A question that seems to be on everyone’s mind after the third assassination attempt on President Trump on Saturday is whether the country has entered into a new, dangerous phase of political violence, and what that would mean for the country.
I talked with Sean Westwood, a professor of government at Dartmouth College and fellow at the Hoover Institution who tracks acts of violence and the reaction to them. Our conversation has been edited for clarity and length.
Beyond the attempts on President Trump, there were also the assassinations last year of Charlie Kirk, the conservative activist, and Melissa Hortman, a Democratic state legislator in Minnesota. Is political violence worse now?
If you want to contextualize political violence today, we just have to look to the past. If we are looking at the period from 1865 to 1901, three of the nine presidents were assassinated. A comparable rate today would mean that we would have lost two or three sitting presidents since the late 1980s. It’s also the case that in the ’60s and ’70s, there were the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr., John F. Kennedy and Robert Kennedy, and days with multiple bombings by radical domestic groups.
That’s just not what we’ve seen in the last two decades. So, we have a myopia about political violence that seems to allow us to only consider a decade or so of the past when we’re trying to think about how bad things are today.
What does that tell us about the country now?
We should be certainly very worried about political violence and its destabilizing effect, but the country has seen far worse and survived. Part of our doom loop is not necessarily the political violence itself, but the narrative of democratic collapse that comes along with it. And history tells us that isolated incidents of political violence — even the assassination of elected officials or presidents — do not lead to the end of the Republic.
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