The Return of Political Violence

Many media and politics experts anticipated an ugly scene at last month’s White House Correspondents Dinner (WHCD). The annual WHCD usually highlights unseemly relationships between governing leaders and the journalists supposed to hold them accountable. This year’s event was particularly cringe as media figures gathered to toast a president who is attacking press freedom, helping his right-wing allies take over mainstream media, and dismantling American democracy more broadly. White House officials advertised Donald Trump’s planned speech as an attack on journalists whom he calls the “enemy of the people.” Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt used violent metaphors to preview the president’s hostile remarks attacking journalists: “Shots will be fired tonight.”

She was almost right. A heavily armed schoolteacher sprinted through a security checkpoint in a vain attempt to assassinate the president and his Cabinet. No one was injured, including the attacker.

The would-be assassin drew surprise over his unremarkable background, his mundane manifesto of criticisms of the Trump regime, and his mainstream social media diet. Nothing suggested a penchant for violence. He was not an incel, not a domestic abuser, not a religious fanatic. Republicans seized on his normality to redouble their efforts to silence mainstream critics while Democrats declared that political violence is never okay.

Political violence is on the rise in the United States, involving a wide range of targets and motives. The rate is low. But the trend is worrisome.

How should we understand the recent spate of political violence? These incidents join a long history of American political violence, which often reached much higher levels than we see today. But this is not a comforting comparison: this history also suggests political violence is likely to get worse before it gets better, because today’s conflicts over social and political equality remain unresolved and only grow more existential by the day.

(I focus on physical harms, threats, and intimidation by civilians impacting politics broadly construed, but it’s important to recognize that violence by government agents is also political, far more impactful, and often unjust.)

The basics

The WHCD assault joins a long list of recent violent political attacks, which are becoming more common in the US, though levels remain low by historical standards. In the past few decades, right-wing attacks consistently outnumbered left-wing attacks several times over. But many acts of political violence are not motivated by a coherent ideology, and the plurality lacks clear political motives at all, counting as political violence because of its social-political impact.

Attackers are usually men, they tend to be younger, they often have histories of interpersonal aggression including violence against women, many have childhood trauma, and they have easy access to deadly weapons. Some attackers are suicidal—the target may be political, but the motivation is unrelated to politics.

Motives for these attacks fall into a few broad bins:

Violence intended to affect who leads or what governments do, including attacks on advocates (often partisan-ideological);
Social identity-based political violence (implicit or explicit) that has broader impacts on equal citizenship, with indirect effects on leadership and governance; and
Personal grievances or other idiosyncratic motives.

Many recent attacks resemble the WHCD assault in their explicit partisan-ideological motives. These include the 2025 assassination of Minnesota state legislator Melissa Hortman and her husband, the 2025 arson attack on the home of Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro, the 2022 home assault targeting Nancy Pelosi that injured her husband, the 2022 plot to attack Supreme Court justice Brett Kavanaugh, the 2020 plot to kidnap Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer, and the 2017 gun attack on the Republican Congressional baseball team that wounded Rep. Steve Scalise. Most of these involved Republicans targeting Democrats. The motives behind the 2025 assassination of right-wing bigot Charlie Kirk are ambiguous, but the shooter may have opposed Kirk’s anti-LGBTQ+ views.

The 2021 assault on the U.S. Capitol by thousands of Trump supporters to overturn Joe Biden’s election victory was similar in motives but vastly larger in scale and consequences. The 2024 attack on students in the UCLA Gaza encampment as police stood by was an ideological attack, but it was also motivated by race and religious prejudices, which are often inseparable from partisanship and ideology.

Other recent attacks have targeted marginalized groups in hate-based attacks with social-political harms that perpetuate unequal well-being and citizenship. The May 2026 San Diego mosque shooting (3 killed) and the Michigan synagogue shooting in March (none killed) fit that pattern. In 2022, a white supremacist killed ten Black people at a Buffalo grocery store because of the ‘great replacement’ conspiracy theory prevalent in Republican media and rhetoric. A 2021 mass shooting at a spa in Atlanta killed eight Asian women. In 2020, a white supremacist set fire to a Minneapolis police station during Black Lives Matter protests, hoping to accelerate violence into a civil war. Right-wing leaders and media outlets blamed Black Lives Matter protesters for the fire.

The 2019 El Paso Walmart shooter who killed 23 people echoed the same anti-immigrant “great replacement” views. The 2018 Tree of Life synagogue shooting that killed 11 Jewish worshippers in Pittsburgh layered an antisemitic conspiracy theory on top of the ‘great replacement’ immigration rhetoric featured on Fox News and other right-wing sources. The 2017 Unite the Right right-wing violence against counter-protesters, which killed do-gooder Heather Heyer, originated in opposition to the removal of a statue celebrating the Confederate rebellion to expand Black enslavement. The 2016 Pulse gay nightclub shooting in Florida that killed 49 people was motivated by support for ISIS. And white supremacy motivated the 2015 Charleston church shooting that killed nine Black congregants. We also see extensive recent violence against transgender people, and security costs eat up large portions of budgets for marginalized faith groups.

In addition to these highest-profile attacks, violent hate crimes are rising too, usually against individual victims. Individual hate-based attacks concerning race, religion, sex, sexuality, and gender are political too, even when attackers do not give explicit bigoted rationales. These increase inequalities in social, political, and economic participation for the group. But this category of political violence encompasses a broader array of implicitly identity-based violence shaped by and reinforcing unequal power relations in society. Sexual assaults targeting women, for instance, can be understood as political violence that maintains patriarchy.

Less commonly, we have seen political violence by (or on behalf of) marginalized groups. These include the 2016 shootings of police in Baton Rouge and Dallas, which were motivated by anger over policing that maintains white supremacy, following the police murders of Alton Sterling and Philando Castille in Minnesota. The 2024 murder of a UnitedHealthcare CEO targeted a person the attacker felt personified a “parasitic” healthcare industry and a broader system that values profits over people.

Finally, we have seen many cases of political violence—or perhaps we should call it politics-adjacent violence—that targets political figures or government but that has personal, mixed, or unclear motives. These attacks include the 2024 assassination attempt on Trump in Pennsylvania, which killed a rally-goer, by a man who considered targeting Biden and other political figures too, who seemed to want notoriety and had ambiguous political views. The 2016 armed occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon was led by ranchers angry about punishments for arson after failing to pay for government land use fees for grazing, though it was also a standoff involving a federal chief executive who was a Black Democrat, and President Trump pardoned the leaders two years later—a complex combination of personal, political, and idiosyncratic motivations. The 2011 shooting of Rep. Gabby Giffords and several others seemed to be motivated by idiosyncratic delusions.

In the immediate aftermath of violent attacks, partisans and ideologues rush to assign the attack to political or social groups based on very limited preliminary evidence and lots of assumptions rooted in misunderstandings of American politics and violence. For example, many people assumed the 2024 assassination attempt against Trump was by someone on the ideological left, but it wasn’t. And many people assumed the 2016 Pulse shooter had anti-LGBTQ+ or anti-Latino motives based on the identities of victims, but the investigation revealed little evidence of such targeting. Some motives are clear and uncomplicated, but many others fail to fit tidily in stereotyped boxes.

Of course, all this political violence is taking place in an incredibly violent society. While murder rates are way down compared to the 1970s and 1980s, the US has, by far, the highest murder rates among economically developed countries.

The rise of violent political threats

Violent political threats are many orders of magnitude more common than physical attacks, and they can have similarly corrosive and corrupting effects on politics and society. Public officials now face far more death threats than ten or twenty years ago. These threats and other forms of harassment disproportionately target women and racial/ethnic and religious minorities.

For members of Congress, the threat numbers rapidly rose from roughly nine hundred in 2016 to nearly fifteen thousand in 2025. Threats are up against all kinds of officials at the federal, state, and local levels, including judges, school boards, librarians, city council members, state and local election officials, state legislators, and others. Many of the threats against Republicans come from other Republicans, targeting those who criticize President Trump. Armed intimidation is another growing problem.

Threats and intimidation can be just as damaging as physical acts of violence in the harm they cause to individuals and the distortions they introduce to the political system, and the few acts make the threats far more credible and therefore dangerous. Mitt Romney revealed that at least one Republican Senator changed his vote on Trump’s 2021 impeachment trial from convict to acquit after fellow Republicans told him that Trump supporters would put the Senator’s family in grave danger if he voted to convict. Beyond changing government decisions, threats and intimidation hurt the well-being of public officials, drive many out of their jobs, and discourage people from public service.

Even so, two thirds of threats and other harassment are not ideological and stem more from personal anger at the government or at specific officials in ways that don’t map well onto broader partisan and ideological views.

America’s violent political past

American history is full of political violence. Presidential assassinations get the most attention, along with the American Revolution and the Civil War, but our history is chock-full of armed revolts, massacres, assassinations and murders, duels, bombings, lynching, and other mob violence. Despite the previous section's grim catalogue, the truth is that many previous eras were far more politically violent than today.

As with contemporary political violence, some historical violence against leaders had personal rather than political motives. Early American leaders dueled over combinations of interpersonal and political grievances, most famously resulting in the death of Alexander Hamilton. President Garfield was killed by a disgruntled fellow partisan because he didn’t get a patronage job, which helped motivate enactment of the 1883 Pendleton Act requiring most government jobs be hired on merit, not partisan loyalty. President Reagan’s would-be assassin in 1981 thought the attack would ingratiate him with a famous actress.

In other cases, isolated extremists acted violently with minimal societal support for their cause. For example, President McKinley was killed by an anarchist amidst other anarchist violence in the late nineteenth and early 20th centuries. The Unabomber’s rejection of technology and modernity attracted few if any adherents.

Bombings by anti-war activists in the 1960s and 1970s and late 20th century environmentalist violence were broadly rejected, even though the causes in question had broader support. Those attacks were rarely lethal, often by intent and design.

Mid-nineteenth century elections involved substantial violence and intimidation as parties deployed toughs to stop opposing partisans from casting ballots in the party’s neighborhood strongholds.

However, the most politically impactful historical violence was driven by the conflict between supremacists of race, class, gender, and religion and the democratizers who sought to end the undeserved social, political, economic, and cultural hegemonic power and resources of dominant groups. Supremacists from dominant groups were far likelier to use political violence against marginalized groups than the reverse, even as the dominant groups wielded state violence against marginalized groups too. In that way, political violence by civilians served as one tactic in broader legal and economic efforts to maintain dominant group supremacy, especially when non-violent means were not effective enough on their own.

That asymmetry parallels the trends we see today. State violence in the form of ICE crackdowns and police brutality synergize with right-wing civilian violence to produce similar supremacist effects on a broader scale. Trump’s pardons of January 6th insurgents make the close partnership between his government and civilian supremacists especially clear. Much of previous identity-based violence coincided with political party alignments and economic interests, creating a potent fusion of motives to maintain dominant group hierarchies in government, the economy, and broader society.

Class-motivated political violence

Class and money motivated the 1780s Shay’s Rebellion by Revolution veterans, tax revolts in the Whiskey Rebellion and Fries’s Rebellion, the Anti-Rent War in upstate New York, the 1840s Dorr Rebellion over class-based suffrage rights, the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, the 1882 Greenwood Insurrection against property seizure for railroad barons, the Johnson County War in 1890s Wyoming over cattle grazing rights, the Coal Wars of the late 19th and early 20th centuries with miners fighting for labor rights, and the 2014 and 2016 anti-government standoffs involving ranchers in Montana and Oregon. Sometimes corporations or governments initiated the violence. Other times, workers turned to violence in response to private and public harms against them that had no hope of non-violent resolution.

Many examples of class-based violence are also racial violence. Revolts against enslavers by enslaved Black Americans easily fit both categories. The 1887 Thibodaux Massacre killed 60 Black workers who were attempting to form a union in Louisiana. Socialists organized low-income people in the 1917 anti-draft Green Corn Rebellion in Oklahoma. The 1946 Battle of Athens protested voting restrictions in Tennessee targeting Black residents and poor whites. And Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968 as he sought worker justice with racial justice.

Racially and ethnically motivated political violence

Racial and ethnic violence has been with America since before the Founding, including the genocide and expulsion of various Indian nations, and the violence of slavery itself. This did not end with the closing of the frontier or the abolition of slavery. Lynching and other mob violence were prevalent in the Reconstruction and Jim Crow eras. White supremacists lynched and murdered many Black Americans and their few white supporters during Reconstruction in the late 1860s and early 1870s, as former Confederates attempted to retake state and local governments, to reinstate enslavement by a different name, and to reinforce Black social inequality. Four thousand Black Americans were lynched throughout the United States between the end of Reconstruction and the Second World War. Although many individual lynching cases lacked an explicit social-political motive, the widespread practice served to steal Black social, political, and economic power and resources. Before the Civil War and Bleeding Kansas, white supremacists were murdering abolitionists. And, of course, Black enslavement itself involved hundreds of years of social-political-economic violence.

The 1850s Bleeding Kansas battles between pro-slavery and anti-slavery militias were a prelude to the Civil War, along with John Brown’s raid on a federal armory in 1859, which attempted to start a rebellion by enslaved people. The Confederate rebellion to expand Black enslavement was the second largest white supremacist conflict (second to the Native American genocide), killing three quarters of a million Americans. The 1863 New York City anti-draft riots targeted Black New Yorkers, killing over 100, and white supremacism motivated Lincoln’s assassination just as the Civil War was won.

The periods of Reconstruction and Redemption were extremely violent. That includes the 1873 Colfax massacre in which Louisiana white supremacists killed over one hundred Black men following the gubernatorial election, the 1874 white supremacist coup attempts in Louisiana and Alabama—the Battle of Liberty Place (dozens killed) and the Election Riot (8 killed)—and the successful 1898 white supremacist coup that began in Wilmington, North Carolina (at least dozens killed), and ultimately overthrew the state government.

Native resistance in the American Indian Wars continued through the nineteenth century as U.S. settlers and soldiers ethnically cleansed native peoples. Anti-Asian political violence dates back to the late 1800s amidst the substantial rise of immigration from China, including the 1871 Los Angeles massacre of 19 Chinese immigrants.

Historians estimate roughly 5,000 Mexican Americans were killed or disappeared between 1910 and 1920. The 1917 Camp Logan Mutiny by Black soldiers protesting police violence in Texas led to roughly two dozen deaths, not counting 19 Black soldiers executed afterwards.

The 1950 San Juan Nationalist revolt for Puerto Rican independence caused three deaths. White supremacists murdered several Civil Rights Movement leaders and activists in the mid-20th century—most famously, Martin Luther King Jr.—along with many Black people who were not involved in activism, including several children.

This history of violence did not end with Jim Crow. The 1992 Los Angeles uprising over police unaccountability killed 63 people (including violence between Black and Asian residents), and the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing carried out by anti-government white supremacists killed 168 people.

Religiously motivated political violence

Much of the centuries-long U.S. genocide against Native Americans was motivated by combinations of religious and racial prejudice, including extensive efforts to convert Native Americans to Christianity as a way of destroying their culture in addition to driving them off their land and killing them. The U.S. Army and state and local militias played a big role, but so too did settler violence not organized by the state, with defensive violence by Native people in response.

Protestant Christians routinely targeted Mormons with violence in the nineteenth century. A mob killed the LDS church’s first prophet, Joseph Smith, in western Illinois in 1844, partly motivated by Mormon economic dominance in their Nauvoo settlement. Mormons were also perpetrators of religious violence against Native Americans (including enslavement) and non-Mormon settlers out West. The 1857 Mountain Meadows Massacre is the most infamous example, in which Mormon settlers in Utah killed 120 non-Mormon Americans passing through their settlement.

New York City’s nativist gangs targeted Catholic immigrants with extensive violence in the mid-nineteenth century, with similar anti-Catholic violence elsewhere that killed dozens of people, and the second Ku Klux Klan drove more anti-Catholic violence in the early 20^th century, in addition to their anti-Black violence.

Jehovah’s Witnesses faced hundreds of violent attacks in the mid-20th century, and Malcolm X’s assassination was likely motivated by a dispute between leaders in the Nation of Islam group. Many forms of supremacist gender-based violence against women and LGBTQ+ people—including anti-abortion violence—are motivated by fundamentalist religious beliefs. And jihadists carried out many attacks in the early 21st century.

The 1991 Crown Heights riot involving Black New York City residents targeted Orthodox Jews, killing two people. And there was the 2012 Sikh temple shooting in the suburbs of Milwaukee that killed seven worshippers.

Gender-based violence

Most violence to subordinate women was (and is) enacted privately by male family members (or other male acquaintances) rather than publicly, unlike most other forms of violent control against marginalized groups. Domestic violence and sexual assault was even supported by some laws permitting violence against spouses, and by policing and courts practices that—when women reported violence to authorities—more often impugned survivors than brought justice.

Violence against abortion providers in the 1980s and 1990s impeded women’s access to reproductive freedom, in addition to restrictive laws, reducing women’s autonomy, safety, and broader well-being. America also has a long history of political violence against LGBTQ+ people, often targeting individuals, including the assassination of San Francisco board member Harvey Milk in 1978.

When is political violence OK?

After each act of political violence, we hear a chorus of “violence is never OK.” Condemning political violence is important. When it comes from a trusted leader, it reinforces collective norms against violence, which reduce acts of violence. Ordinary Americans have this effect, too, in conversations with their family, friends, and acquaintances. When condemnations come from out-group leaders, it helps people see their opponents as less dangerous. Condemnations notably reduce public support for political violence whether coming from in-group or out-group leaders.

With all that said, we should also acknowledge that political violence is appropriate in rare cases. The most obvious example: the vast majority of Americans, and all of our mainstream social, educational, and cultural institutions, say that the American Revolution’s violence was justified.

The conditions when political violence might be justified are highly constrained. The goal must involve substantial gains in well-being compared to not acting, which only applies to democratizing violence, not supremacist violence. Non-violent means of accomplishing the goal must be all but impossible in the short and medium term. The attack must be likely to succeed (or have minimal consequences if it fails). And the violence must be the minimum possible to produce the result and targeted so as not to harm anyone undeserving of harm.

Finally, if violence will accomplish the immediate goal but produces a violent and oppressive backlash that makes things worse, then political violence still can’t be justified. This last point is precisely why we see so little liberating violence by oppressed people. Even when otherwise justified, supremacists usually impose retaliatory harms against oppressed people that far outweigh any initial gains from violence.

Violence tends to escalate in retaliatory spirals, immiserating everyone in the process. Whatever moral and strategic guardrails limit violence at the start fall away easily as vengeance becomes all-consuming.

What’s next? And where do we go from here?

I start by looking back. My 2020 book on racialized partisanship and violence during the American Civil War considered the present-day risks of political violence at the end of Trump’s first term. I wrote:

“Like secessionists then, Republicans from the president on down now threaten to reject legitimate elections and deny governing rights to their opponents when their party loses. Some even suggest that violence is justified in that case… Rejecting an unfavorable presidential election result seems to be the likeliest way in which wider partisan violence could break out in our time, though still far short of all-out war… Beyond individual partisan hate and violence, this book shows that partisan animus is most dangerous when party leaders organize violent action with direct calls, plans, and infrastructure for violence against specific targets.”

One year later, the 2020–21 Republican coup attempt to keep Trump in power—through a vast array of legal and illegal means at the federal, state, and local levels—culminated in the shocking mass assault on the Capitol by thousands of Trump supporters.

Republicans had organized this specific focal event—endorsed ahead of time by Trump, who said it “will be wild!”—to gather in that place, on that day, for that purpose. Republican messages inciting January 6th violence represented an enormous escalation over past violent rhetoric in their specificity, resulting in an equivalently dramatic increase in violent effects. Republican extremist groups organized an armed assault as part of the gathering, with plans to capture or perhaps kill members of Congress. Finally, the crowd was incited by the president exhorting them in a White House speech to “fight like hell” to stop the legitimate transfer of power, and they promptly marched down Pennsylvania Avenue to attack Congress during the election certification.

What does the future hold for us now?

Today’s levels of political violence are much lower than the worst eras. But the trends and the factors driving them strongly resemble the beginnings of the worst eras. Yet reaching those past peaks is by no means inevitable.

Though the vast majority of Americans still reject political violence in principle, surveys show general support for political violence has risen substantially over the past decade. That trend seems likely to continue as Republicans and their supremacist base become more desperate to maintain power.

However, given Republican control of the federal government and many state governments, the biggest risk for violence is from state forces as they attempt to ensure permanent control. Individual Republican civilians and organized groups may supplement that government oppression with their own violent attacks and deluges of violent threats, especially after Trump pardoned the Capitol attackers and is now attempting to pay them reparations out of a slush fund, implicitly offering a get-out-of-jail free card and a sizable monetary payment to anyone who uses violence and other illegal means to keep Republicans in power.

All of this is leading up to a 2028 presidential election that could make 2020–21 look benign in comparison. By no means are Republicans certain to retain power, no matter what undemocratic steps they take, but an anticipated loss of power in 2028-29 seems likely to motivate Republicans to attempt a full autocratic takeover, pulling every illegitimate governing and societal lever to retain power.

It’s our job to organize to stop them. Luckily, they are wildly unpopular for reasons that are only loosely related to their anti-democratic threats—mostly, it’s a challenging economy made much worse by Trump’s devastating policies. We are also aided by their incompetence and their rush to autocracy before they have removed enough governmental and civil society obstacles to ensure a successful semi-permanent power grab.

But dethroning them won’t end the violence, if the Reconstruction Era is any indication.

Winning control of the federal government is only the first step. We must make a real democracy from the wreckage through major institutional changes to ensure equal say and equal rights for everyone, including enforcing the Constitution’s guarantee that all states must maintain republican form of government with equal rights. As in the Reconstruction and Civil Rights eras, federal intervention may be required. Regime officials and their collaborators must be held accountable for their crimes.

With a newly democratic system in place, we must vigorously defend it from supremacist-partisan violence. That may include suppressing organized resistance by some state governments or pockets of armed resistance in some more localized areas. The Civil War era also emphasizes a risk that some parts of the U.S. military may remain loyal to Republicans, though America’s military is reputed to be among the most independent and apolitical in the world. That neutrality will be tested following Trump’s leadership purges of the armed forces to date.

Perhaps the biggest challenge will be holding onto governing power with democratic means until a new deradicalized Republican Party can form, given how party power is highly cyclical under normal election patterns. It will be an uphill effort, but we don’t get to choose the macro environment we work within—and this may be the best chance we get to make a real democracy for a long time.

Featured image is "Thomas Matthew Crooks Rifle and Backpack," FBI 2024.