Name: Trump Shooting: How Violence Against Politicians Has Surged | WSJ
Uploaded: 2024-07-17T02:45:03.000Z
Duration: 5 min 59 s
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The assassination attempt on Donald Trump is a shocking event.

Americans haven't seen anything like it since 1981, when Ronald Reagan was the target of an assassination attempt.

But you don't need to reach back that far to see that America has had a large share of political violence.

We don't know the shooter's motive and whether he was driven by political hostility.

But many Americans are using this moment to pause and reflect on the trend of political violence that we have seen in America.

The string of violent attacks has been almost constant.

In 2017, someone who was angry at then-President Trump and at Republicans went to a baseball practice where Republican lawmakers were and shot a number of people, leaving a leading Republican lawmaker, one of the senior members of the House, in critical condition.

This could have been a tragedy like so many others.

The next year, somebody sent pipe bombs to a number of critics of then-President Trump.

We heard the fire alarm go off while we were anchoring a show recording on these explosive devices, suspicious packages delivered to the former president's home of Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, George Soros, and the White House.

And minutes later, we were told suspicious packages, CNN, evacuated immediately.

In 2020, six men were arrested in a plot to kidnap Gretchen Whitmer, the Democratic governor of Michigan, and to try her for treason.

I think that the president has given safe harbor to hate organizations and terror, you know, domestic terror organizations.

And of course, one woman lost her life in the Capitol riot of January 6, 2021, in which a crowd that had been stoked by President Trump tried to stop the certification of the vote and the results of the 2020 election.

We fight like hell, and if you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore.

In 2022, the husband of Nancy Pelosi, the former Democratic Speaker of the House, was attacked in his own home.

And that same year, a man was arrested outside the home of Brett Kavanaugh, the Supreme Court justice, and he was found with a pistol and other threatening items in his backpack.

These incidents raise the question of why are they happening.

Is it simply a matter that public officials are in the public eye?

Or is there something in our political culture and in our culture more broadly that's driving these events?

One thing that we'll certainly turn to is whether the rise in political polarization is part of the problem.

There is no doubt that members of one party feel more animosity, not just dislike, but significant dislike, for members of the other party than they have in the past.

Polling has documented amply that members of one party feel that the other party's agenda, if enacted, would not only be bad for America, but would destroy America.

Polling has also shown that members of one party feel in very large numbers that those in the other party are immoral and close-minded.

Many people think that this hostility has been a kind of kindling that incites acts of violence or spurs them on, though we don't know if this is the case in the attack on Donald Trump.

Some violence against political figures has been carried out by people with non-political motives, people who just had access to guns and some kind of motivation to act.

The attack on Ronald Reagan was not politically motivated, but rather done by someone who was trying to seek the attention of a celebrity.

But in many of these cases, the perpetrators did show some animosity toward one party or the other.

Some political violence has really changed the course of this country.

Like anybody, I would like to live a long life.

The death of Martin Luther King Jr., a horrible event, sparked violence and riots across the country.

Ronald Reagan's near assassination became part of the mythology of him being a fighter and a survivor.

It will take time to learn what effect this assassination attempt means for the presidential election and for the two political parties.

Many Democrats say that Donald Trump himself has added a kind of negative energy to the political environment.

Trump's biggest lie of all is that he had nothing to do with the insurrection of January 6th.

We saw he sent thousands to attack the Capitol.

Some Republicans right now are faulting Democratic rhetoric for fomenting the attempted assassination on President Trump.

When the message goes out constantly that the election of Donald Trump would be a threat to democracy and that the republic would end, it heats up the environment.

Many Americans will be looking again at Donald Trump in the coming week.

As he goes to Milwaukee, he names his choice as a vice presidential running mate, and he formally accepts his party's nomination for president.

Will he be perceived as a fighter and a hero to his supporters?

Or will Americans take a step back and say, gee, the political environment that he's part of is too heated, and we want a calmer temperature?

 But now more Americans are tuning in, and this is the moment where they'll be forming an opinion about who to vote for in November.