms," Vice President Kamala Harris, now the Democratic presidential candidate, charged in March. She's since repeated such language.

Democrats will respond that Trump started it, and they have a point. Trump is famously nasty. Among his statements are a claim in March that if he doesn't win the election, "we're not going to have a country anymore."

When Harris took over from Biden as their party's standard-bearer, Trump warned that "she will destroy our country in a year," which he followed during his debate with his opponent by warning, "they're the threat to democracy."

But it was Trump who was wounded by one assassin's bullet and targeted by another.

Politics as a Struggle of Good vs. Evil

None of this vicious verbiage is an overt call to violence. But talk of saving democracy or preserving our country presents the normal business of electoral politics as struggles between good and evil. If we take this language seriously, we're not debating taxes and healthcare, we're engaged in Manichean struggle.

"Seekers have mistaken Leviathan for God, the will to power for the state of grace—and, by exalting political action almost literally to heaven, they have succumbed to what might be called the transcendental temptation," former CIA analyst Martin Gurri, author of The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium, recently wrote. "Only politics, they believe, can save the earth."

While everybody is susceptible to the unhealthy desire to search for deeper meaning in political activism, Gurri thinks the "progressive political class" has been especially effective at turning it into "a potent weapon of control." That means particular success in wielding apocalyptic language as a spur to fanatics who imagine themselves as holy warriors against evil. Ryan Routh, who appears to have been unbalanced from the beginning, would have been a likely convert to such a mission.

Political Violence Hurts Regular People

But prominent politicians aren't the only victims. Schools in Springfield, Ohio have been inundated with bomb threats amidst the controversy over the city's sizeable population of Haitian immigrants. In July, an 80-year old man putting up a Trump campaign sign was run over by a politically motivated attacker who later killed himself. Arsonists have targeted Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.), the offices of conservative organizations in Minnesota, and an Ohio church that hosted a drag event, among others.

"Threats against public officials have steadily risen during the last decade," according to a May data review from the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point. "Indeed, in the last six years, the number of individuals who have been arrested at the federal level for making threats has nearly doubled from the previous four years."

We have until November before ballots are finally counted in this election. But that's unlikely to settle matters. Americans live in a state of permanent political campaigning now, forever staring-down the "immoral" and "dishonest" people (as they describe them) across the political divide whom they increasingly despise and would, in many cases, resort to extreme measures to keep out of power.

"One in 5 U.S. adults believe Americans may have to resort to violence to get their own country back on track," PBS reported in April of the results of a PBS NewsHour/NPR/Marist poll.

More Violence To Come

That's not nearly a majority. But it only takes a few nuts with grudges to set things on fire. And that's exactly what a lot of Americans expect to happen. A January CBS News poll found that "half the country expects there to be violence from the side that loses in future elections." That share rose to three-quarters regarding this year's vote in an August Deseret News/Harris X poll.

Elections should never be so important that people anticipate literally warring with their neighbors over the outcomes. If those who are drawn to political power are so dangerous that they threaten "our democracy and fundamental freedoms" or "will destroy our country in a year" and are poised to win on waves of popular support, then far too much power has been concentrated in government. In a free society, you can't guarantee that only angels will run for election. So, government and all of its offices should be stripped of the ability to do so much damage in the hands of the unfit.

Until that happens, mutually loathing factions, prompted by their leaders, will fear and plot against each other's rise to power. That threatens more political violence in the weeks, months, and years to come.