America's Bloody Political Culture
Americans in both parties like to think that violence does not belong in our democracy. Unfortunately, it does
An image of the attempt on Trump’s life in Butler, Pennsylvania on July 14, 2024. Image credit: Hadrian/Shutterstock
How do we explain the fact that there have been not one, but two, attempts on former President Donald J. Trump’s life in the last two months? Is it that the country is awash on guns, conspiracy theories, and violent political rhetoric? Is it part and parcel of the national mental health crisis?
We won’t know the answer to these questions for some time, although the capture of yesterday’s would-be assassin will help flesh out our understanding of how a gunman found himself poking a semi-automatic weapon through a hedge at a Florida golf course, waiting for the once and future President to walk by.
Partisans on both sides have radically different responses to the attempts on Trump’s life: Democrats express a relief that he is not dead that many do not feel, while Republicans blame Democrats for these events, because—well, find a problem, a Democrat caused it. Yet partisans on both sides agree on two things, if for very different reasons: that the threats to Trump’s life are political attacks, and that violence aimed at politicians is not normal.
In order: they are right, and wrong. Let’s start with why these attacks are necessarily political.
MAGA world’s arguments are couched in typically deranged and fact-free narratives that make them hard to grapple with strictly as “politics.” Violence against Trump, they argue, originates in linked phenomena: an ongoing “deep state plot” against MAGA, as well as widespread animus towards the Former Guy specifically located in the Democratic Party. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis implied as much by immediately declaring that, despite the fact that the FBI and Secret Service have jurisdiction over federal crimes, Florida will conduct a separate investigation of yesterday’s events. Why? Because “The people deserve the truth about the would-be assassin and how he was able to get within 500 yards of the former president and current GOP nominee.” It need not be said in MAGA world that neither the “deep state” nor a Justice Department in a Democratic administration can deliver “the truth.”
These linked forces, with the addition of “the liberal media,” are what a MAGA politician, spokesperson or social media influencer mean when referring to a mysterious “they” who are persecuting, and even trying to kill, Trump. “They “encompasses all of Trump’s supposed enemies, from the sitting president to MSNBC to scribblers like me, and culprits we haven’t even thought of yet. For example, after the shooting in Butler, Pennsylvania, Republican Vice Presidential nominee JD Vance declared that after having tried to bankrupt and jail Trump, “they” had “tried to kill him.” X is full of accusations against the nameless this “they.”
How “they” incite lethal attacks on Trump, Republican Congressman Mike Waltz (FL-6) argued, was by making Trump seem more extreme dangerous than he really is. “This rhetoric against President Trump, “Waltz said on Fox News after yesterday’s attempted assassination,
this narrative that he will be the next dictator, that he is the next Hitler coming, it has got to stop. Enough is enough. And when you have this narrative coming from the left, from [the] media, from elected officials, even, that Trump has to be stopped by any means necessary, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that these people are being radicalized and taking action like this.
Trump is far more specific. While he also blames “they” for a variety of sins, including wanting to harm his voters and change their children’s gender in the school nurses office, he also blames specific culprits: his opponent, Vice President Harris, and President Joe Biden. During last week’s debate with Vice President Kamala Harris, he specifically blamed her and Biden for the Butler, PA shootings. Yesterday, he blamed them for motivating the shooter in Florida.
Democrats, as we know, are more tethered to reality. Although they agree that these assassination attempts are political violence, they imply that the reason why two different individuals have tried to kill Trump is that he, and other MAGA candidates, have inflamed the political process. Instead of ascribing specific blame, numerous party leaders have taken the opportunity to articulate “political violence” as aberrant to the American democratic tradition. After the Butler shooting, Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer and House Minority leader Hakeem Jeffries quickly condemned the attack as an intrusion on a normal democratic election. Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi took the opportunity to express her gratitude that a man she has every reason to despise was not dead—and to remind Americans that Democrats, specifically her own family, had been the victim of an aspiring MAGA assassin.
What we don’t seem to want to grapple with as a nation is that political violence is uncomfortably frequent in American presidential politics. For example, we love to talk about the peaceful transfer of power, and what we mean is that the United States does not suffer through routine coups d’états. Fair enough. Yet, it is also true that the United States has a fairly high rate of presidential assassination. Five out of the 45 men who have served as President, or around 10%, have been murdered in office. If you add attempted assassinations, that number is much higher: 12, or 26%, of the men who held, or have held, the nation’s highest office has been successfully or unsuccessfully attacked, or visibly plotted against, at least once.
Here’s what that history looks like. After Trump was clipped on the ear by an assassin’s bullet last July, Al Jazeera created a list of twelve assassination attempts in United States history, five of which resulted in death. Four were presidents: Abraham Lincoln (1865), James Garfield (1881), William McKinley (1901), and John F. Kennedy (1963); one was presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy (1968).
In three of these 12 incidents, the victims survived potentially fatal wounds. Theodore Roosevelt, a former president running on the third-party Bull Moose ticket in 1912 at the time of the assassination lived out his days with a bullet lodged in his chest. Alabama Governor George Wallace, who was running for the Democratic nomination in 1972 when shot by Arthur Bremer, spent the rest of his life in a wheelchair. Ronald Reagan underwent two hours of surgery after an assassin’s bullet ricocheted off his armored vehicle and into his lung in 1981. Fox News commenter Bill O’Reilly alleged that it was this trauma that triggered Reagan’s mental decline, although this is unproven.
In only three cases was the object of such a presidential assassination not harmed. In 1933 Franklin Roosevelt was not hit, but the mayor of Chicago who was sitting next to him was killed by a bullet man for the President. Gerald Ford was unsuccessfully attacked by two female members of the Charles Manson gang within 17 days in 1975. In 2005, George W. Bush was sitting on a stage in Tbilisi with the President of Georgia when an assassin tossed a grenade on the stage, but the weapon failed to explode.
Al Jazeera missed one event that should not be overlooked. In 1835, President Andrew Jackson was approached right outside the Capitol by one of the “common men” he championed. With a pistol in each hand, the aspiring assassin pulled one trigger, then the other, only to have both misfire. Jackson then beat the crap out of the guy with a cane before he was arrested
(As an irrelevant aside—it’s probably good that Trump’s most recent assassin was over 500 yards away from him, not only because it gave the Secret Service time to spot him and prevent an attack, but because I could easily see Trump, a legendary Jackson fan, beating the guy to death with his putter.
Another assumption that promotes the mistaken notion that political violence is aberrant is the assumption that presidential assassins are mentally ill. Some are, some aren’t, and many declare explicitly political motives for their actions. Jackson’s assassin was confined to a mental institution, although Old Hickory told anyone who would listen that the guy was an assassin hired by his political enemies. The legal team for Garfield’s assassin, Charles Guiteau, helped to define the modern criminal insanity defense. Deanne Stillman has recently argued that JFK’s assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, suffered from mental illness, most of these assassins claimed overtly political motives. And although they were judged competent to stand trial by the court, it was easy for most people to agree that the two female members of the Charles Manson cult who attacked Gerald Ford were also out of their minds.
Thus, it is unsurprising that when John Hinckley shot Ronald Reagan, his legal team successfully mounted an insanity defense that put their client, not in prison, but in a facility for the mentally ill for an indefinite term: although no other presidential assassin has ever walked out of a prison alive, Hinckley was released in 2022. An interesting aspect of this trial is that forensic psychiatrist Park Dietz supported the government’s case that, although Hinckley was “preoccupied with a number of things including fame, assassinations and [actress] Jodie Foster,” it was “not a sign of serious mental illness." Why? Because Hinckley was aware that he had alternatives to satisfying his obsessions other than assassinating Ronald Reagan.
But the judge rejected Dietz’s argument. Tellingly, an article published in an academic psychiatry journal the following year argued that presidential assassins were, almost by nature, mentally ill. Analyzing the content and handwriting of threatening letters and diaries generated by would-be assassins and intercepted by federal police, the principal investigator concluded that there was “substantial evidence to suggest that most U.S. assassins have been psychotic at the time they attempted to kill their victims and that the most frequently rendered diagnosis was 'paranoid schizophrenia.’”
Yet mental illness and political violence are not mutually exclusive, and two assassination attempts within two months raises the ante for facing the problem head on. We also know that these two attempts against Trump’s life are the tip of the iceberg. As a culture, we are grappling with a surge of threats against public and elected officials at all levels, from town halls to the Supreme Court.
But it is also true that the American political tradition is a violent one, and it’s time for politicians in both parties to recognize that the calls have always come from inside the house.
Short takes:
At The New Republic, editor Michael Tomasky summarized what we know about Donald Trump’s connection with far-right conspiracy theorist/influencer Laura Loomer—who, I have it on background, does not just seem mentally ill; she has a history of mental illness. Loomer is traveling on Trump’s plane with him and Melania is…not, leading to speculation that Loomer and the Former Guy are doing the dirty boogie. Whatever—right? But Loomer is also one of Trump’s hate-whisperer, permitting a “presumption that this influence river is flowing in just one direction implies that if not for Loomer, Trump wouldn’t be entertaining extremist and racist ideas,” Tomasky writes. Trump “has plenty of hateful instincts of his own. But certainly, Loomer makes it all worse. And as long as Trump keeps having her around, and defending her as a `free spirit,’ Democrats and the media should be relentless about the presence of this hatemonger in his orbit.” (September 16, 2024)
Paul Waldman speaks for all of us here at Political Junkie when he writes that the Republican Party’s failure to put a stop to the Trump-Vance ticket’s toxic racism towards members of the Springfield, Ohio community should neither be forgiven or forgotten. Republicans still making excuses “even as Trump and JD Vance descend into the moral sewer their campaign has become, devoted now to no greater goal than stirring up the most poisonous hate imaginable at Haitian immigrants in Ohio (and by extension all non-white immigrants everywhere), an effort in which they have joined forces with neo-Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan,”Waldman writes at his Substack, The Cross Section. “As he has so many times before, Trump is presenting his party with a test, and as they did so many times before, they are failing.” (September 16, 2024)
The Pennsylvania State Supreme Court has upheld a lower court ruling that philosopher Cornel West’s Justice for All party will not be on that state’s presidential line, and counties may now begin printing and mailing paper ballots. “Monday afternoon the state Supreme Court upheld a lower court decision that West, who had sought to run for president as a member of the “Justice for All” party could not be included on November’s ballot,” Kate Bernard reports at The Philadelphia Inquirer. “The Pennsylvania Department of State rejected his candidacy because of missing paperwork, a decision the court affirmed.” RFK Jr. was removed at his own request in August, after he withdrew from the race and endorsed Donald Trump. (September 16, 2024.
Intense piece. I just hope the security for Harris and Walz is tight.
Agreed - political violence is nothing new. Violence evolves from universal human emotions such as hate, jealousy, greed etc. it is as old as time and anyone is capable of it. What appears to be new is the unprecedented direct calls for violence from not only the ex-president, but also his many enablers. They don’t even bother to veil it in any way.