The News
The attempted assassination of former US President Donald Trump at a rally in Pennsylvania on Saturday has been met with bipartisan condemnation.
It’s been 34 years since the last serious attempt on a president’s life on American soil, though there have been at least 15 direct attacks on sitting presidents, presidents-elect, and presidential candidates since the founding of the US, according to the Congressional Research Service. Other politicians have also faced threats to their lives, including in the last 15 years, perhaps most notably former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and Representatives Gabby Gifford and Steve Scalise.
SIGNALS
Political violence in the US is not new, but began rising in 2016
Political violence is a “lethal tradition” in US history, from assassinations of various leaders — Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield, William McKinley, Martin Luther King, Jr., the Kennedy brothers — to the government-sponsored violence of Jim Crow, a historian noted in Foreign Policy. While most political violence in the 1970s was aimed at property, rather than people, such incidents began rising in 2016, around the time of Trump’s first presidential run, a 2023 Reuters investigation found. In the last year or so, politically motivated violence has been largely directed at groups of people and individuals, and most has been associated with right-wing beliefs or conspiracies. The reasons why are difficult to isolate, but rising fears about elections and social grievances could top the list, experts told Reuters.
Calls for unity could dampen criticism of Trump’s policies
Trump’s fiercest critics worry that championing unity over division could risk extending an “implicit pardon” to Trump that covers everything he has ever done as President, a candidate, and private citizen to undermine the rule of law, former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum argued in The Atlantic. Calls for unity might inadvertently be “inscribing Trump into a place in American life that he should have forfeited beyond redemption” given his role in the Jan. 6 Capitol riots. Now, Trump’s opposition must find a way to criticize him and condemn the gunman as “common enemies” to the rule of law and democracy, he argued. Conversely, a fellow at the United States Studies Centre, an Australian research hub, argued that Democrats also need to “tone down” their own rhetoric about Trump’s threat to democracy and refocus on policy differences.