The assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump last Saturday spurred an outpouring of condemnation against political violence from Republicans and Democrats alike. President Joe Biden declared that the shooting at the Pennsylvania rally, which injured Trump and killed one attendee, was “contrary to everything we stand for as a nation.”
“It’s not America, and we can’t allow this to happen,” Biden said.
But two and a half centuries of American history show that political violence is not new—or even uncommon. Although the current moment has yet to reach the heights of some of the nation’s more violent eras, such as the Civil War or the turmoil of 1968, historians still draw a comparison between 2024 and other times of significant upheaval.
“We’re at a period where we’ve been before, where there’s two sides that are so divided it isn’t surprising that there’s violence,” said Michael Kazin, a history professor at Georgetown University who recently wrote a book on the history of the Democratic Party. He added that “each side has convinced themselves that the other side wants to destroy the republic.” Indeed, polling by NBC News ahead of the 2022 midterm elections found that members of each party viewed the other as a threat that could destroy America.
Even before the assassination attempt, 2024’s unrest invited comparisons to 1968. There are some superficial similarities between the two years: a contentious presidential election with a weak Democratic candidate, protests on college campuses pertaining to unpopular wars, and a Democratic convention in Chicago. But the turmoil of 1968 was defined by an increasingly unpopular war in Vietnam that was drafting young Americans and by the assassinations of two prominent political figures, Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy. The attempt on Trump’s life has only sharpened comparisons between the two years.
“If you could reduce ’68 to one word, it’s drama. ’68 was full of drama,” said Luke Nichter, a history professor at Chapman University and the author of a book on that year’s political upheaval. “I think this adds a degree of drama to 2024 that does begin to put it in the category of ’68.”
The late 1960s were also characterized by rising mistrust in the government, which is echoed today in the deep unpopularity of Congress, the Supreme Court, and the two presidential candidates. “We are again in the eye of another storm where a critical mass of Americans across the political spectrum have reached a point where there’s a nadir of faith in American institutions,” Nichter said. However, the fragmentation of the news and the proliferation of disinformation that has accompanied the rise of social media have led to a greater distrust in journalism than existed 50 years ago.
Republicans and Democrats of 1968 are also different from their modern counterparts, Kazin argued. “The Republican Party was basically a moderate, conservative party at the time, as it had been through most of the twentieth century, and now it’s been taken over by a hard right that is speaking in populist rhetoric,” said Kazin. (The 1964 Republican presidential nominee, Barry Goldwater, was considered such an extreme conservative that he lost the general election in a landslide.)
History may not repeat itself, but there are certain patterns that could portend future conflict. Suzanne Mettler, a political science professor at Cornell University, identified key threats to democracy itself present in previous eras of political upheaval: high partisan polarization, conflict over who could be considered a “real” citizen, economic inequality, and increased concentration of power in the executive.
“Today, for the first time, we have all four threats present at once,” said Mettler, who recently co-authored a book on recurring perils facing democracy. She continued that the current political era has also seen democratic norms undermined, as the Republican Party in particular has questioned the legitimacy of Democrats’ ability to win—most significantly with Trump’s refusal to acknowledge that he lost the 2020 election. Even before then, Trump and his supporters viewed his 2016 rival, Hillary Clinton, as a criminal; chants of “Lock her up,” referring to Clinton, were common at Trump rallies.
Political polarization in the United States has been on the rise for decades, and members of Congress have veered away from the ideological center, particularly on the right. Under these conditions, political violence may not be inevitable, but it is certainly more likely.
Although a president or presidential candidate has not faced an assassination attempt since President Ronald Reagan was shot in 1981, recent years have seen an increase in violent rhetoric. Since 2010, two members of Congress have been injured in politically motivated shootings—Representative Gabrielle Giffords in 2011 and Representative Steve Scalise in 2017—and there has been an uptick in threats against lawmakers in the past five years. The attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, was a culmination of this violent rhetoric, with rioters threatening to injure or kill members of Congress and Vice President Mike Pence.
Previous eras of political violence have been characterized by backlash to changing demographics and perceived transformations of societal structure. Joanne Freeman, a historian at Yale University who has written a book on political violence in Congress prior to the Civil War, noted that the 1850s were characterized by slaveholders “using threats and violence to intimidate others so that they could preserve the institution of slavery.”
“They worried that maybe the demographics of the nation were not going to support them, that they were no longer going to really have the kind of majority power that they used to have,” said Freeman. “And so there was violence, and ultimately a civil war and an assassination.” One century later, support for explicitly racist politicians such as George Wallace characterized the backlash to the 1960s Civil Rights Movement, culminating in the King and Kennedy assassinations. Freeman sees parallels between prior eras of backlash rhetoric and that of Trump, who has frequently employed language imploring followers to “take back our country” and blaming migrants for crime and economic woes.
Speakers at the Republican convention have adopted aggressive language regarding immigrants in particular, with signs declaring “Mass Deportation Now” common in the hall on Wednesday evening. Tuesday evening’s theme was “Make America Safe Once Again,” with speakers characterizing migrants who enter the country illegally as primarily violent criminals. Trump himself has accused migrants of “poisoning the blood” of the country.
“The folks who are in power right now, who know that the demographics are working against them—and by this, I mean the Republicans, people on the right—they can feel the demographics shifting and the public will and public feelings about politics and society shifting, [and] that they are going to be losing some power,” Freeman said. “So some of them are responding with violence, and that’s been interwoven with former President Trump’s political message.”
Trump has frequently incorporated the word “fight” into his political rhetoric. Hours ahead of the attack on the Capitol, Trump told supporters to “fight like hell” against the results of the 2020 election. After he was shot at the rally on Saturday, he raised his fist to supporters and mouthed at them to “fight,” a defiant expression on his bloodied face, even as law enforcement guided him from the stage. At the Republican National Convention this week, supporters echoed that entreaty, chanting, “Fight, fight,” before Trump appeared onstage Monday evening.
Some of Trump’s Republican allies, including vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance, have blamed Democrats for encouraging violence against Trump with their rhetoric, prompting politicians to rethink the verbiage they use. Biden on Monday said that he had made a “mistake” the previous week when he told donors on a private call that he wanted to put a “bull’s-eye” on Trump, comments that some Republicans argued encouraged violence against their nominee. Other Republican leaders, such as Speaker Mike Johnson, have urged for a toning down of heated rhetoric.
Any effort by Trump to tone down his rhetoric in his 90-minute nomination acceptance speech on Thursday, as he recounted the assassination attempt and declared that he would do more than represent half the country, was countered by his more typical language demonizing migrants and castigating Democrats. “We must not criminalize dissent or demonize political disagreement,” Trump said. “In that spirit, the Democrat Party should immediately stop weaponizing the justice system and labeling their political opponents as an enemy of democracy, especially since that is not true. In fact, I am the one saving democracy for the people of our country.”
Little has been revealed about the shooter who targeted Trump, although FBI officials told members of Congress on Wednesday that gunman Thomas Matthew Crooks had searched images of both Trump and Biden, as well as other public figures. He had also looked up the dates of Trump’s events and the Democratic National Convention. A motive for the assassination attempt on Trump has yet to emerge.
The 20-year-old Crooks used an “AR-style” semiautomatic rifle, according to law enforcement, similar to the recognizable AR-15 firearm used in several recent mass shootings. The firearm was legally purchased by the gunman’s father. Although “violence is hardly a unique element of the American experience,” said Robert Dallek, a presidential historian who is co-writing a book on political violence in the twentieth century, the current era differs from other periods of upheaval in part because of easy access to weapons such as the AR-15.
“This is a society that really is, however much we think otherwise, awash in violence,” Dallek said.
