A question that seems to be on everyone’s mind after the third assassination attempt on President Trump on Saturday is whether the country has entered into a new, dangerous phase of political violence, and what that would mean for the country.
I talked with Sean Westwood, a professor of government at Dartmouth College and fellow at the Hoover Institution who tracks acts of violence and the reaction to them. Our conversation has been edited for clarity and length.
Beyond the attempts on President Trump, there were also the assassinations last year of Charlie Kirk, the conservative activist, and Melissa Hortman, a Democratic state legislator in Minnesota. Is political violence worse now?
If you want to contextualize political violence today, we just have to look to the past. If we are looking at the period from 1865 to 1901, three of the nine presidents were assassinated. A comparable rate today would mean that we would have lost two or three sitting presidents since the late 1980s. It’s also the case that in the ’60s and ’70s, there were the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr., John F. Kennedy and Robert Kennedy, and days with multiple bombings by radical domestic groups.
That’s just not what we’ve seen in last two decades. So, we have a myopia about political violence that seems to allow us to only consider a decade or so of the past when we’re trying to think about how bad things are today.
What does that tell us about the country now?
We should be certainly very worried about political violence and its destabilizing effect, but the country has seen far worse and survived. Part of our doom loop is not necessarily the political violence itself, but the narrative of democratic collapse that comes along with it. And history tells us that isolated incidents of political violence — even the assassination of elected officials or presidents — does not lead to the end of the Republic.
How is political violence today different from the 1960s? Are the perpetrators themselves different? For example, Cole Tomas Allen, the man who was charged in the latest assassination attempt — put him in historical context.
In the 1960s and ’70s, attacks largely came from organized groups like the Weather Underground and the Black Panthers. There was structure, there was coherence, there was leadership. Today, there just aren’t networks premised on spreading violence across the country.
The individuals who commit these acts are lone wolves. Largely mentally ill, largely male, largely younger. The thing that seems to connect them is not ideology — it’s anger. Most do not leave a manifesto. We’re left to reconstruct it from their internet history, from their social media, from text messages with friends.
A really good example is Thomas Crooks, the first one to try to assassinate President Trump. He was searching for candidates on both sides of the aisle. He just seemed to be lashing out against society. So in that way, Cole Tomas Allen is a bit of an outlier because he did provide a clear explanation for his actions.
You’ve been tracking Americans’ views on political violence. Has our political divide affected how we see it?
The really fascinating thing is that we didn’t even start thinking about support for political violence until about 2016. It wasn’t something that entered the academic debate. So we cannot look at survey data and say today it is worse or better than it was in the ’60s and ’70s. We just don’t have those data.
But we can say that there is not a huge uptick in support for political violence since I’ve been tracking it over the past five years. Numbers vary by study and how they ask the question, but ours has remained basically steady, at around 2 percent. And that is true for both Republicans and Democrats.
In the aftermath of Trump’s first assassination attempt in 2024, we found something surprising — that Democratic support for political violence remained essentially flat, but support among Republicans went to near zero. There was no desire among the public for retribution.
There does seem to be this small subgroup of Americans who endorse or support or tolerate violence, regardless of motivation. So it’s not the case that our modern politics are somehow moving nonviolent people to be violent. It’s moving violent people to be willing to tolerate political violence.
Do Americans see it as a threat to the country?
We asked individuals if political violence is a bigger threat than a number of other issues facing the country. And 73 percent of Americans say political violence is a greater threat than the risk of a future pandemic, 67 percent say it’s a greater threat than the growing influence of China, 66 percent say that it’s greater threat than the effects of climate change.
It’s absolutely terrifying how miscalibrated Americans are.
What does that mean for the country?
This means that politicians are able to exploit that fear for their own gain. After the assassination of Charlie Kirk, Trump argued for the suppression of civil liberties, arguing for the termination of university faculty, arguing for suppression of speech. And that message resonated among Americans. After the assassination, 36 percent of Americans thought that tenured professors should be fired for celebrating or justifying violence on social media. That’s 60 percent of Republicans and 10 percent of Democrats.
But could political violence affect the stability of the country?
If we’re looking at the magnitude of the problem, it’s not political violence that’s destabilizing our country.
The number of incidents of political violence is small, a couple of dozen, maybe three dozen incidents over the four years ending in 2024. But over the same period, we’ve had more than 9,000 religious hate crimes — about 5,700 were antisemitic — and more than 25,000 racial hate crimes.
I would strongly argue that it’s these other cleavages, these other acts of violence that are hurting us.
But aren’t those crimes also political?
If we’re truly worried about political violence, we need to focus on crimes with a motivation of politics or political affiliation. The calibration has to be pretty precise between the motivation for the violence and our response to it. I’m not trying to dismiss those acts of violence, but just say that we can make fundamentally incorrect inferences about what we as a society need to do.
Essentially, we’re laundering other forms of hatred through politics, if we don’t adopt a very precise definition.
Ruth Igielnik contributed reporting.
