Political Violence Is Rising. This Is What We Can Do to Stop It.

Opinion|Political Violence Is Rising. This Is What We Can Do to Stop It.

Since the beginning of President Trump’s second term in January, acts of political violence in the United States have been occurring at an alarming rate.

The assassination and attempted assassination on Saturday of two Minnesota state lawmakers and their spouses are horrific recent examples. Since January there have also been politically motivated attacks on Tesla dealerships, an act of arson that could have killed Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania and his family, the killing of two Israeli Embassy staffers in Washington and the use of fireworks, rocks and glass bottles to attack law enforcement officers in protest of Immigration and Customs Enforcement activity — to cite just a few additional instances.

This spate of political violence comes on the heels of a roughly five-year period that included, among other acts, two assassination attempts against Mr. Trump; a kidnapping plot against Nancy Pelosi, then the speaker of the House; an assassination plot against the Supreme Court justice Brett Kavanaugh; the Jan. 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol; and riots that occurred alongside peaceful protests in the wake of the murder of George Floyd.

What is most concerning is that the conditions for political violence today are worsening. We may be on the brink of an extremely violent era in American politics.

Today’s political violence is occurring across the political spectrum — and there is a corresponding rise in public support for it on both the right and the left. Since 2021, the Chicago Project on Security and Threats, which I direct, has conducted national surveys on a quarterly basis on support for political violence among Americans. These surveys are telling because, as other research has shown, the more public support there is for political violence, the more common it is.

Our May survey was the most worrisome yet. About 40 percent of Democrats supported the use of force to remove Mr. Trump from the presidency, and about 25 percent of Republicans supported the use of the military to stop protests against Mr. Trump’s agenda. These numbers more than doubled since last fall, when we asked similar questions.