Trump’s 3rd Assassination Attempt: What Is Behind Today’s Political Violence?

BIANNA GOLODRYGA: Now, the temperature of American politics has been rising for some time. The United States has seen a troubling spate of violent attacks across the political spectrum, including yet another attempt on President Trump’s life. And Americans are asking, what is causing this dangerous uptick in political violence? In a recent Substack article, Professor Barbara F. Walter offers her answer to that question. She joins Hari Sreenivasan to discuss.

HARI SREENIVASAN: Bianna, thanks. Professor Barbara Walter, thanks so much for joining us. You wrote a substack recently titled, “Political Violence is Here to Stay: America Has All the Conditions for Violence and No Signs of Change.” And we are really having the conversation just in the wake of the third presidential assassination attempt on Donald Trump’s life. And what does this say about political violence in the US today?

BARBARA F. WALTER: What we know about political violence is it happens under these conditions  it happens most frequently in countries that are pseudo democracies. Most people think, oh, you know, full democracies are really safe and you don’t have a lot of violence. But the closer you get to being a North Korea or China the more violence you’re gonna see. And that actually is not true. Autocracies tend to be almost as peaceful and stable as full healthy democracies. But if you look where the violence happens, it all happens in the middle. It spikes as democracies are declining, especially if they’re declining rapidly. And once they get to the middle zone, that’s peak violence, peak in instability. And that’s based on pretty much every data set out there. So that’s the first and the most important condition. 

The second condition is when politics in these partial democracies  gets defined by identity rather than ideology. So it’s when voters join parties, not because they’re conservative or liberal. That’s a healthy political system. It’s when they join a party because they’re black, or they’re white, they’re Christian, they’re Muslim, they’re Serb or Croat. Those two are the most destabilizing conditions, a partial democracy with these really tribal politics. But then you add a few additional features, you add easily accessible guns, right? The United States has the highest per capita gun ownership of any country in the world by a lot. And gun ownership is rising, and it’s now rising across a wider swath of people. It used to be that most guns in the United States were held by a small percentage of the population. They tended to be conservative. Since 2024, you’ve started to see more women, more minorities, more people on the left buying guns. 

And then the fourth thing we know is that the type of violence that we’re seeing today, you could call it domestic terrorism, you could call it political violence, is overwhelmingly caused by what we call lone actors. These are individuals, they’re acting alone. They’re overwhelmingly young, male, and they’ve been radicalized online. 

SREENIVASAN: Let’s break that down a little bit. Right? You say that the data from the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Response To Terrorism shows that terrorism and targeted violence events increased by more than 30% between 2024 and 2025. And a different analysis found that more than 520 plots and violent incidents happened in just the first half of 2025. And that’s up 40% within a year’s time. I mean, clearly there is, there are more people who are willing to say that political violence is okay.

WALTER: Yes. And so then the question is, why do they think this? And I think there’s a multitude of reasons. One is that we have a president, and we have party leadership on the Republican side who are willing to condone it, normalize it, give immunity to it. And that was not the case even 20 years ago. I mean, when, when there was an assassination attempt on a politician, both parties would come together and immediately condemn it, would immediately show real sympathy towards the target. And now you don’t see that anymore. Now it’s just like, well, he deserved it, or, you know, that’s what happens when you do X, Y, and Z.

And it’s this environment of hate actually, also. Where we’re in a place where….the members of each party see the other as their enemy. They don’t want their children to marry somebody from the other party. Those attitudes are much stronger on the right than on the left. So it’s not equal, but it is growing on the left, just as gun ownership is growing on the left. So you have this sense of hate, this sense of, you know, violence in pursuit of your political ideals is justified. And that’s in part why you see it growing.

SREENIVASAN: You know, we’ve been hearing about the impacts of social media and the filter bubble and the echo chambers specifically around young men who seem impressionable, they have their own frustrations about the economy, or job loss or dating, or whatever it is. And they seem to go down these rabbit holes. And I wonder you know, is there any idea of how that’s contributing specifically to this sort of lone-wolf type attack or this type of political violence?

WALTER: Yeah. So, you know, I think the single drive biggest driver of this increase in political violence is the social media environment, full stop, period. And we know that young men are struggling. There’s, you know, we’re trying to figure out why that’s the case, but they are disproportionately drawn to a lot of these more extreme sites and chat rooms.

And what usually happens is there’s some underlying grievance. So they’ve lost – here in the United States, they’ve lost their job, or they’re looking around and they’re seeing immigrants in their community who are getting good jobs. Or they, you know, they see the people who are becoming billionaires in Silicon Valley, and a lot of them aren’t, you know, weren’t born here and don’t look like them. And they have that grievance. Why is this not happening to me? Why am I getting, why am I getting worse off? This is my country. My country’s changing, I want it back.

And then they go online. And what the studies have shown is that they’ve tracked exactly how they become more radical the longer they stay online. And it’s not, it doesn’t happen initially. They might go online and they’ll say you know, they’ll type something like “Muslims in America.” Right? The algorithm then feeds them more and more extreme – it doesn’t stay neutral, it doesn’t stay at the same level – more extreme material. And that’s how it slowly happens. 

The, the big question that researchers still have is, okay, you become more radical in your beliefs, in your ideology, in your hatred. But that’s a – there’s a big difference between your attitude and actually picking up a gun and killing somebody. And we know only a minority of the people who are radicalized online actually take that last step. But they do. And that’s what we don’t quite understand yet. That could be partly a mental health issue, right? You know, you look at a lot of these lone actors and they don’t have stable lives. They don’t seem to be operating on solid ground. And so there’s probably an element of that as well.

SREENIVASAN: I wonder how does despair key into political violence? You know, some of the people that have been behind the attacks – whether it’s on Charlie Kirk or the President or the United Healthcare CEO – I mean there’s just a core frustration that they express in manifestos or at testimonies where it just seems like they’re in a system that isn’t gonna work. So I feel like maybe I should take matters into my own hands.

WALTER: You talk about despair, I frame it as a loss of hope. That you’ll – people will work within the system, they’ll go through conventional political channels as long as they think that there’s some hope that that will actually fix the problem that they care about. But when they come to believe and they despair that anything will ever change, then suddenly they shift and they go from, okay, I’m not gonna work within the system anymore. I’m gonna turn to violence. And if you look historically at all the violent terrorist groups – Hamas, the IRA, the Tamil Tigers – they didn’t start as violent organizations, they started as political organizations.

The IRA has been around since the 1920s, and they actually modeled their organization and their movement, they modeled it against the Civil Rights Movement, Martin Luther King’s Civil Rights Movement here in the United States. They had marches, they they had strikes, they did all of that. It was only after they saw that nothing was ever going to change as long as they worked in the system, that the more extreme members of that group who were in the background saying, it’s not gonna work. It’s not gonna work. You need to, you need to turn to violence. That the moderates in that group eventually said, yeah, you’re probably right. And that’s when you see the shift to violence. So despair plays a really important role in all this.

SREENIVASAN: I wonder, one of the things that we have been familiar with over the past few years is the rise of political violence from far right groups. And we saw that even when the president came into office the first time around, we continued to see an increase in that. But what you also document here, and that there’s studies that are kind of looking at this, is that there’s now an uptick in political violence from the left. How significant is that?

WALTER: It’s small but meaningful. So the vast majority of political violence you know, since about 2008 has been perpetrated by the far right. And even today after this uptick on the left, it’s much, much more lethal, has killed you know, more people by a magnitude of 10. You know, so it’s much, much bigger on the right. But the left had been quiet until recently. And since 2024, so since Trump came back to office, you are seeing more attacks from the left that continues in 2025.

In fact, there’s, there’s one statistics that shows that 2024 was the first year where there were more attacks from the far left than the far right. That is in large part because attacks from the far right decreased in 2024. You know, they’re guys in power, right? They have the keys to the Cadillac, so they don’t really need to turn to violence right now. But still you’re seeing it from both sides. 

They’re different. Their target – the way they use violence is different and who they target is different. The far right has overwhelmingly been violence driven by white nationalism. It tends to be targeted at minorities. The three big targets are black Americans, Jews, and LGBTQ citizens. There – Latinos are also included in there and women. So these are white nationalists who wanna reassert white male dominance. And this is the way some of them are choosing to do that. So they tend to target individuals. The left tends to target infrastructure and the government. So it’s law enforcement, it’s politicians who are voting ways that they don’t agree with. So it’s different. And it’s driven by a different set of grievances on both sides.

SREENIVASAN: You know, we seem to collectively put a social disincentive on acts of political violence. Right? We capture lone wolf actors quickly, we give them very public trials, long sentences. That doesn’t seem to be deterring more acts of this.

WALTER: But if you look at the data over time, we’re not consistent in how we prosecute these groups. So the previous peak of political violence, domestic terrorism in this country was 1995. That’s when Timothy McVeigh bombed the federal building in Oklahoma City. That was a wake up call to the FBI. And after that, they had a very, very well organized, aggressive campaign to figure out who these extremists were within our country, how they were operating, and they went after them. And you saw a significant decline in these groups and membership into these groups.

That changed under Trump. Trump doesn’t want these groups prosecuted. Right? His attitude towards the January 6th – the people who attacked the capitol — he gave them all immunity, right? He – we did go after them. We did put them in jail, if they had committed a crime, and then Trump released them. And he’s told others that they would have immunity if they, you know, if they supported him unconditionally. So we, you know, if you were to look at the data, Trump has given the order that we are not going after these groups anymore. And again, their ability to operate and to grow and to train is related to, you know, how much freedom and tolerance they’re given. And right now, they’re given a lot of tolerance.

SREENIVASAN: The more troubling part of your recent note was, you kind of end the piece by saying that we are entering, the United States is entering a period of 10 to 20 years of elevated instability and political violence. How do we know that we’ve gone from isolated incidents to elevated violence to civil war? I mean, put us in that continuum there. 

WALTER: Yeah. It’s overwhelmingly insurgencies, guerilla warfare. And it’s usually quite decentralized. So you’ll have militias, paramilitary groups and sometimes they’re working together, but sometimes they’re actually, you know, doing their own thing, sort of parallel play. It’s interesting. I actually think the risk of civil war under Trump has declined somewhat because the militias and the groups that were training for war were all on the far right. So the Proud Boys and the accelerationists and the, you know, the Boogaloo boys and all these groups that actually wanted a civil war to essentially clean house and to make America, you know, pure and white, again. They’ve become quite quiet under Trump. And again, that’s because their grievances have declined. And in their place, you’re seeing more of these lone actors. And lone actors from a civil war perspective, an insurgency, guerrilla warfare perspective, are less threatening. They’re not organized for that. They’re not training for that. It’s – they would be much less lethal than very well trained militias, which every state here in the United States has.

So you know, who’s in the White House matters. The far right, these white nationalists, you know, if we were to get a Democrat in the White House again, if that Democrat was, you know, a woman of color, for example they would, they’re ready to train again. And their goal is to prevent America from becoming a non-white majority country, which is going to happen in the next 20 years. And so they’re just gonna be reinvigorated. So it really depends on who’s in power and how threatened those really radical groups that are well-armed, trained, organized who want war, whether they feel threatened or not. 

SREENIVASAN: Author and Professor Barbara Walter and a political scientist as well. Thanks so much for taking your time.

WALTER: Thank you, Hari. It was a pleasure to be here.