Shooting at Trump Rally Spotlights Rising Violence That Has Become America’s Political Reality

The shooting at Donald Trump’s Pennsylvania rally is the latest horrifying proof of the increase in violence and threats that has gripped America’s contemporary political discourse.

The country, already seething and polarized, appears to be bracing for recriminations, even as details about the shooting were only beginning to emerge.

Though it appears to be the first attempted shooting of a U.S. president — current or former — since Ronald Reagan survived a gunshot in 1981, Trump’s name is now atop a harrowing list of prominent leaders marked for violence in recent years.

That list includes former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), whose husband Paul was bludgeoned in their San Francisco home by an attacker who was seeking her out. It includes House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.), who was nearly killed by an assailant’s bullet during a 2017 mass shooting of the GOP congressional baseball team just outside Washington. And it includes Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who was allegedly targeted for assassination by a man who got within feet of the conservative justice’s Maryland home in the middle of the night.

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Just as Trump’s term culminated with an infamous outbreak of violence on Jan. 6, 2021, the early phase of his presidency was marked by one as well: the June 2017 shooting that nearly killed Scalise and injured several others. At the time, a parade of lawmakers and aides who played on the baseball team and fled the shooter described in vivid detail the terror that overtook them as they were marked for assassination. A similar scene played out Saturday as lawmakers who attended the Trump rally became eyewitnesses to a historic crime scene.

The attack on Trump is already a defining moment for the country and the 2024 election. And it arrived against the backdrop of a government already inundated by threats that have become facts of the job for members of Congress, judges and other prominent officials. Those threats are punctuated by occasional, but repeated, outbreaks of actual violence.

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New criminal cases based on threats to members of Congress, FBI agents and government officials are filed almost weekly.

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