How Donald Trump is making America politically violent again

The assassination of ultra-right, racist influencer Charlie Kirk may not have been the “shot heard around the world.” But before the videos of his shooting death were taken down, at least 10 million views had beenlogged on platforms like X, Facebook, Tik Tok, Instagram, You Tube, and Truth Social.

However, this commentary does not focus on the assassination of the 31-year-old Kirk, who spoke at the Republican National Convention in 2024 and was a highly valued member of Donald Trump’s inner circles. Nor do I talk about his 22-year-old accused killer,Tyler Robinson, or the possible political motivations behind engravings on four bullet casings, suggesting a mixture of “leftish” and “rightist” leanings.

I want to focus on polarized reactions to Kirk’s death by the two major parties, in relation to threats and incidences of political violence that have been surging since the MAGA base violently assaulted the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

What the data tell us

Before October 2020 — with the exception of November 2019, the month before Trump’s first impeachment, when Republican support for violence spiked —support for violence and dehumanization were in single digits with voters of both parties.

Of course, the political elephant in the room is the criminal-instigator-in-chief. To put it unequivocally, Trump hogs the blame for most politically motivated violent behavior plaguing this nation.

As Rachel Kleinfeld, founding CEO of the Truman National Security Project who serves on the National Task Force On Election Crises, notes in a recent article in the Journal of Democracy, as far back as January 2020, one year before Jan. 6, 41 percent of Republicans agreed that “a time will come when patriotic Americans have to take the law into their own hands.” After the failed insurrection, 56 percent of Republicans agreed that “if elected leaders will not protect Americans, the people must do it themselves even if it requires taking violent action.”

Moral disengagement or lack of civil discourse has also been spiking. By February 2021, Kleinfeld notes, “more than two-thirds of Republicans (and half of Democrats) saw the other party as ‘downright evil,’ while 12 percent more Republicans believed Democrats were less than human than the other way around.”

Kleinfeld writes:

“The false narrative of a stolen 2020 election clearly increased support for political violence. Those who believed the election was fraudulent were far more likely to endorse coups and armed citizen rebellion; by February 2021, a quarter of Republicans felt that it was as least “a little justified to take over state government buildings with violence to advance their political goals.” This politically driven false narrative points to the role of politicians since 2016 in fueling the difference in violence between the right and left. As has been found in Israel and Germany, domestic terrorists are emboldened by the belief that politicians encourage violence or that authorities will tolerate it.”

In 2022, according to theInstitute for Responsive Government and a New York Times review of threats leading to indictments, one third of such threats were made by Republican or pro-Trump individuals against Democrats or Republicans deemed “insufficiently” loyal. One quarter of indicted threats were made by pro-Democrats against Republicans.

More recent data also tells us that high-volume threats against members of Congress, their families, and staff investigated by U.S. Capitol Police rose from 8,008 in 2023 to 9,474 in 2024.

Also, a 2024poll of nearly 300 former members of Congress found that 49 percent of Republicans and 46 percent of Democrats frequently received threats in office, alongside a higher incidence of threats against female lawmakers and those from racial minorities, with 69 percent of such respondents reporting frequent threats.

According to Mike Jensen, a researcher at the University of Maryland who since 1970 has been tracking this kind of violence, in the first six months of the second Trump administration,the U.S. “experienced about 150 politically-motivated attacks — nearly twice as many as over the same period last year.”

After the assassination of Kirk, Jensen said: “I think we are in a very, very dangerous spot right now that could easily escalate into more widespread civil unrest … This could absolutely serve as a kind of flashpoint that inspires more” racially motivated violence.

Within 24 hours of Kirk’s death, Black students and colleges across the US were targeted “by coordinated racist death threats, forcing at least seven historically Black colleges into emergency lockdowns.”

Meanwhile, lawmakers from both sides of the aisle were voicing what The Hillcalled “fresh concerns that the polarization of American politics is radicalizing the fringes and fueling extremism.”

Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-Fla.) said: “People are scared to death in this building. I mean, not many of them will say it publicly, but they’re running to the Speaker talking about security — and that’s a lot of Republicans.”

Lack of civil discourse

Both Republicans and Democrats urged, in The Hill’swords, “a national shift in rhetoric – on and off of Capitol Hill – away from the knee-jerk partisan attacks that practically define the country’s political debate.”

Comparatively speaking, however, the partisan social discourse of Republicans, from the top down, was as hateful as it has been since Joe Biden beat Trump in November 2020.

Following the assassination of Kirk, the pot once again called the kettle black. As reported by the New York Times, Trump “released a four-minute video from the Oval Office in which he condemned the killing as ‘the tragic consequence of demonizing those with whom you disagree day after day’.”

During a Fox News interview, Trump blamed political violence on one of his favorite scapegoats, the ”lunatic” radical left supposedly supported by billionaire social justice philanthropist George Soros. Without missing a beat, absent any conscience, the sociopathic president defended political violence on the “radical right” as a matter of patriotic justice.

As the Times put it, “instead of calling for Americans of all political stripes to lower the temperature,” the fueling agent of chaos and mistrust was as usual rattling off a list of political violence targeting Republicans or perpetrated by those he views as on the left.

These included the two “assassination attempts against him; attacks on Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers; the assassination of a health care executive in New York; and the mass shooting of Republicans at a congressional baseball practice that nearly killed Representative Seve Scalise of Louisiana.”

Trump also told reporters on Thursday, “We just have to beat the hell out” of the radical left.

Missing once again from the insurrectionist-in-chief was any reference to violence encouraged by himself and his allies, for example, byRudy Giuliani, who Trump plans to award the Presidential Medal of Freedom, or by a corrupted Justice Department, targeting Democrats and Republicans because the president does not like them.

Conversely, as the Timesreported, Trump “made no mention of the recent killings in Minnesota of a Democratic state lawmaker and her husband, who were on a hit list of dozens of left-wing figures; the arson attack on the home of Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, while he and his family slept; a shooter’s attack on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; a hammer assault on the husband of former Speaker Nancy Pelosi; the shootings at an Arizona campaign office of Kamala Harris; or the Jan. 6 pro-Trump mob attack on the Capitol that injured roughly 150 police officers.”

In short, rather than condemning violence on both sides and “calling for unity,” the Atlantic reported, “the president of the United States accused his political opposition of being accessories to murder.”

Here is how Jonathan Freedland of the Guardian summed up whatTrump’s cheerleaders are saying:

“'We’re gonna avenge Charlie’s death,' promised Fox News host Jesse Watters. Elon Musk declared that 'The Left is the party of murder.' A legion of other rightwing influencers have already taken this talk to its logical conclusion, announcing, as one put it, that 'THIS IS WAR.' Could the message being sent to a furious and well-armed support base be any clearer?

During the same period, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) made comments to Mehdi Hasan, expressing both condolences for Charlie Kirk’s family and criticism of his positions. Immediately thereafter,on social media and elsewhere, rightwing influencers and Republican legislators called for Omar’s resignation from Congress and deportation to Somalia.

In response, Omar posted: “Right-wing accounts trying to spin a false story when I condemned [Kirk’s] murder multiple times is fitting for their agenda to villainize the left to hide from the fact that Donald Trump gins up hate on a daily basis.”

As Trump was exploiting and weaponizing the murder of his young friend, some Republicans “seemed preoccupied with proving that ‘the left’ was celebrating the attack,” Jonathan Chait wrote in the Atlantic.

Trump has been doing that since the attack on Paul Pelosi, in December 2022.

‘Fanaticism on the left’?

Unlike Republican leaders or Fox News, Democratic leaders and liberal outlets like MSNBC were united in revulsion and condemnation of the attack on Kirk and political violence. Nor did they call for vengeance.

California Governor Gavin Newsom wrote, “The attack on Charlie Kirk is disgusting, vile, and reprehensible. In the United States of America, we must reject political violence in EVERY form.”

New York City mayoral candidate Zorhan Mamdani said: “I’m horrified by the shooting of Charlie Kirk at a college event in Utah. Political violence has no place in our country.”

And yet, as Chait wrote, “the Republican Party’s fanatical devotion to Trump requires an insistence that it is responding to a greater and more insidious form of fanaticism on the left.”

Like Boss Trump, the GOP posits that “a totalitarian and violent left-wing threat is necessary to justify Trump’s” emerging police state and excuse the president’s criminality, past and present — as the MAGA Supreme Court's 6-3 ruling did in Trump v. United States, granting presidents criminal immunity.

Asked about bringing the country together, the Outlaw-in-Chief told Fox News he “couldn’t care less.” Naturally, because he desires more violence, not less. That is why he is sending troops into Democratic-run cities — so he can ratchet up the violence and declare some kind of emergency, in order to suspend elections.

• Gregg Barak is an emeritus professor of criminology and criminal justice at Eastern Michigan University and the author of several award-winning books, includingCriminology on Trump (2022) and its sequel, Indicting the 45th President: Boss Trump, the GOP, and What We Can Do About the Threat to American Democracy (2024). The third book in Barak’s trilogy, Regime Change, Authoritarian Treason, and the Outlaw-in-Chief: President Donald Trump’s Struggle to Kill U.S. Democracy & Realign American Global Power, will be published after the 2026 midterm election.