“Killer, killer, killer, killer,” Donald Trump shouted as he resurfaced after being shot. He called for violence in a climate of extreme political tension that has been building since the campaign that brought him to the White House in 2016. It reached a point of no return with the attack on the Capitol, where he himself addressed his followers. He lost the last election with the intention of preventing President Joe Biden from taking office.
The United States is facing the largest sustained increase in political violence since the 1970s: Since the attempted takeover of the Capitol, there have been 14 deadly political attacks, 13 of them by an assailant with clear right-wing leanings, Reuters reported.
Last November, a year before the election, there were 213 incidents of political violence in the past three years, killing at least 39 people in the country. However, the current resurgence of political violence in the United States takes a very different form and purpose than it did in the 1970s.
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The attackers were traditionally from the far left, and attacked administrative buildings, often empty because it was nighttime or after being evacuated with a bomb warning, and the goal was to influence the political decision-making process, not to kill people, according to the agency.
However, after nearly five decades of political attacks becoming more sporadic in the country, this surge in violence is mostly coming from the far right and is directed directly at people in order to kill them.
While the last president to be assassinated was Ronald Reagan in 1981, attempts on politicians’ lives have been on the rise in recent decades. One of the most notable recent attacks was against former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat, whose husband, Paul, was beaten in their San Francisco home by an assailant who was looking for her just two years ago.
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The hard-line wing of Trump supporters has been dedicated to intimidating Democrats, even front-runners, since his election. In 2018, a vocal Trump supporter based in Florida, then identified as Cesar Sayoc, sent out stunning letters to critics of the then-president, including Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Joe Biden. Even the actor Robert De Niro, an open Democrat.
In this climate of intense polarization, violence has been repeated—though much less frequently—on the other side of the political spectrum. In the Republican caucus, Republican Majority Leader Steve Scalise was nearly killed in a 2017 mass shooting at a Republican baseball team outside Washington. Also in the judiciary, Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, a Trump appointee, was allegedly targeted for murder by a man who approached his Maryland home just a few feet away in the middle of the night.
“There will be a bloodbath.”
Despite being president, Trump continues to present himself as an outsider coming to fix a broken political, economic and social system, with a declared war on what he calls “political correctness,” which often refers to basic rights, and calls for violence when he sees fit.
The verbal escalation as he entered the political fray was remarkable: from the explicit xenophobic, racist and sexist statements of his first campaign, fueled by false data, to the recent warning that there would be a “bloodbath” if he took office. He declared himself the loser of the November election, after calling the previous presidential election “rigged.”
That was the impetus for the attack on the Capitol, which left five people dead. Among the wounded were 174 officers, five of whom committed suicide in the months that followed. A grand jury indicted Trump on three criminal charges just a year ago. But after several appeals by the defense, the Supreme Court kept the case in limbo, granting him partial immunity.
Since then, the United States has been carrying a collective trauma, the same trauma that led Trump to become the victim of a cycle of violence that he himself fueled.
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