How Did We Get Here?

Where the president is a proponent of political violence

Credit: Getty Images

As journalists, we have long been taught that writing a comprehensive news story requires answering the five Ws. Who, what, when, and where are the easy ones. It’s that last one, the why, that is almost always the most difficult to answer.

In some cases, motivation for an act, especially a murder, may never be known. How does one get to the point of purposely killing another person?

In cases of political violence, some in our country just want to retaliate — violence meeting violence, the biblical eye for an eye. Others, those who care to learn from abhorrent behavior so society can be made better, ask questions and seek knowledge.

One way to help us with our hopes for understanding is to turn to those, including academics, who study political violence. The headline from their current research: As a country, we have a big problem, and it’s getting worse.

During the first six months of the year, there were 150 politically motivated attacks, almost twice as many as the same period last year.

On New Year’s Day, 14 people were killed when a radicalized Muslim-American drove a truck into a crowd in New Orleans. In April, the Pennsylvania governor’s mansion was firebombed with Governor Josh Shapiro’s family inside, because of Shapiro’s stance on the war in Gaza. The following month, two Israeli embassy workers were killed in a hate crime. In June, a Christian nationalist assassinated one Democratic lawmaker in Minnesota and injured a second. In August, a Covid vaccine conspiracy theorist killed a police officer and shot dozens of rounds at the CDC headquarters in Atlanta. And last week, the killing of Charlie Kirk.

Over the past five years, we have seen a plot to assassinate a Supreme Court justice and one to kidnap the speaker of the House. There were two assassination attempts on then-candidate Donald Trump and a deadly attack on the Capitol incited by then-president Trump.

Sean Westwood of the Polarization Research Lab characterized what is happening in America as “pouring poison into the public well.” Those in power are the ones pouring.

A political leader’s reaction to political violence is a test of character. It is a test that Donald Trump has failed. He exploits others’ violent acts to further his own vengeful agenda. At a time when our leadership should be seeking unity, Trump is using Kirk’s killing as a call to arms for his supporters. “We have radical left lunatics out there and we just have to beat the hell out of them,” the president said at the White House last week.

He is calling for retribution as conditions for escalating political violence in America are becoming more conducive to it. According to Barbara Walter, a professor of internal affairs at UC San Diego, all four needed conditions are currently present in the United States: a rapidly declining democracy, a society divided by race and/or religion, political leaders who encourage violence, and easy access to guns.

“We are now in a watershed moment for what I call the era of violent populism in America,” said Robert Pape, a political science professor at the University of Chicago who studies political violence. He believes “big social change” is the main driver of the anger that causes political violence, pointing to resentment over society’s diminishing white majority.

“It started about 10 years ago, with the real tipping-point generation and corresponds with the rise of Donald Trump, why his issue of immigration is meteoric, why it’s morphed from immigration meaning stop people crossing the border to now deporting mass numbers of people,” Pape said on CBS News’ “Face the Nation.”

Add to all of this the internet. Pape says it isn’t a cause of political violence but an accelerant. Online radicalization is a common characteristic among the disgruntled young white men who have been perpetrators of much of the recent political violence.

The lack of controls and the virality of social media content adds to the speed with which rage bait infiltrates people’s feeds. In the two hours between the shooting of Kirk and the announcement of his death, video of the attack was viewed 11 million times on X alone.

Before the suspect was even caught, the online justification machine kicked into high gear. The alleged perpetrator was labeled and characterized with little information or evidence, all to fit a narrative. We still know very little about him, but that hasn’t stopped Trump and the MAGAsphere from suggesting a radical left-wing cabal is responsible and must be stopped. Together they are demonizing half the country — the half that did not vote for Trump.

The call for retaliation is not surprising. Trump benefits politically from promoting violence. It is red meat for his base. He uses it to gain media attention and fundraising dollars.

Governor Shapiro called out Trump’s reaction to the Kirk killing, writing, “We are at an inflection point in America. Violence transcends party lines — and the way to address it and have true peaceful debate is for leaders to speak and act with moral clarity. That needs to start with the President.”

Since there is plenty of anger, some of it justified, on both sides, it is a good time to remember that violence begets violence. And that violence is currently being fueled by, among others, the current occupant of the White House.

This is a tough truth in a tough time. All the more reason for the rest of us to stay calm, listen to our better selves, and do the best we can to prevent the country from spiraling ever deeper into political violence.

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Dan