Pennsylvania man Thomas Crooks’ attempt to assassinate former President Donald Trump on July 13 rattled the nation. The attempt on Trump’s life, and the shocking spectacle it generated, has raised fears about the increasing hostility in our political atmosphere, with violent rhetoric seeping into the mainstream. There are also questions of whether the act could inspire future copycats or aggressive counterprotests.
In this particular instance, some of the long-term fallout of the shooting may hinge on the motive of the shooter, which investigators and authorities are still having enormous trouble identifying. FBI Director Christopher Wray told Congress on Wednesday that the bureau’s investigation has not “yielded significant clues.”
Another factor in whether this fades or sticks as a momentous event is how different political movements and parties react to it. While President Joe Biden and Democrats uniformly condemned violence as unacceptable, a number of Republicans attributed Crooks’ act to Democratic rhetoric, despite not knowing what motivated Crooks and the fact that Democrats have not called for political violence. What remains to be seen is how people interpret it in the long term.
To get a better understanding of what happened and how to think about it, I called up Lilliana Mason, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins University, whom I’ve interviewed before about America’s growing problem with political violence. We discussed the possible motives behind the shooter’s actions, what makes political violence lead toward more large-scale conflict — like civil war — and how we as a society can turn the temperature down to prevent a spiral into chaos.
Our conversation, edited for length and clarity, follows.
Zeeshan Aleem: It seems that investigators and reporters have had trouble so far identifying the ideology of the shooter. How should we think about how to interpret the event?
Lilliana Mason: We don’t know what this guy was thinking. He could’ve been a school shooter type that’s sad and looking for attention. But it was political violence to the extent that it was violence at a political event targeting the leader of one of our two political parties. And so whether or not he meant it to be political violence, it’s going to be taken by people as political. One thing that I worried about immediately was whether it would be taken up — as JD Vance did — as “they did this to us.”
I have a lot of research with my co-author Nathan Kalmoe showing that if you ask partisans — people who identify with one party or usually vote for it — whether political violence is OK, 10% to 20% say that it could be. But then if you ask them, “What if the other party is violent first, then would it be OK to use violence?” And then the numbers really skyrocket. In earlier data that we had from 2020, we saw them go up to around 40% of people saying it would be OK if the other side did it first. I was looking at data from June that we just got in, and actually on that one it was even more disturbing: It went up to basically 60% of people saying, “If they started it, then political violence would be OK.”
Could you expand on what a school shooter type means and how that might be significant?
Mason: A “school shooter” can do violence anywhere. It’s horrible that we even have a word for this, right? It’s only in America that we have this word. This guy was very young. He was not even old enough to drink, and in the last election he was 16; this would have been his first election voting for president. It sounds like he was relatively isolated and troubled, and his politics were confusing. He was a registered Republican. [He also donated $15 to a Democratic organization via Act Blue.] We just don’t know. If there was an ideological reason, then it really fits firmly in the category of political violence that he wanted Trump to die because Trump was dangerous or because he didn’t like his platform. But if it’s more on the school shooter end of the spectrum, he may have targeted Trump because, for example, he wanted be famous, and was maybe already suicidal and this was his chosen way to go. The Reagan shooter was not ideological. It wasn’t because he hated Reagan necessarily. It was because he wanted Jodie Foster to pay attention to him.
Some right-wingers claim that Trump’s shooting was an outcome of describing Trump as an existential threat to democracy. What’s your response?
Mason: It’s possible that framing this as an existential election encourages violence in the sense that violence tends to emerge when we don’t believe that we have remedies within the system, right? That’s when we do protests; we engage in an anti-system way. But if we believe that we have remedies within the system, like voting, then we don’t need to engage in violence.
But what that ignores is that the Republican Party also thinks this is an existential election and that, if Biden wins, we will descend into socialism and communism and whatever else they think. It’s not being framed as an existential election just from the Democratic side. And the other thing is that Trump being the victim of this really overshadows the extent to which Trump himself has encouraged violence since the beginning of his 2016 campaign. He encourages it at his rallies — when people are violent on his behalf, he doesn’t condemn it. He didn’t ask the Jan. 6 people to stop until hours after they had already done all the damage they could do. He made fun of the violent attack on [former House Speaker] Nancy Pelosi’s husband.
What does history and social science tell us about the possible repercussions of a presidential assassination attempt?
In the 1960s there were a lot of assassinations and also assassination attempts. I think the 60s is a really good analogy to today in the sense of social upheaval, a lot of social progress, previously marginalized groups claiming their power back, and that was very disruptive for the traditional social hierarchy. The difference between the 60s and today is that the political parties didn’t take sides on that divide in the 60s. There were both more progressive and more conservative people in both the Democratic and the Republican parties, and so it didn’t pit the parties against each other on this really volatile topic.
Now that we have Republicans as the party of “Let’s go back to the traditional hierarchy” and the Democrats as the party of “We still need to make more progress toward equality,” we’re going into the voting booth thinking about this. That means that the elections themselves and transitions of power feel more existential because they’re related to who belongs in America. It’s related to questions of like “which racial group is best” and “which religion is best” — these are not things we’re supposed to bring into the voting booth. We’re supposed to find the people that represent our families, and bring us material well-being, and that our pocketbook likes, but instead, our politics are now arranged around who gets to live with the full dignity of being an American. We know that there’s political science that’s shown that in other countries, when politics is divided along racial or ethnic or religious lines, the chance of civil war increases 12 times, because those types of divides are uncompromisable.
What’s the best way to turn down the temperature right now in terms of preventing escalatory spirals and worst-case scenarios?
Mason: It requires all of the leaders on both sides to reject violence. One thing that my co-author Nathan and I found for our book was that it’s pretty easy to get people to back off of approving of political violence. You just have them read a quote from either Trump or Biden saying that’s not acceptable, that “we don’t do that in a democracy, and if you are going to engage in violence, I don’t want you on my team.” Reading two sentences from a leader in our survey experiment made people back off. It’s really important to note that leaders have a really powerful role to play.
And we’ve heard that from Biden and from some Republicans, but we haven’t heard it from Trump or Vance. And so the problem is the people who need to be turning down the temperature are unwilling to turn down the temperature. They have the power to, but they’re not using it.
I have seen some people sort of worrying about the possibility of mass violence or civil war. As a researcher on violence, how do you strike the balance between telling people to be concerned about things, but also not catastrophizing, since political violence is a reality across human history and doesn’t necessarily always slide into something like civil war?
Thank you for asking that. I think it’s really important to pay attention to political violence, but it’s also important to remember that it is still exceedingly rare. We have a lot of threats, but not as many actions. And the number of acts of political violence are very, very few. As long as that’s the case, it’s really important for Americans to do their part as citizens and not turn their back on democracy because they’re afraid. This shouldn’t be meant to scare people out of voting or going to their voting places, or even volunteering at their polling places, right?
The people that run our elections are mainly volunteers. They are dedicated to democracy. They’re absolutely heroic and brave and they are committed. If people get afraid that everything is violent, then they might withdraw from participating and having their voices heard. And we don’t want that to happen.
Zeeshan Aleem is a writer and editor for MS NOW. He primarily writes about politics and foreign policy.