On Sunday evening, President Joe Biden addressed the nation from the Oval Office, condemning Saturday’s assassination attempt on Donald Trump. Biden expressed his condolences to the family of former fire chief Corey Comperatore, who was fatally shot at the rally. He extended his good wishes to Trump. He called on Americans to settle their differences at the ballot box and in the field of debate, rather than turn politics into “a literal battlefield or, god forbid, a killing field.”
But the most important part of Biden’s speech was when he contextualized what happened at Trump’s rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. This was not an isolated incident of political violence, but part of a continued surge.
Violence has never been the answer, whether it’s with members of Congress in both parties being targeted in the shot, or a violent mob attacking the Capitol on Jan. 6, or a brutal attack on the spouse of former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, or information and intimidation on election officials, or the kidnapping plot against a sitting governor, or an attempted assassination on Donald Trump. There is no place in America for this kind of violence or for any violence ever. Period. No exceptions. We can’t allow this violence to be normalized.
Biden’s assessment is 100% right. What happened at Trump’s rally is another in a long line of incidents. Those incidents didn’t start with Trump, but since his rise in politics, in 2015, violent political speech has certainly increased. As PBS NewsHour reported in 2021, violence is “becoming a dangerous feature of Republican campaign and party messaging.”
That’s not to say Democrats are completely innocent of calls for violent action. But there’s a difference between someone on Twitter calling for violence and someone in a position of power making that same call—especially if that person is in the White House.
Right now, Republicans are seeking to leverage this past weekend’s assassination attempt to their political advantage, painting Democrats as the primary—or even sole—perpetrators of violence. However, a study of incidents between 2021 and 2023 conducted by Reuters shows exactly what might be expected: “In those years, fatal political violence more often emanated from the American right than from the left.”
Reuters’ numbers confirm exactly what Biden talked about in his speech. The United States is currently experiencing the “most sustained spate of political violence since a decade of upheaval that began in the late 1960s,” according to Reuters. That violence has come from many different parts of the political spectrum, including a number of property crimes associated with protests originating on the left. But when it comes to violence against people, most were conducted “by suspects acting in service of right-wing political beliefs and ideology.”
And it’s not hard to understand why.
Political violence is unacceptable. But so is violence against kids in school. So is the violence of domestic abuse. So is violence against anyone, anywhere, on any occasion.
The attempted shooting of Trump isn’t garnering attention because it was an exceptional event in an America overrun with guns and people who think all problems can be solved by a bullet. It’s getting attention because it’s Trump.
If politicians want to stop people from climbing onto rooftops and firing rifles into a crowd, toning down the political rhetoric is a great idea. And doing so in the Christmas cards, pins, campaign ads, and daily rhetoric that celebrates the use of deadly weapons to settle disputes is a good place to start.
But an even better idea is to stop making battlefield weapons acceptable in the public square, streets, stores, and homes of Americans. Stop making America itself the “battlefield” or “killing field” that Biden warned against.
What happened to Trump is, unfortunately, not unusual in America, no matter how much media attention it’s getting.
But it should be.
