Former President Donald Trump is helped off the stage at a campaign event in Butler, Pennsylvania, on July 13, 2024.
CNN —
The motivations of the gunman who opened fire at former President Donald Trump in Pennsylvania on Saturday are not known, but the incident comes at a time of political anger and anxiety in a country split down the middle and bursting at the seams.
Violence has targeted Republicans, Democrats, conservatives and liberals, and seems to be happening with agonizing frequency.
► A plot to assassinate conservative Supreme Court justices was foiled in 2022 by the FBI.
► The husband of then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was attacked by a hammer-wielding intruder at their San Francisco home in 2022.
► A violent mob stormed the US Capitol in January of 2021 to interrupt the certification of Joe Biden’s election win.
► Would-be kidnappers hatched a plot to snatch Michigan’s Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer in 2020 and were sentenced on terrorism charges.
► A GOP congressional baseball team practice was attacked by a gunman in Alexandria, Virginia, in 2017. The then-House GOP Whip, Steve Scalise, was nearly killed.
Those incidents range from organized plots to the irrational actions of lone attackers, but they all feed off a desperate and intractable polarization in which apocalyptic language is used to demonize both sides of the political aisle.
A major question will be how Trump reacts
The Republican National Convention is set to get underway Monday in Milwaukee. Will Trump use the shooting to further feed the idea among his supporters that the country needs to be taken back, or will the former president, who doesn’t believe he lost the last election, call for calm?
Americans need to treat this assassination attempt like 9/11 and unify, according to Ian Bremmer, the president of the political risk firm the Eurasia Group. But there is another direction that is more frightening. “I fear it’s going to be a lotmore like January 6, where therewill be a large number ofpeople that will weaponize whatjust happened. And that we willcontinue to tribalize as acountry and people won’t acceptthat the people on the otherside of the aisle areAmerican,” Bremmer told CNN’s Fareed Zakaria.
In the shocking chaos of the immediate aftermath of the shooting, Trump was encouraging supporters to “fight.”
Trump yelled to supporters, pumping his fist, as blood dripped from his head when the Secret Service rushed him from the rally stage.
Later, on his social media platform, the presumptive GOP nominee called for national unity.
“In this moment, it is more important than ever that we stand United, and show our True Character as Americans, remaining Strong and Determined, and not allowing Evil to Win,” he said.
As the gravity of the situation sank in Saturday night, over-the-top rhetoric was on hold, replaced by bipartisan condemnation of political violence and calls to cool things down.
In a statement, Biden condemned political violence and called the attack on Trump “sick,” while his advisers halted television advertising and put active campaigning on hold.
President Joe Biden speaks after at the Rehoboth Beach Police Department, in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, after Donald Trump was shot in Pennsylvania on July 13, 2024.
Blaming anti-Trump rhetoric
Scalise, now the House majority leader, issued a statement blaming anti-Trump rhetoric, which he said is “fueling ludicrous hysteria that Donald Trump winning re-election would be the end of democracy in America.”
“Clearly we’ve seen far left lunatics act on violent rhetoric in the past. This incendiary rhetoric must stop,” he added.
One of Trump’s potential running mates, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, issued a statement Saturday night, before the identity of the suspected shooter had been released or his motivation was known, blaming political opposition to Trump, and the Biden campaign’s rhetoric specifically, for the shooting.
“The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs,” Vance said on X. “That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.”
On NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Sen. Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican, said Trump’s election would not break the country.
“You know, if he wins, democracy is not going to end. He’s not a fascist.He represents a point of view that millions share,” Graham said.
Calls to calm down
Sen. Ron Johnson, the Wisconsin Republican, told CNN’s Jake Tapper Sunday that “the greatest threat to America is that we’re horribly divided.”
He said Americans need to spend less time on social media, where divisions grow, and more time out in their communities focused on the things that unite them.
Sen. John Fetterman, the Pennsylvania Democrat, noted on “State of the Union” that the Tree of Life Synagogue was attacked in 2018 in nearby Pittsburgh.
“I can’t believe we’re in that place. It’s the same kind of shock,” Fetterman said.
Cycles of political violence ‘bred in the bone’
The presidential historian Tim Naftali said on CNN that there have been other cycles of violence against presidential candidates in US politics — frequently at times of social change, including 1968, when Robert F. Kennedy and Marin Luther King, Jr., were shot. He said political violence is “bred in the bone” of the country.
“It’s something we ought toremember — we are capable of thisas a nation,” Naftali said. “The people who doit, of course, are outliers,but they are a product of theextremism and the anger and thehatred that sometime pulsesthrough our elections.”
The gunman, identified by the FBI as 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks, had apparently been a registered Republican, and would only this year have been old enough to vote in a presidential election. His name is also associated with a $15 donation to a progressive political action committee.
The FBI has been warning about the terror threat posed by domestic violent extremists in recent years. Last December, FBI Director Christopher Wray warned of the threat of lone actors as a top domestic threat to the homeland.
Not all attacks on politicians are politically motivated
John Hinckley was mentally unstable, seeking fame and to impress a Hollywood actress, when he tried to kill President Ronald Reagan in 1981.
But the recent string of violent incidents falls into a definite period of division and anger.
The Republican pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson said on CNN that Americans across the board are angry and frustrated.
“I look at data allthe time that says Americansare getting angrier and angrierabout what’s going on in thiscountry, that they are gettingmore and more frustrated thatthey think traditional ways ofsolving problems are no longerworking,” she said.
