I’m really not surprised by this analysis piece
Trump is a target of political violence, but he’s hardly its only cause
To hear Donald Trump tell it, the attempts on his life are a measure of his singularity as a president.
“The people that do the most, the people that make the biggest impact, they’re the ones that they go after,” Trump said Saturday night after a gunman rushed security at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, allegedly intent on assassinating the president and high-ranking members of his administration. “I hate to say I’m honored by that, but we’ve done a lot.”
There is no doubt that Trump has been impactful and historic, though the country is deeply divided over whether that has been for better or worse. Few figures in the modern era have generated both the devotion and the rage that he has.
But political violence — of which Trump has been the most high-profile recent target, but which has also been directed against figures across the political spectrum — has many roots.
Many! Like the constant number of Democrat voting wackos in the streets, throwing rocks, attacking police, fighting, and so forth? How about all those Dem voting transgenders who committed mass murder and left left wing manifestos?
And in some instances, it is hard to discern any reason at all. Authorities have yet to figure out a motive, or a set of them, behind Trump’s closest call: the shots that grazed his ear during a July 2024 outdoor campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, and killed one person in the crowd and critically injured two others.
He was radicalized by Democrats. All that yammering about how dangerous Trump was, that he was literally Hitler.
“It is easier than ever for mentally ill individuals to become radicalized,” said Matthew Dallek, a political historian at George Washington University who has written extensively about extremist political movements. “When they’re radicalized, even if their agenda is not always crystal clear, they usually are responding to ideas and conspiracy theories circulating in the culture.”
Radicalized by Democrats
Meanwhile, the president and his allies have seized upon the threats against him to justify a fresh crackdown on his foes. On Tuesday, former FBI director James B. Comey was indicted by a federal grand jury for a second time, after charges lodged last year were dismissed by a federal judge. In the new case, he is charged with threatening the president by posting, and then removing, an image on Instagram last year of seashells spelling out “86 47.”
Trump is the 47th president, and “86” is slang for getting rid of something. Administration officials claimed that Comey was advocating the president’s murder. Comey said he viewed the shell arrangement, which he saw while taking a walk, as a political statement, not a call to violence.
While I personally do not agree with the indictment, 86 means killing someone. It’s a cop code. And here you have the former director of the FBI casually calling to kill Trump, which entices the unhinged liberal base.
What Trump and those around him do not mention is that prominent Democrats have also been targets of political violence in recent years. Those incidents include the 2022 bludgeoning in his home of Paul Pelosi, the husband of Rep. Nancy Pelosi (California), then the speaker of the House; a 2020 plot by members of a right-wing paramilitary group to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer; the 2025 arson of the Pennsylvania governor’s mansion, where Gov. Josh Shapiro and his family were celebrating Passover; and the 2025 killings of Minnesota lawmaker Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark.
Of course there are right wing wackos, but, the number doesn’t come close to the number of left wingers. Also, Shapiro is a Jew, and was firebombed by a hater of Jews and Israel.
The Polarization Research Lab, a multi-university collaboration, collected data in the wake of the September 2025 assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk. It found that fewer than 1 percent of Americans considered murder for partisan reasons acceptable. “This near-total rejection demonstrates that there is no meaningful constituency for political violence in the United States,” its report found.
However, its numbers also indicated that upward of 90 percent of Americans fear political violence. Nearly a third said they were reluctant to put a political sign in their yard or bumper sticker on their car because they were worried about being targeted.
And it is mostly Republicans concerned with that, because few Republicans will attack someone or their property over a sign or bumper sticker. It’s mostly Democrats doing that.
Maybe the Washington Post should simply be saying “hey, Democrats, knock it off. Stop with the unhinged talk, especially you elected ones.”
Jeffries doubled down
Read: Washington Post Tries Some Deflection On Political Violence »
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