Kamal Ghorui
Thankfully, the gunman couldn’t get to Trump. Worryingly, political violence is getting to America
From Republican Abraham Lincoln (1865) to Democrat John F Kennedy (1963), four US presidents have been assassinated while in office. But a 2007 Congressional Research Service report documented that, actually, there had been direct assaults on 10 of the 42 persons who had served in this office until then.
A broader definition, including credible plots foiled before execution, or threats serious enough to trigger Secret Service investigations, would put the number of assassination attempts at well over 30.
So, when, after surviving a third such attack in two years, Trump said that his is a “dangerous profession”, he was being bleakly, highly factful.
Still, a distinction should be made between America’s legacy of political violence and the political currents feeding it today.
After all, the country born out of revolutionary conflict, interrupted by a bloody civil war, the 1960s social unrest…is not experiencing present violence as simply a historic feature of the system. Instead, there is a sense of alarm.
Whether it is the man who shot dead Charlie Kirk, or the one who fractured Nancy Pelosi’s husband’s skull with a hammer, these actions are being experienced by Americans as shocking, even cataclysmic.
But also, most importantly, as systemic, as if something has happened to their country. This suggests that political rhetoric has outpaced the violence.
Such is the dehumanisation of political opponents, so vicious is the polarisation, that a feeling of civil war is near-omnipresent in society.
Whether institutions and culture can recalibrate before real violence spreads, and peace is truly shattered, is arguably the central national question about the Trump era.
And it doesn’t cleave to party lines. As the open-source Prosecution Project, tracking US felony criminal cases involving illegal political violence since 1990, underlines, neither the left nor the right, the religious or irreligious, have a monopoly on this hobby.
CNN’s Wolf Blitzer was scarily close to “Shot Fired!” – at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on Saturday night. But as someone who has been to 30 such dinners over the decades, he also said this one had the kind of security he’s never seen before. Securitymaxxing is one way for a society to go.
But another, better way is to reduce the oxygen for radicalisation. Elite cues strongly shape what supporters see as acceptable.
Plus, it’s on them to tackle the real grievance drivers, such as economic insecurity. A lot of human beings unstably carry violence inside them. But any country in which politics incites them to aim it towards political targets should correct course. Or, things can always get worse.
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