Second assassination attempt on former President Trump raises new questions

The ability of a gunman to come within shooting range of former President Trump on Sunday has once again raised the specter of violence in the American political landscape, a development that analysts said was only to be expected as Trump supporters vowed it would make them even more determined to reelect him.

Just two months after a would-be assassin’s bullet struck Trump in the ear in Butler, Pennsylvania, the Secret Service shot and killed a gunman with an assault rifle who had hidden in the foliage less than 500 yards from the former president.

The suspect’s identity and motives had not been revealed by late afternoon, but supporters of the former president immediately rallied around him.

“FIGHT! FIGHT! FIGHT! TRUMP 2024,” wrote one supporter on Trump’s Truth Social platform.

“The greatest warrior,” said Kash Patel, a former Trump Defense Department official.

In another message, Trump appears as a heroic figure, fists raised as he walks across a battlefield. “I AM SAFE AND HEALTHY!” the missive read. “Our President Donald Trump.” The letter was followed by praying hands.

After the first assassination attempt on Trump in July, his supporters and even some neutral political observers predicted that violence would give him an insurmountable lead over President Biden.

But a lot has changed since then, including Biden’s disappointing debate performance, which led him to drop out of the presidential race and endorse Vice President Kamala Harris. In many ways, Harris has been the one who has had the wind in the sails of the campaign ever since.

“The peak of Donald Trump’s enthusiasm came immediately after the Pennsylvania shooting, in the run-up to his own convention,” said Mike Madrid, a Republican political consultant and staunch Trump critic. “Republicans were absolutely convinced they were going to win a landslide.”

“This latest incident gives his base another reason to mobilize and perhaps his supporters to say, ‘This is what we’re fighting against,’” Madrid said. “But in terms of the enthusiasm gap, that edge still goes to Harris and I don’t think that’s going to change.”

Longtime Republican pollster Frank Luntz said: “I was pretty sure that Trump’s defiance after being shot (in June) was going to propel his reelection. To my surprise, it’s not even the most important event of the campaign. This second shooting probably won’t have an impact either. I don’t see anything other than a war that could have a significant, measurable impact on a critical segment of the population.”

Colin Clarke, a research director at the Soufan Group, a global intelligence and security consulting firm, said his organization had just hosted a major summit on political violence, bringing together many U.S. government officials and leading academics, whose attendees would not be surprised by Sunday’s incident.

Clarke said one of the key takeaways from the conference was that the United States was likely to see “a lot more political violence” in the future, given “the general polarization in this country, where everyone is heavily armed and angry.”

“A lot of people are worried about what happens after November, regardless of which candidate wins,” he said.

“The things that make people angry these days are ubiquitous, and it’s so easy to get a gun, and easier than many people thought to get close to a president or a former president,” he said.

The data shows that violence from the far right poses the greatest threat, but violence from the far left also poses a danger, he said.

“There’s been a kind of mutual radicalization as the far right – those neo-Nazi bastards – have become more prominent,” he said.

Trump has stoked anger and fear daily with his political rhetoric, which has not abated since the first assassination attempt, and Clarke said he fears it will only increase now.

“We are in the thick of it and I am very concerned about the escalating rhetoric,” he said.

He said that a “responsible leader should often talk about unifying the country instead of dividing it,” but he does not expect that from Trump.

“The general political climate is more tense and more vitriolic and that’s what sells: it’s part of the social media age, where being moderate doesn’t get you clicks or followers,” he said.

Some Trump supporters say harsh rhetoric against him, particularly criticism that he poses a threat to democracy, has incited those who would harm him.

“The Democrats put Trump’s life in danger by calling him a danger to democracy!” one supporter posted Sunday on Truth Social. “He was the victim of an assassination attempt on July 13th and the Democrats continued to call him dangerous! Now there’s another assassination attempt in West Palm Beach!”

Dr. Garen Wintemute, who directs the Violence Prevention Research Program at UC Davis, has studied political violence for years. Since 2022, his group has conducted a large, nationally representative annual survey of Americans’ support for political violence and their personal willingness to engage in it.

The group just received its 2024 data, collected before the first attempt on Trump’s life, and Wintemute said it was encouraging in that it showed no increase in Americans’ acceptance of political violence starting in 2023.

In 2022, nearly a third of respondents said they believed violence was usually or always justified to advance at least one political goal. Republicans and Republicans who support the MAGA movement were more likely than others to think this, as were white supremacists, conspiracy theorists, and gun owners.

In 2023, racists, sexists, anti-Semites, homophobes, and transphobes were also more likely to believe that violence was justified to advance political goals.

Yet Wintemute said two-thirds of respondents in 2022 and three-quarters in 2023 rejected political violence. And, among respondents who said they saw it as justified by at least one political goal, the majority said they were unwilling to engage in violence themselves.

According to the latest data, Wintemute said: “We do not see an increase in support for political violence from 2023 to 2024 and there was an increase from 2022 to 2023.”

He said it was “good news” given that 2024 is an election year and he expected support for political violence to increase.

For the first time this year, Wintemute said, they asked people how likely they were to participate as combatants if large-scale violence broke out, and found more “good news”: “The vast majority of people — about 85 percent — said they were not likely to participate as combatants.”

He added that most of the people who said they would not show up for the fights were not willing to change their minds if their family or friends urged them to. But among those who said they would show up for the fights, many said they would be willing to change their minds.

What this shows, Wintemute said, is that “we must commit to preventing violent retaliation” by speaking out in opposition to it.

“It’s our job to be a breeding ground, so that when a spark of political violence erupts, it stops immediately and doesn’t ignite a conflagration – there’s no answer to that,” he said.

“It is also our job – we, the vast majority of those who reject violence – to speak out on this issue.”

Another academic who conducted a survey of Americans and their attitudes toward political violence said more needs to be done to condemn such attacks.

“All political leaders and presidential candidates should immediately condemn political violence,” said Robert A. Pape, a political scientist at the University of Chicago, “whether it comes from the left or the right, rather than waiting for a spiral of escalation to occur.”

Pape surveyed more than 2,000 Americans in late June, before the first assassination attempt on Trump on July 13. The survey revealed a disturbing willingness across the political spectrum to say that violence was justified to remove political obstacles.

According to a poll by the Chicago Project on Security & Threats released in June, 6.9% of Americans, or 18 million adults, believe that using force to restore Trump to the White House is justified. In a separate question, 10% of Americans, or 26 million adults, believe that political violence is justified to prevent Trump from becoming president again.

The researchers found that millions of those on both sides who believed political violence would be justified also owned guns.

“What’s happening, unfortunately, is directly consistent with our surveys,” Pape said, “which show that not only do people support the use of force to prevent Trump from becoming president, but many of them own guns.”