The apparent assassination attempt on Donald Trump, evidently carried out by a lone shooter at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, killed one spectator and severely injured several others. The shooter is also dead. The former president himself suffered a minor injury to his right ear, and has been discharged from hospital. While little is known so far about the shooter and his motivations, the incident was a grim reminder of the new era of intensified political violence in which we are living.
There has long been violence in American politics. The Democratic congresswoman Gabby Giffords was injured in a mass shooting at a constituent event in Arizona in 2011; President Reagan survived an assassination attempt in 1981, carried out by a stalker of the actor Jodie Foster. Black Americans have faced violent oppression when attempting to exercise the franchise, which for decades was kept a white-only privilege throughout much of the country not only through the cold calculation of law but through the bloody use of force.
Trump’s own authoritarian politics have been accompanied by bigotry, virulent political tribalism, and a willingness to allow his preferences to be enforced and his enemies punished through physical violence. His rallies, for instance, have been sites of violence since his first campaign for the presidency in 2016, when supporters would frequently attack protesters and members of the media.
Trump supporters have long taken it upon themselves to enact vigilante political violence against his enemies. In 2018, a Florida-based Trump supporter, Cesar Sayoc, conducted a terror campaign in which he mailed bombs to critics of President Trump, including Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, John Brennan, Robert De Niro, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Joe Biden. And in 2022, a deranged Trump supporter, David DePape, broke into then House speaker Nancy Pelosi’s San Francisco home and beat her husband, Paul Pelosi, in the head with a hammer.
Trump’s enthusiasm for a brutish and at times outright violent politics of domination appears to be infectious, and has spawned imitators throughout the Republican party: in 2018, then representative Greg Gianforte, of Montana, was charged with assault in the midst of his congressional reelection campaign after body-slamming a reporter, a move that Trump praised. “Any guy who can do a body slam, he is my type!” Trump said. (Gianforte pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor assault charge, and has since become Montana’s governor.)
All that is not including the January 6 attack on the Capitol, in which an angry, violent mob of Trump supporters stormed Congress in an attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election – where they threatened to kidnap and attack members of congress and chanted that they would hang Trump’s own vice-president Mike Pence.
Trump’s influence – and, at times, his express direction – has arguably made political violence more central, more frequent, and more bloody a force in American politics. What has changed now, with this shooting at a Trump rally, is only that it seems to have been the first time that this kind of violence has been directed at him.
What happens next could be very dangerous. After Trump ducked to avoid the bullets, he was immediately surrounded by Secret Service agents, who closely surrounded him as a human shield. But he rose from the stage, apparently in defiance of their wishes, to raise a fist in the air and yell “Fight!”, Trump was defiant, and calling for revenge. The risk of vigilante violence by Trump supporters, meant to avenge their leader or punish his perceived enemies, will be high. There is no sign that Trump or his surrogates will disavow this, or make any effort to call it off. And why would they? They never have before.
Before information about the shooter had even been made public, Trump’s supporters were blaming Biden for the attack. “The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs,” tweeted JD Vance, an Ohio senator and Trump’s most sycophantic vice-presidential hopeful. “That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.”
Republican Mike Collins, of Georgia, was even more direct, accusing President Biden of ordering the assassination of his rival. “Joe Biden sent the orders,” he wrote. There was no solemnity at the assassination attempt, no sombre reflection on how far America has fallen. There was only grubby, single-minded self-interest, a rush to benefit from the violence as much as possible.
The Democrats, meanwhile, have not been playing by the new rules. Nearly every nationally prominent Democratic party figure issued a statement expressing gratitude for Trump’s safety, and saying that violence has no place in our politics. It’s a wishful statement, not an accurate one: violence is now a central part of American political life, and we will not soon be rid of it.
Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist
