The attempted assassination of Donald Trump could be the moment that pulls America back from the edge—but it isn’t likely to be.
For the past several years, American politics have heated to a rolling boil. Members of Congress have been shot, an intruder attacked the House speaker’s husband in their home with a hammer, and a mob stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. Political violence is not new. Yet this weekend, when former President Donald Trump was shot at during a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania—an apparent assassination attempt that left one person dead and two others injured—it felt as if the kettle had boiled over.
In the immediate aftermath of the shooting, some officials across the political spectrum called for de-escalation. American politics have grown too pitched, they argued, and it is time to turn down the temperature.
The incident has turned a mirror on America. How did we get here? How true are the claims, as President Joe Biden put it in the immediate aftermath of the shooting, that “this is not who we are”? What does history tell us about the necessary steps to reclaim a peaceful democracy and retreat from what seems to be the point of no return?
Listen to the conversation here:
(Music)
News Archival: Oh we see Donald Trump at a rally in Pennsylvania. You can see his face. There’s blood coming from his ear. Not exactly sure what’s happened, but those are Secret Service agents trying to pull Donald Trump off the stage.
News Archival: The FBI continues to search for a motive in the shooting. All of this comes as the Republican National Convention begins today in Milwaukee.
President Joe Biden: A former president was shot. An American citizen was killed, while simply exercising the freedom to support the candidate of his choosing. We cannot—we must not—go down this road in America
Adam Harris: This Saturday, a gunman opened fire at a Trump rally in Pennsylvania, injuring candidate and former President Donald Trump, killing one person, and critically injuring two others.
We’re still learning details about the gunman himself and how people react to this horrible event.
And with me to talk about this distressing moment in American politics and history are two Atlantic voices.
One is staff writer and historian Anne Applebaum. Hello, Anne.
Anne Applebaum: Greetings.
Adrienne LaFrance: Hey Adam.
Applebaum: I’ve thought quite a lot about the normalization of violence.
There was an attempt to kidnap Nancy Pelosi.
The attacker used a hammer to attack her husband, but had meant to reach her.
During the January 6th events, there were calls for the murder of Mike Pence.
Somebody had a noose there ready for him. It’s hard to know how serious that was, but it was certainly—the language of assassination was present. And then there was also an attempt—however serious, still hard to tell—to kidnap and assassinate the governor of Michigan, Gretchen Whitmer.
So we’re actually in a moment when the normalization of violence, to use that phrase again, is part of the culture. And I should say it’s not only famous people, it’s election officials. It’s ordinary, low-level, local politicians. The idea that violence is an okay way to express your political opinion is much more widespread now than it was even just a few years ago.
Harris: And Adrienne, you know, responding to that, thinking about these previous events that we’ve seen even in this election cycle. In a cover story about extremism last year, you cited a 2022 UC Davis poll that found one in five Americans believed that political violence would be at least sometimes justified.
So what does this most recent instance say about the undercurrent of political violence in America?
LaFrance: I think Anne is exactly right that the signs of a society becoming more comfortable with political violence have been all around us for a while now, concerningly. It’s terrible. You mentioned the UC Davis study. They found a small but substantial percentage of Americans believe that lethal violence is justified to get to their preferred political ends.
You see more Americans bringing weapons to political protests in recent years, political aggression often expressed in the rhetoric of war, the building of political identities around hatred for the other or hatred of one’s political foes rather than articulation of whatever value someone might have.
So this has been in the air—in addition to the concrete examples that Anne provided of actual violence—anyone who tracks this has been warning for years that we’re in it and that it’s getting worse.
Harris: And you mentioned something that—thinking about weapons and how guns factor into all of this—what is the sort of ramping up of access to firearms meant for the forms that political violence can take in American society?
LaFrance: One expert who I talked to in recent years—you know, I had been asking about where we should anticipate there to be violence—because the nature of political discourse is so dispersed. Often you hear people invoke the possibility of another civil war. And for Americans, I think you think of the civil war of the 19th century, understandably. But the kind of fight we’re having politically is different today. It’s just the way society is organized is different. And this person that I asked—I had asked where should we look for the threats of violence?—and I remember more than one expert telling me that it’s likely to be in places where there’s already militia groups emerging, where people who do disagree strongly with one another bump up against one another, where there’s heightened partisanship, and in particular swing states.
So the states that came up again and again in those conversations were Michigan, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Arizona. And so you know, I think guns are broadly available in America, generally, but with an incident like this, you have to ask about access to the weapon that was used.
Harris: And so as Adrienne mentioned, we often bring up this idea of a civil war, kind of around when we’re thinking about political violence, because that’s our sort of touchstone example. But is that the right way to be thinking about political violence in America?
I think the better idea of what could happen here is something that looks more like civic breakdown and a really good example might be Northern Ireland. So Northern Ireland was a very, very bitterly divided community in which people literally had different identities.
