Editor’s note: This essay was originally published on July 19, 2024; we are republishing it today due to the direct relevance to recent events. Readers may also be interested in a Just Security podcast interview with Rachel Kleinfeld.
Around the country, people are concerned that the attempted assassination of Donald Trump will ripple in destabilizing ways, perhaps even leading to further violence in the United States. Drawing on more than a decade of work in democracy, security, and political violence, and a decade more on U.S. politics, I consider how this moment in the United States fits into trends of political violence – and what might be done to reduce the risk of escalation. Political leaders, political parties, Congress, the judiciary, and perhaps most important of all, the American people ourselves, all have a role to play to reduce tension and bring the country towards a steadier path, if we choose it.
There Won’t Be a Civil War…
The fear that the assassination attempt will escalate violence, while understandable, is unfounded. True, there was a spike in discussion of civil war immediately following the shooting. While some of that is not threats, but concerned discussion such as this piece, other mentions were the result of conspiracies proposed in the hours immediately after the shooting, suggesting all manner of inside job and perpetrator possibilities.
Yet civil wars are not determined by how angry a populace is, or even how polarized. And luckily they are also not correlated with how armed people are – otherwise, the United States would have been in continuous civil conflict for decades, given that it has more guns in private hands than are held by all of the world’s militaries, combined.
They tend to turn on how strong institutions are, particularly whether security forces remain neutral in their enforcement of the rule of law, or pick a side and become brutal. The United States has problems with its law enforcement bodies, but its military is highly professional. The country has already been facing – and is likely to continue to witness – far, far too much political violence, mass shootings, and hate-fueled violence, for any nation of its wealth and level of democracy (more on all those later). But the United States is not about to have a civil war in the 1860s style, nor anything approaching what has recently engulfed Ethiopia, Sudan, South Sudan, Syria, or other recent examples anytime soon.
Another reason for calming concerns of violent escalation right now is that Trump is actually not very able these days to mobilize people en masse for offline action. That is likely to change over time, as his campaign picks up. And he has shown an ongoing ability to generate violence against particular targets via his social media posts, getting judges, juries, and witnesses in his trials targeted for threats and swatting attempts over and over again.
But when Trump attempted to drum up angry crowds with his social media during his recent legal troubles, he repeatedly failed. Many of those who lurk on far-right corners of the web are distrustful, fearing that calls for violence are entrapment attempts from FBI agents or otherwise traps. And despite his recent rhetoric about the January 6th “martyrs,” many who support those individuals blame Trump for not doing something more concrete – like pardoning them during his presidency, or paying their legal bills.
In addition, the vast majority of political violence these days is carried out by individuals who radicalize thanks to loose online communities of like-mind, and do not belong to an organized offline group or even an online membership-based group. Many mix ideologies and groups, moving between sites about school shooters, misogynistic entitlement, and cultural conservativism, for instance, cobbling a sort of stew of disgruntlement and violence. This may be the case for Trump’s shooter, who appears to have been active on message boards, though any ideological motive remains murky.
That is bad news in many ways: groups actually tend to commit less violence because they hold each other back; leaders are concerned about repercussions and tend to be less violent than their followers; and groups are easier to infiltrate by law enforcement as America saw during the unraveling of the kidnapping attempt against Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer. But it is good news from the perspective of a real civil war: it’s hard to organize warfare with no nucleus around which to build.
Finally, the United States seems to have lucked out. Given the escalation of violent threats and the occasional cases of actual violence in recent years, an attempt against a presidential candidate should not be unexpected. But the country is fortunate that the attempt was made by a person who, at least now, appears to be a disturbed 20-year-old with no clear political leaning – a registered Republican who had once made a small donation to a progressive organization – and who had photos of both Joe Biden and Donald Trump on his phone.
The fact that this was the profile of the perpetrator is also, actually, unsurprising. Presidential assassination attempts in America (of which there are sadly enough to have a strong sample) are often the work of people shouldering personal disturbances, grievances, and desires for notoriety rather than political ideologues. Remember that Ronald Reagan’s shooter was attempting to impress a young actress.
But the Tinder Has Been Lain
Nevertheless, it is lucky this appears to be one of the less ideologically-charged events. Had the shooter been a strong Democratic partisan – or had the motive been murky but the shot hit its mark – the United States would be in a very different moment. Had Trump been killed, or had his attacker been clearly of the left, it is easy to imagine violent armed rallies spreading around the country, conspiracy-fueled militia forces attacking government targets, and individuals committing murders or mass shootings for partisan reasons.
While this would not be the same as civil war (and the difference really matters if you care about, say, living through it), it would likely have looked something like a combination of the riots that roiled the country in the 1960s, mixed with anti-federal-government violence of the sort that gained ground among militias and sovereign citizen movements in the 1990s, and the mass shootings that have desecrated the 2000s, all mixed together.
The long tail of the conspiracy theories that would have accompanied this violence may well have caused such guerilla warfare and redoubts of localized violence to burn for a very long time, much as the violence of the 1960s continued to roil the country through the 1970s. And heavy-handed state attempts to quell the unrest may have led to a more repressive government being accepted by many Americans as the price for greater safety.
This potentially terrifying vision, unveiled momentarily by a near-miss, is the real worry. The United States is a forest fire waiting to happen, where the wood stands dry as kindling and a relentless sun beats down day after day. It could ignite at a lightning strike – or merely a tossed cigarette.
A Pivot Moment, or More Institutional Decay?
Violence is by no means inevitable. In fact, the assassination attempt itself could be used to make major, de-escalatory change.
It would have been ideal for Trump to use the platform the campaign gives him to speak out against political violence. No single human being has more power to change the trajectory of the country than Trump himself. People follow their leaders, looking to them for what behavior is socially acceptable and will merit inclusion in the in-group. Research is unequivocal that one of the most effective ways to bring down the justification of violence (though not always violence itself) is for leaders to speak against it. Conversely, when Kyle Rittenhouse gets speaking tour invitations, it sends a strong message in the opposite direction.
A speech against violence from the top leader of the right, as Biden made, would provide permission for followers to take a breath. Imagine if such a speech had been the headline of the Republican Convention, affording other Republican officials the chance to echo the sentiments, making statements as Bill Clinton and Barack Obama have done. With safety in numbers, they could have reset what is normal for a large majority of their followers.
Instead, Trump offered a few unusually subdued minutes on unity, capitalized on the Almighty’s unique protection of him, and then returned to critiques of “Crazy” Nancy Pelosi and an immigrant “invasion” – the sort of dehumanizing language that invites violence. And, of course, he anointed J.D. Vance as his vice presidential pick, one of the few politicians irresponsible enough to immediately and erroneously blame Democrats for the attack when no one had any idea. Even if Trump chooses to act more statesmanlike, his campaign apparatus has chosen an attack dog in his stead who seems willing to say what might intensify his power, regardless of the violence that could engulf the country.
The U.S. legislature could also rise to the occasion. The power of Congress has been shrinking in recent decades compared to its leading role in domestic policy making in the mid-20th century. But it could pass strong laws to penalize perpetrators of political violence, provide greater support for candidates facing intimidation, and allocate adequate funds to the Department of Justice to enforce such provisions – as it did in the years after the Civil War with legislation such as the Ku Klux Klan Act, making racist terror a federal crime, and in the civil rights era when it made voter intimidation illegal at the federal level.
There has been some talk of pushing funding for candidate security – but so far, only that. However, the House did manage to strip Marjorie Taylor Greene of her committee assignments after she supported the execution of Democrats – though only eleven Republicans joined the Democrats on the vote. The idea of Congress rising to the occasion to protect its own Members and other politicians is not impossible, particularly if they felt they had cover from a newly unifying Trump.
Parties could also help: They could craft new rules regarding acceptably non-violent speech among candidates who wished to benefit from PAC funds they influenced, or use the removal of Congressional positions to enforce norms of non-violent and non-extremist conduct. For instance, they could have punished Representatives Paul Gosar, Steven King, and Marjorie Taylor Greene after each spoke at a rally organized by white supremacists, or could do so against Members in the future. Instead, the Republican Party has primaried deeply conservative Members such as Liz Cheney for speaking against political violence. But again, things could change with permission from party leaders.
The Democratic Party has its own troubles – though not equivalent, they have long held themselves as the party of truth and democracy. Those claims have been harder to stomach for millions of voters, after watching leaders try to deny the hapless state of the President despite what they had seen. Democrats with any scrap of influence have spoken in droves – and rather than getting forced out of the party, as Republicans did to Never Trumpers, the party may be on a path to righting the ship, regaining trust, and showing that voter sentiment matters. Being able to make such change at the top, as well as taking actions against their own, such as with calls for Senator Robert Menendez (D-NJ) to resign apparently being heeded, would go a long way towards showing the American people what it looks like for a party to police itself and work for democracy and the rule of law.
In most countries facing democratic degradation, courts play a crucial role in shoring up institutional guardrails. In Brazil, for instance, the Supreme Court (which operates within a system that gives courts more investigative powers than the United States’) took upon itself the ability to initiate investigations in order to look into the January 2023 riot by Bolsonaro supporters that ransacked their Congress, Presidential Palace, and Supreme Court. Colombia’s court blocked popular president Alvaro Uribe’s attempt to amend the constitution to run for a third term.
In the United States, by contrast, the Supreme Court just provided previously unimaginable scope for immunity for a president; reduced the ability to charge those who violated the Capitol building on January 6th for disrupting an official hearing; and allocated to the courts the power to make expert judgments on technical rules that had previously belonged to federal agencies.
While Democrats decry these and other rulings, many Republicans feel that the courts have been weaponized to attack Trump and those around him. Prior to the recent Supreme Court decisions, 7 in 10 Americans – including 50 percent of Republicans – told surveyors that the Supreme Court was more influenced by ideology than serving as fair and impartial checks on the other branches of government. It is hard to imagine public trust has grown subsequently – or if it has grown for Republicans, it likely has weakened for Democrats, creating a problem of polarized trust in the judiciary that is in some ways even more problematic than simply its diminution.
The weakening of each guardrail of democracy, on its own, would be worrying. The cracks appearing in so many of them at the time when a party faction is pushing so hard against them is potentially devastating. Democracies have few ways to resolve differences except through parties aggregating interests, legislatures logrolling and compromising, and courts and elections providing agreed upon processes for choosing a winner. When all these fail at once – what is left to solve the disagreements inherent among 333 million Americans, but naked power and force?
The American People
So it comes to the American people to rise to the occasion. I once was speaking to Jeremy Rosner, of the polling firm Greenberg, Quinlan, Rosner, which had played a crucial role in helping Nelson Mandela win his election in South Africa, and beating the Pinochet dictatorship to enable democracy to return to Chile, among other successes. I told him that I had just been speaking to Albania’s “Mjafte!” party – exclamation mark included – which meant “Enough!” “They are all ‘Enough!’” he exclaimed, waving a hand to include all the color revolutions and efforts to revitalize democracies around the world at that high point in the early 2000s.
Perhaps it is time for an “Enough!” movement for America. Instead of watching the car drive off a cliff, as if someone else were inside, we could recognize that we are all passengers heading towards the precipice. And that we need to take the wheel, because no one else is going to save us.
The rate of political violence has gone down in the United States many times before, and it can again. In fact, violence trajectories can decline quite quickly. The U.S. murder rate, for example, hit its greatest one year increase in over a century in 2020 under Trump, but has fallen at one of the fastest rates recorded for the last two years. Political trends can peter out with equal alacrity – consider how McCarthyism was punctured after a peer finally stood up to the bullying and reminded the Senator of that uniquely powerful force: social shame.
Americans are overwhelmingly against political violence. Despite poor polling suggesting that larger numbers are positively inclined – language asking people whether they ever justify political violence generates large numbers by including people who might be willing to condone the murder of Adolf Hitler, or fighting back against police brutality.
Partisans could join together to make clear their revulsion at political violence with candlelight vigils and moments of silence. They could start seeing one another as complex individuals with reasons for their differing beliefs, rather than fearing the other side as if they were invaders from another planet who needed to be repelled. And they could also take concrete action to reset norms: such as refusing to vote for or fund candidates who use violent language or refuse to speak against it.
This is by no means fanciful. Americans are already banding together to demand that their candidates commit to accepting election results, regardless of who wins – as a Wisconsin business group just did of its gubernatorial contenders. Arizona businesses are calling out local politicians for violent rhetoric. More than 120,000 veterans have become pollworkers to continue their service to the nation and reassure themselves and others that our elections are fair – crucial efforts given how often political violence globally results from a belief that elections were stolen.
Civil society groups have taken it upon themselves to train law enforcement around the country to ensure a safe election in the fall. And despite the failures of the nation’s parties, individual politicians are also doing their part to uphold peace – such as Utah Governor Spencer Cox, who spent his year leading the National Governors Association in a campaign to “Disagree Better,” with more substance, less heat, and strong research suggesting that the ads and behavior modeling they produced reduces polarization. Research also shows that the politicians who appear in the ads get a bump in favorability from voters, including the most partisan primary voters, suggesting that the American people know what can heal this country. More efforts are underway in upcoming days, from former Members of Congress to religious leaders standing together to demand better from their own communities.
After all, this is our country. Its fate is shared by us all. And in the inimitable words of Winston Churchill, we Americans can be counted on to always do the right thing – after all other options have been exhausted.
Editor’s note: You can listen to a podcast discussion with Rachel Kleinfeld by clicking below.
