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Pago Pago, American Samoa— On July 13, 2024, Donald Trump was assassinated at a rally in Pennsylvania, marking another violent incident in the United States’ increasingly polarized political landscape. Former President Trump, who was set to officially become the Republican presidential candidate for the 2024 election, reportedly escaped assassination with a bullet grazing his ear. But one rally attendee was killed, more spectators were injured, and the suspected gunman died. After the event, The Conversation’s political editor Naomi Schalit spoke with Arie Perliger, a scholar at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. Perliger provided insights based on his research on political violence and assassinations.
Given the deep political polarization in the United States, Perrig said, “it’s not surprising that people end up resorting to violence.”
Schalit: What was the first thing that came to your mind when you heard the news?
PERIGUE: The first thing that comes to my mind is that we are one step away from a potential civil war. I think that if Donald Trump were actually mortally wounded today, the level of violence that we have witnessed so far would pale in comparison to the violence that would occur in the coming months. I think it would unleash a new level of anger, frustration, resentment, and hostility that we have not seen in the United States for many years.
The assassination attempt may, at least in its early stages, confirm the strong feeling among many Trump supporters and those on the far right that they are losing legitimacy, that they are on the defensive, and that there is an attempt to block them from participating in the political process and to prevent Trump from returning to the White House.
For many on the far right, what we’ve just seen fits very closely into the narrative they’ve been constructing and spreading over the past few months.
Shalit: Political assassination attempts are not just about killing people. They have a bigger goal, don’t they?
PERIG: In many ways, assassination attempts bypass the long process of trying to demean and defeat political opponents when people believe that even a long political struggle is not enough to solve the problem. Many perpetrators see assassination as a tool that allows them to achieve their political goals in a very quick, very efficient way without requiring a lot of resources or a lot of organization. If we try to relate that to what we’re seeing today, I think many people see Trump as a unicorn, a unique entity who in many ways has really engulfed the entire conservative movement. So by getting rid of him, people think that will or might solve the problem.
I think that the conservative movement has changed dramatically since Trump was first elected in 2016, and many of the features of Trumpism are actually quite popular now in different parts of the conservative movement. So even if Trump decided to retire at some point, I don’t think Trumpism — as a set of populist ideas — would disappear from the Republican Party. But I can definitely understand why people who see it as a threat would feel that removing Trump would solve all problems.
Shalit: In a study of the causes and effects of political assassinations, you wrote that unless the electoral process addresses “the strongest political grievances…electoral competition has the potential to provoke further violence, including assassinations of politicians.” Do you see that in this assassination attempt?
Perrig: Democracy cannot work if different parties, different movements are not willing to work together on certain issues. Democracy can only work when multiple groups are willing to negotiate a certain consensus, to collaborate and to cooperate.
Over the past 17 years, especially since the rise of the Tea Party movement in 2008, we have seen increasing political polarization in the United States. The worst part of this polarization is that the American political system has become dysfunctional because we are driving away all politicians and policymakers who are willing to work with the other side. That’s one thing. Secondly, people do not recognize leaders who are willing to work with the other side, and therefore portray them as betrayers of their values and their party.
The third part is that people are delegitimizing their political opponents. They are turning political differences into wars in which there is no room for both sides to work together to address the challenges they agree are facing the country.
When you combine those three factors, you create a dysfunctional system where both sides believe that this is a zero-sum game and that this is the end of this country. If the other side wins, democracy will end.
If both sides emphasize to people over and over again that losing an election is the end of the world, it’s no surprise that people are eventually willing to take the law into their own hands and use violence.
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