A political party trafficking in political violence shouldn’t be surprised when it blows back.
To be clear, it should go without saying that political differences should be solved with ballots, not bullets. And that political violence, no matter the target, will only lead to more violence. It’s good that former President Donald Trump survived Saturday’s assassination attempt at his Pennsylvania rally, and the family of former volunteer fire chief Corey Comperatore—who was killed by one of the shooter’s bullets after using his body to shield his wife and daughter—deserves compassion and condolences.
Still, it’s critical to understand that the tragic event in Butler, Pennsylvania is an effect of the root cause: Republicans’ consistent embrace of political violence since Trump rose to power. The attempt on Trump’s life is the direct result of the Republican Party’s decision to exploit violence for political gain.
Violence is Trump and the GOP’s modus operandi
In 2012, Florida man George Zimmerman shot and killed 17 year-old Trayvon Martin, who was on his way home from buying Skittles at a convenience store. The killing of Martin and the acquittal of Zimmerman, who claimed self-defense, is what initially gave birth to the Black Lives Matter movement. In 2016, Zimmerman auctioned off the Kel-Tec PF-9 gun he used to kill Martin for at least $100,000, saying the proceeds would go toward stopping “[2016 Democratic presidential nominee] Hillary Clinton’s anti-firearm rhetoric.” He now autographs Confederate flags and bags of Skittles for fans.
Before Donald Trump even entered politics, he exhibited bloodlust in his hometown of New York by accusing five innocent men of sexually assaulting a woman in Central Park in 1989—something he still refuses to apologize for.
“I want to hate these murderers and I always will,” Trump wrote in the ad, which was headlined: “BRING BACK THE DEATH PENALTY AND BRING BACK OUR POLICE!”
“I am not looking to psychoanalyze or understand them, I am looking to punish them,” he added.
In 2016, as the Republican presidential nominee, Trump suggested “Second Amendment people” could take matters into their own hands to prevent Clinton from appointing federal judges (the Second Amendment of the Constitution is the right to keep and bear arms). This was just the latest iteration of a pattern of violence in Trump’s rally speeches: He also encouraged his supporters to “knock the crap out of” anyone carrying a tomato, after a tomato-thrower in Iowa missed him. And later, he pledged to pay the legal bills of anyone who assaulted protesters at his rallies (before eventually walking it back).
Trump’s lust for violence continued into his presidency. In 2017, he urged police to not “be too nice” when apprehending suspects, and instead encouraged them to be “rough.” Roughly a month later, a neo-Nazi drove a car into a crowd of protesters, killing one and injuring 35 others after a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Trump refused outright condemnation and instead insisted there were “very fine people on both sides.”
In 2018, after Trump’s constant attacks on the media (repeatedly assailing them as “the true enemy of the people”), Trump supporter Cesar Sayoc mailed pipe bombs to several prominent media outlets and high-profile Democrats. Defense lawyers said Sayoc was a Trump “super fan” who viewed Trump as a “surrogate father,” and lived in an “alternate reality” thanks to Trump’s caustic rhetoric about his political enemies.
During the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, Trump called protesters in Minneapolis “thugs,” and ominously tweeted: “When the looting starts, the shooting starts” (Twitter flagged that post for “glorifying violence” almost immediately). That summer, Trump asked then-Defense Secretary Mark Esper about whether he could order the military to open fire on protesters in Washington, DC.
“Can’t you just shoot them?” Trump asked. “Just shoot them in the legs or something?”
That same year, more than a dozen men were arrested as part of a plot to kidnap Michigan Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer. Six arrestees were part of a far-right paramilitary militia group called the Wolverine Watchmen. Nine of the 14 arrested were eventually found guilty, some after accepting plea deals, and others after being convicted by a jury. The plot was hatched in response to Whitmer’s lockdown of the state due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Two weeks after Trump tweeted “LIBERATE MICHIGAN,” armed protesters entered the Michigan State Capitol building. Two of those protesters were later implicated in the kidnapping plot.
Months later, 17 year-old Kyle Rittenhouse opened fire on the streets of Kenosha, Wisconsin with an AR-15 style rifle, killing local residents Joseph Rosenbaum and Gaige Grosskreutz, claiming self-defense. After Rittenhouse was acquitted, he became a folk hero of the far right. In May, he spoke to a large crowd of supporters at the Texas Republican Party Convention.
And of course, Trump’s embrace of political violence hit a new low on January 6, 2021. During a speech to his supporters, the lame-duck president encouraged them to “go to the Capitol” and “fight like hell” or else they’re “not going to have a country anymore.” Hours later, Trump supporters—who built a gallows outside of the Capitol—were roaming the halls of Congress and chanting “hang Mike Pence.” At the time, Trump tweeted that Pence “didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done,” regarding his hopes that Pence would refuse to allow the certification of the 2020 Electoral College vote count in Congress.
Even as a private citizen, the former president didn’t relent in his calls for and celebration of political violence. After Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s (D-California) husband, Paul, was the victim of a grisly hammer attack by a home invader in 2022, Trump joked about it in a 2023 speech to supporters in California.
“We’ll stand up to crazy Nancy Pelosi, who ruined San Francisco—how’s her husband doing, anybody know?” Trump said at the 2023 California Republican Convention. “And she’s against building a wall at our border, even though she has a wall around her house—which obviously didn’t do a very good job.”
Also in 2023, Trump wrote on social media that Gen. Mark Milley, who was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the last half of his presidency, should have been executed for treason. That comment came after a report that Milley called his Chinese counterpart, Li Zuocheng, to assure him of the US’ stability despite Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election.
“This is an act so egregious that, in times gone by, the punishment would have been DEATH,” Trump wrote.
During Trump’s first official rally of his third campaign for the presidency in Waco, Texas last year, he declared to the crowd: “I am your retribution.” He also declared in subsequent campaign speeches that his political opponents on the left were “vermin,” and that immigrants—specifically those from Africa and Asia—were “poisoning the blood of our country.” NBC pointed out that his “blood poisoning” remark was almost a verbatim quote from Adolf Hitler’s manifesto. And in March, he suggested that there would be a “bloodbath” if he lost the 2024 election. He even posted a video to his Truth Social account of a truck bearing Trump flags that had a sticker on its bed made to look as if President Joe Biden was bound and gagged.
“This image from Donald Trump is the type of crap you post when you’re calling for a bloodbath or when you tell the Proud Boys to ‘stand back and stand by,’” Biden campaign communications director Michael Tyler said, referencing a far-right gang that was present during the 2021 attack on the Capitol.
“Trump is regularly inciting political violence and it’s time people take him seriously – just ask the Capitol police officers who were attacked protecting our democracy on January 6,” he added.
Despite his claims of being pro-law enforcement, Trump has also indirectly celebrated attacks on U.S. Capitol Police Department officers by promising to pardon January 6 insurrectionists currently serving time for assaulting police officers. The former president has repeatedly been in contact with Micki Witthoeft, whose daughter, Ashli Babbitt, broke past several police lines and was fatally shot after attempting to jump through a window at lawmakers sheltering in place just feet away.
In March, the Washington Post reported that Trump called Witthoeft to discuss “setting these guys free when he gets in,” and to pass along the message to jailed January 6 rioters “that they’re on his mind, and when he gets in they’ll get out.”
Republicans encourage a self-destructive cycle of political violence
As New York magazine columnist Jonathan Chait recently wrote, Trump surviving his assassination attempt on Saturday was fortunate both for him and for the movement to stop him. He argued that the United States’ reliance on democracy and the rule of law is what separates it from other countries that are plagued by “endemic political violence, corruption, coups, [and] authoritarianism,” and that “maintaining the expectations of social peace and the rule of law is one of the most important tasks in American politics.”
“Political violence is a tool favored by radical causes. Assassination attempts of authoritarian figures, successful or unsuccessful, generally do not prevent authoritarianism. They enable it,” he wrote. “Even by the coldest calculation, murdering Trump would not protect American democracy, because the threat of right-wing authoritarianism would not die with him. Had he been killed, his martyrdom would have only fueled his movement’s will to power.”
Chait’s point is correct in that the far-right MAGA movement will outlive the 78 year-old Trump. There are already numerous powerful figures in the United States who have indicated a willingness to use violence to accomplish their political objectives. North Carolina Republican Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson—who is the GOP’s 2024 nominee for governor in the Tar Heel State—recently said during a campaign speech that “some folks need killing.”
Even behind-the-scenes figures in the GOP have shown a thirst for political violence. During a July interview, Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts—one of the chief architects of the far-right authoritarian Project 2025 playbook—boasted that his side is currently “in the process of taking this country back.” He also notably suggested that dissenters could be met with violence in a second Trump term.
“I come full circle on this response and just want to encourage you with some substance that we are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be,” he said.
The attempted shooting of Trump should be viewed in the broader context of America’s epidemic of public mass shootings, in particular those carried out by gunmen with a political agenda:
- In 2015, a white supremacist gunned down nine people at the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina. From behind bars, he later said he wanted it to be “crystal clear” that he had “no regrets” about the murders.
- In 2017, a man who had a history of posting anti-Semitic screeds on a far-right app killed 11 people at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
- That same year, then-House Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R-Louisiana) was critically injured by a gunman with antipathy toward Trump and the GOP.
- In 2019, a man killed 20 people at a Walmart near El Paso, Texas, after posting a manifesto describing illegal border crossings as an “invasion.” Trump has consistently used that same term when describing immigration in the past.
- In 2022, a gunman who subscribed to the racist “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory—which alleges that shadowy forces are attempting to “replace” whites as the demographic majority by filling America with Black and Brown immigrants—killed 10 people at a grocery store in a predominantly Black neighborhood in Buffalo, New York.
In each of these mass shootings, the perpetrator was able to purchase his gun legally (the Charleston shooter was able to buy his gun due to a failure in the background check system). Democrats tried and failed to pass bills to regulate gun purchases and sales after almost each of these instances due to Republican opposition.
The most significant gun reform legislation in decades was only signed into law in 2022, after an 18 year-old killed 19 students and two teachers at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. Some of his victims were as young as nine years old. And despite the significance of the bill, it still wouldn’t have prevented the shooter from buying his weapon.
The attempt on Trump’s life is, in a way, the chickens coming home to roost for Republicans and the MAGA movement. Given Trump’s lengthy record of celebrating political violence, America’s pattern of politically motivated mass shootings—and Republican lawmakers’ refusal to allow passage on any bill aimed at stopping them—it was only a matter of time before the barrel of a weapon was pointed back at them. The surest way to stop the cycle of political violence is to defeat the party that encourages it. And this defeat must come via democracy and the rule of law, not with guns and bullets.
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