The result is a nation on edge, with the two presidential candidates poised to spend $1 billion on advertising to demonize each other, and with 112 days to go until the polls close.
“Over the last few years, the country has gone from polarization to polarization and radicalization,” said Michael Jensen of the terrorism research consortium START at the University of Maryland.
The former leads to traffic jams, while the latter leads to violence, he explained.
“We are right to express our anger. We are right to call for solidarity. We are right to condemn these actions,” he said. “I don’t think it’s right for us to pretend to be surprised.”
Investigators said Sunday they had no information about the shooter’s motive, describing him as 20 years old, with no history of violence, little social media profile or significant political involvement. Authorities said the gunman’s shots killed one man in the crowd and wounded others, including Trump, who was left bleeding from his ear.
The atmosphere of the campaign had changed long before shots rang out in Butler, Pennsylvania, on Saturday. Gone were the “future of our children” and “the most important election of our lifetime” rhetoric that had underscored American elections for decades. Instead, there are dire warnings of catastrophe if the other side wins.
“Donald Trump is a real threat to our country,” Biden’s campaign announced a few weeks ago, with the president’s team asserting that the Supreme Court’s decision on immunity would allow Trump to “become a dictator, as he promised to do on his first day in office.”
Trump encouraged violence against protesters at his rallies and has convicted people of crimes. Trump has viewed them as “hostages” for taking part in the 2021 storming of the U.S. Capitol. He has called his political opponents “vermin” and warned that the nation faces terminal decline during Biden’s second term. “If he wins this election, our country stands a chance,” Trump said during a debate with Biden in June.
Leading Democrats have been nearly unanimous in condemning Saturday’s shooting, with both sides saying they want to be more careful with their rhetoric in the coming days.
“Unity is the hardest goal to achieve, but nothing is more important right now,” Biden said in a statement at the White House after meeting with the team investigating the shooting on Sunday. “We will debate and we will have differences. That will remain the case. … We will never lose sight of the fact of who we are as Americans.”
Trump told his team to focus on programming. Trump will speak on the theme of “unity” at the Republican National Convention, which begins on Monday. His advisers have suggested to speakers that they need to “not speak too loud, but not too low,” according to a person who has spoken to Trump and spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the private conversations.
But discontent remains the dominant currency of American politics, the conviction that one side is being harmed by the other. There was little evidence Sunday that any calls for greater cross-partisan understanding had trickled down to the grassroots, or that any easing of divisions would be lasting.
Republican Representative Bob Branch Arizona The man, who is running for Maricopa County Board of Commissioners, spoke about the shooting with a trembling voice. He boarded a flight Sunday to the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee.
“If you look at the graphic ads Biden is running in the media, you can see that Trump is a dictator, a Xi Jinping, a Putin puppet. With all this, it’s no wonder people aren’t outraged and trying to kill him,” he said. “Biden can’t beat Trump in any other way.”
Republican delegate David Lara of San Luis, Arizona, also roundly condemned Biden. “He preaches one thing but actually does the complete opposite,” Lara said. “That’s what causes someone like this guy to do something like this. Joe Biden has no case. He actually did what he’s accusing other people of doing. He should have known better.”
A YouGov poll conducted on Sunday painted a picture of a nation in turmoil, with two in three respondents saying the current political climate makes violence more likely and eight in 10 saying political violence is a problem.
The percentage of Americans who support the use of force for political purposes remains much smaller. A research project by the Democracy Fund found that 2% of Democrats and 4% of Republicans consistently justify violence for political purposes in surveys conducted between 2019 and 2022. More than eight in 10 Americans said that violence for political purposes is never justified.
From Rhetoric candidate or campaign Whether it directly impacts violent behavior is a more complicated question.
The man who attacked then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband with a hammer in 2022 testified at his trial to several right-wing conspiracy theories and said he had been watching up to six hours a day of political commentary on YouTube before the attack.
The man who shot President Ronald Reagan in 1981 said: He was trying to impress a Hollywood actress. The 22-year-old man who shot and killed Rep. Gabby Giffords (D-Ariz.) in 2011 was later diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. There were two assassination attempts on President Gerald Ford in 1975, one of which was by a woman who was a follower of cult leader Charles Manson.
Robert A. Pape, a political science professor at the University of Chicago, has studied political violence for decades and has been surveying Americans on the topic for four years. His research has found little direct correlation between social media use and support for the use of force to achieve political ends, because most Americans still get their news from major news outlets. He argues that deeper unrest is rocking the country, turning policy debates into more existential contests.
“At the root of this is likely a deep divide about where this country should go,” he said. “We’re moving from a majority-white democracy to a multiracial democracy over the next decade.”
These tensions, he said, have led to divisive rhetoric around racial justice and immigration, two key issues in this year’s presidential election. Policy debates are no longer about policy, but often about the fundamental character and foundations of the country.
“This is a division about what America means, and there’s a sense that we don’t have the love for our institutions that we once had,” said presidential historian Douglas Brinkley.
Biden supporters have taken note of rhetoric from the right, such as an early July statement from Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation think tank, who said the U.S. is “in the process of a second American Revolutionary War, and it will remain bloodless if the left allows it.”
“Patriotic Americans are committed to a peaceful revolution at the ballot box, but the left has made it clear that they may use violence to stop it,” Roberts said.
Trump supporters have been focusing on Biden’s own words: After what many analysts and pundits called a dismal debate performance, Biden told donors last week he needed to change gears and “attack Trump head on,” before talking about the differences in his policies.
Roberts said such speech “leads to murder and grief for families.”
“At a time when Americans should come together to condemn this horrific attack, for anyone, particularly a national policy elected official, to politicize this tragedy, spread disinformation and seek to further divide the American people is not only unacceptable, it is an abdication of leadership,” the Biden campaign said in a statement.
The worry of those who study political violence is that public tensions and conflicts can seep into deluded and unstable minds and indirectly lead to violence.
“This is not an ‘accident,'” Elizabeth Newman, a former senior Homeland Security official during the Trump administration, wrote to X about Saturday’s shootings. “We are immersed in a toxic soup of frustration, anger, perpetual resentment, and fear. This environment directly contributes to people concluding that violence is somehow justified.”
There is little sign that the assassination attempt on a former US president and leading Republican candidate is going to change that anytime soon.
But in the best case scenario, the researchers hope it will prompt people to rethink their behavior.
“This is a test for political leaders and ordinary Americans,” said Cynthia Miller Idris, director of the PERIL Extremism Lab at American University. “It’s time for everyone to think about the role they play in increasing the likelihood of violence.”
Winget Sanchez reported from Phoenix. Josh Dorsey contributed to this report.
