Trump helped normalize the idea that some political differences cannot be resolved through democratic means.
September 24, 2024, 10:45 AM ET
Produced by ElevenLabs and News Over Audio (NOA) with AI narration.
Before Donald Trump’s supporters rioted on January 6, 2021, to try to overturn his election loss, U.S. presidential elections had proceeded largely uninterrupted by violence for decades. The Secret Service and other law enforcement agencies had been able to protect the president and major party candidates from physical harm. Even after close and tough elections, the transfer of power had been peaceful. But it is clear that the country has entered a new, grueling cycle. In July, a bullet fired by an assassin at a rally in Pennsylvania struck Trump in the ear. This month, authorities thwarted another gunman hiding in the bushes near Trump’s golf course in Florida. At the time, the former president and current Republican presidential candidate was playing an unscheduled round a few hundred yards away.
Throughout history, political violence has tended to self-propagate, and groups that believe their opponents are seeking power through extralegal means have been more likely to resort to violence themselves. Parts of modern life exacerbate the risks: social media allows extremists to bring like-minded people together, and the ready availability of dangerous guns increases the likelihood that individual bad actors can inflict serious harm. Unfortunately, law enforcement can only be limitedly prepared for the range of threats a nation may face from people on the right, the left, and with singular or inconsistent ideologies.
Earlier this month, the Department of Homeland Security announced that it would designate the certification of the electoral votes at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2025, a “national special security event,” or NSSE, a classification that typically requires planning for far-reaching security measures, including a heavy police and National Guard presence, extensive surveillance, road closures, and other measures. The decision drew little attention, but in the past, no one had thought precautions of that magnitude were necessary. No losing candidate in a presidential election before Trump had incited a mob to disrupt a process that had previously been viewed as merely a formality.
The NSSE designation shows how limited the options are, and it comes with some costs: the Presidential Inauguration on January 20 will always be treated as an NSSE. In effect, the federal government and the District of Columbia will be on high alert for a month, but there is no guarantee that the precautions taken will be sufficient to thwart the unpredictable plans of opportunistic attackers.
In security planning, U.S. experts and government officials use a war-gaming technique called red teaming to evaluate how to deal with an adversary whose intentions are known. If the supposed enemy is, say, a Chinese spy or a Russian ransomware hacker, a few Americans (the red team) are assigned to mimic the attacker’s actions. Then a second group (the blue team) has to come up with a defense. But this is a much harder task when threats can come from any direction.
Trump is at the center of the recent trend in political violence. In recent months, he has been the most vulnerable target for political violence, but, as I and others have previously argued, he has also been the most frequent instigator of political violence over the past few years. These concerns remain valid. He is stoking chaos and confusion. He is telling his religious allies that if he wins this year, they will never have to vote for him again. He is threatening to jail his political opponents. He is threatening to use military force to deport illegal immigrants en masse. He is dehumanizing immigrants who came to the U.S. legally by falsely claiming that they are stealing and eating pets, and he is inciting fear and intimidation against immigrants.
In short, Trump helped popularize the idea that some political differences cannot be resolved by democratic means. Surviving an assassination attempt did not convince Trump of the need for detente. In fact, he has done the opposite. In a debate with Kamala Harris, Trump claimed, “I might have taken a bullet to the head because of what they say about me,” clearly referring to the vice president and his supporters. If Harris wins, Trump will almost certainly not concede defeat. He will claim election fraud and support non-compliant state election boards to disrupt the certification, creating chaos in the January certification just as he did in 2021.
But if Trump pressures state and local election officials to win a close election, or indeed wins clearly, many Americans who supported Harris will no doubt rally together to oppose his return to power. Even if the vast majority of them intend to do so peacefully, some with violent intentions may be among them, at the behest of foreign or domestic forces intent on causing chaos. A poll conducted this summer by University of Chicago researcher Robert Pape showed that, contrary to past polls, the percentage of people who support violence against Trump was higher than the percentage of people who support violence in support of Trump.
But in reality, some perpetrators of political violence do not have a clear worldview. The perpetrator of the first assassination attempt on President Trump had previously shown an interest in violence in public places, and FBI officials suggested he may have targeted the former president because he was a convenient geographic target. The suspect in the second assassination attempt lived a life heavily dependent on social media and was once a supporter of President Trump but has since fallen out of favor. His most dominant ideological belief was his commitment to the war in Ukraine.
The United States has experienced and escaped cycles of political violence for as long as anyone can remember: Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. were assassinated in the turmoil of the late 1960s, and President Gerald Ford survived two assassination attempts in the mid-1970s. American democracy proved resilient because enough people eventually understood that the costs of violence were far greater than the political gains for anyone.
Fortunately, the Democratic Party does not have a leader like Trump who embraces intimidation as a political strategy, but the former president has made the atmosphere so bad that even if he were to lose the election, the risk of violence is unlikely to decrease anytime soon.