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Political violence is on the rise again, at home and abroad
In a small town out in coal country, a lone assassin shoots a controversial populous leader. The leader miraculously survives, and his supporters blame the press and his political opponents for fomenting violence. Does that sound familiar? Months before Donald Trump was shot in Pennsylvania in the first assassination attempt of its kind in America in 40 years, Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico took a bullet to the stomach during a visit to Central Slovakia. But Fico is just one of many leaders or high-level candidates who have been attacked in democracies around the world in recent years.
Across the democratic world, political violence and violent political language are becoming more common again as polarization deepens, viewpoints harden, and political differences start to feel like existential battles. Here in the US last year, there were more than 8,000 threats of violence against federal lawmakers alone, a tenfold increase since 2016. And as we head into the most contentious and high-stakes election in America's modern history, people are bracing for more. A poll taken just after the attempt on Trump's life showed that two-thirds of Americans think the current environment makes political violence more likely. Who is responsible for stopping this slide into violence? Is it our leaders, our media outlets, or our social media platforms? Is it ourselves? Unless things change, we will be lucky if it's another 40 years before this happens again in the US.
Watch full episode: Trump, Biden & the US election: What could be next?
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Republican presidential candidate and former US President Donald Trump is assisted by the Secret Service after gunfire rang out during a campaign rally at the Butler Farm Show in Butler, PA, on July 13, 2024.
Electoral violence comes out of the shadows
The brazen assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump this weekend has pulled from the shadows an inevitable implication of the country’s polarization: the risk of political violence. In this consequential US election year, with questions of institutional legitimacy hanging in the air, misinformation flooding social media, and worries about the fitness of at least one of the candidates, we have now been alerted to how real the threat of violence is for the months ahead.
Elections offer voters an opportunity to express something fundamental about what they expect from their government. This is at least the theoretical underpinning for conducting elections. But in each election, losers also have a responsibility. At its core, democracy is a system in which groups lose elections. Votes are held, results are counted and respected, and turnovers take place. Losers consent to being losers in any given election cycle because they believe they will have the opportunity to be winners in the future.
If, however, the institutional framework does not allow losers to become winners later, the system’s legitimacy erodes. Losers may withdraw their consent and pursue alternative strategies to access power. Sometimes this leads to boycotting elections, but sometimes the strategy is the use of force.
When winners repeatedly win and losers repeatedly lose, or if winners are perceived to repeatedly win and losers to lose, ballots may be replaced by bullets. In fact, according to data from the National Elections Across Democracy and Autocracy Dataset, in more than 4,000 global elections between 1945 and 2020, just under 19% of them involved significant violence. Nearly one in five elections over the past 75 years turned violent. Already in this pivotal election year, we have seen violence in the run-up to elections in Senegal, Pakistan, South Africa, Mexico (at historic rates), and France.
In the US, grievances that have been stoked around the legitimacy of the system and how well it is serving voters, travel through the existing fault lines in American politics – particularly political party identification – activating them further. It is now a near-truism that there is little common ground between the two political sides, and the gap is widening.Survey data from 2022 and 2023 has repeatedly found that a wide swath of the US population believes the system is rigged, and as much as a quarter of those polled agreed that it may soon be time to take up arms against the government. In 2021, these realities culminated in the Jan. 6 storming of the US Capitol. In 2024, this blueprint heightens the likelihood of civil unrest and violence across the US in the lead-up to and, depending on the outcome, after the election.
The name Thomas Matthew Crooks will now go down in the annals of US history alongside John Hinckley Jr. and Lee Harvey Oswald. While very little is currently known about what motivated Crooks’ attempt, lone-offender terrorism has become all too common. It speaks to a broader thread of radicalization that has emerged from US polarization – as political parties no longer speak to the same set of facts and individuals find themselves moving towards the extremes.
“Lone actors are difficult to detect and disrupt because of their lack of affiliation,” according to the2024 US Intelligence Community’s Annual Threat Assessment. “While these violent extremists tend to leverage simple attack methods, they can have devastating, outsized consequences.”
Yet it would be a mistake to focus too narrowly on Crooks’ character or political affiliation in attempting to make sense of the current US political climate. The polarization, the movement to the poles, the rising radicalization – are not just left (including ecological or animal-rights extremism, anarchists) or right (including racially or ethnically motivated extremism) problems. They are brewing on both sides of the aisle, especially as the center has become hollowed out.
When Trump was reported to have shouted “Fight” after being pierced by a bullet on Saturday, he was being heard. His message resonated with those who want to see him be returned to the White House in November, and those who just as desperately want to see him lose.
Security will be stepped up at rallies, this week’s Republican National Convention, August’s Democratic National Convention, and across all campaign stops. But as grievances grow, as fight talk and candidate fitness persist, so too will the shadow of political violence.
Lindsay Newman is the practice head of Global Macro, Geopolitics for Eurasia Group and is based in London. She writes the Views on America column for GZERO.
Former President Donald Trump, with his face bloodied by a shot that hit his right ear, raises his fist as he's rushed from a rally stage in Butler, PA.
Donald Trump survives assassination attempt. What happens next?
What happened: Shots rang out at a rally for Donald Trump on Saturday in Butler, PA. The former president – who was speaking at the podium – dropped to the ground and was surrounded by the Secret Service before standing with what appeared to be blood dripping from the right side of his face. He then pumped his fist into the air and was whisked away by his guards.
The Secret Service issued a statement Saturday evening indicating that the shooter aimed from atop a nearby rooftop and was “neutralized,” and that one spectator was killed while another two were critically injured. The FBI has identified the suspected shooter as Thomas Matthew Crooks, a 20-year-old registered Republican from Bethel Park, PA.
A few hours after being rushed from the scene, Trump took to Truth Social to thank the Secret Service. His upper right ear was hit by a bullet, he explained. “I knew immediately that something was wrong in that I heard a whizzing sound, shots, and immediately felt the bullet ripping through the skin,” he wrote. “Much bleeding took place, so I realized then what was happening. GOD BLESS AMERICA!”
The United States has not seen this level of political violence since the assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan in 1981 in Washington, DC.
President Joe Biden was quick to respond to the violence, saying that he is “grateful to hear that [Trump is] safe and doing well” and that he’s “praying for him and his family and for all those who were at the rally, as we await further information.”
“There’s no place for this kind of violence in America. We must unite as one nation to condemn it,” Biden emphasized.
The Biden campaign has reportedly suspended its campaign ads, and elected officials on both sides of the aisle have condemned the shooting, denouncing political violence and hoping for Trump’s recovery.
Eurasia Group and GZERO President Ian Bremmer says it’s essential that everyone across the American political spectrum denounce the violence. “Ideally, that is done in a bipartisan manner, that is done in Congress, in the House, and in the Senate. Not with individual posts, and comments, and tweets, but from the entirety of a joint session condemning it and working for peace,” he says. “That’s what the country needs.”
What to expect: Trump’s quick reaction and defiant fist pump will likely cement his image as a political martyr – and benefit his campaign in the runup to the November election. “That response, and being caught on tape,” says Bremmer, “is going to be a rally for his people for a long time.” All eyes will be on Trump’s appearance at the upcoming Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, which gets underway on Monday.
It may also lead to a slew of conspiracy theories that the Democratic Party was responsible, while Democrats are likely to wonder whether it was staged by the Trump campaign to boost him in the polls.
While the motivation of the shooter remains unknown, political tensions have been rising in the United States in recent years. Nearly 25% of Americans agree that “patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country,” and 75% believe that American democracy is at risk in the 2024 presidential election.
Against that backdrop, and with political extremism and disinformation having been weaponized through the media landscape, especially social media, Bremmer says today’s attempt on Trump’s life means “we should be prepared for more violence.”
Political violence in Mexico
Graphic Truth: Mexico’s political murder problem
The Mexican political campaign season that concluded with the June 2, 2024, general election was the deadliest on record, with at least 34 candidates for local or state office killed during the preceding nine months.
According to observers at the Colegio de Mexico in Mexico City, nearly a third of the dead were members of current president Andres Manuel López Obrador’s ruling Morena party, whose candidate Claudia Sheinbaum won the presidential vote in a landslide.
Over the past two decades, homicides have soared in Mexico, driven in large part by the rise of powerful drug cartels warring for territory and markets. Between 2000 and 2018, the rate of killings more than tripled to 16 per 100,000 people, before coming down slightly in the years since.
But within that, there’s also been a staggering rise in political violence specifically. This includes assassinations of candidates, officials, human rights defenders, journalists, and other activists.
During the presidential term of Vicente Fox, between 2000 and 2006, there were a total of 58 such killings. In the current term of López Obrador, which extends until October, there have already been 500.
Here is a look at how political violence in Mexico has evolved over the past quarter of a century.
Participants in a rally to mark an attack on an SPD politician stand on Pohlandplatz. After the brutal attack on the SPD politician Ecke, a 17-year-old turned himself in to the police.
Latest attack on a German politician stokes concern ahead of elections
Last week, the top European Parliament candidate of the governing Social Democrat Party was beaten unconscious in the eastern city of Dresden while campaigning. A Green Party operative was assaulted there as well. Several teens with ties to far-right ideologies are suspected in both cases.
Statistics show rising violence against German politicians. In 2023, there were nearly 2,800 physical or verbal attacks, twice as many as in 2019, when a neo-Nazi assassination of conservative lawmaker Walter Lübcke stunned the country.
Last year’s violence included about 500 attacks on politicians from the far-right Alternative for Deutschland, or AFD, and more than 1,200 on members of the center-left Green Party.
Why now? The problem has deep roots, according to Jan Techau, a Berlin-based Europe expert at Eurasia Group. Establishment parties’ long-standing failure to address big issues like immigration, schooling, or the economy, he says, opened the way for more radical and violent forces on both the left and right. “What we see is an overall more charged, political atmosphere where this kind of violence becomes more legitimate.”
Top US national security threat: the myth of the stolen election
David Sanger knows a thing or two about national security. After all, it's his beat at the New York Times.
So what does he think is the biggest threat to America's national security right now?
An "insider threat" to the stability of the election system coming not from Russia, not from China, and not from North Korea. The biggest menace is Americans willing to engage in political violence, Sanger tells Ian Bremmer on GZERO World.
Watch the GZERO World episode: US threat levels from foreign and domestic enemies
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US threat levels from foreign and domestic enemies
The Biden administration finally released its long-anticipated National Security Strategy, basically America's biggest threats — foreign and domestic.
The No. 1 external enemy is not Russia but rather China. It also emphasizes the homegrown threat of Americans willing to engage in political violence if their candidate loses at the ballot box.
On GZERO World, Ian Bremmer speaks to David Sanger, who knows a thing or two about national security because it's his beat at the New York Times.
His take on China? Taiwan's status as a semiconductor superpower may be staving off a Chinese invasion.
On Russia, Sanger discusses how Kyiv and the world face the paradox that the better Ukraine gets at resisting Russia, the more likely it is that Vladimir Putin will consider launching a tactical nuke. “If the Russians use a tactical nuclear weapon in a conventional war and essentially get away with … then all of a sudden, the taboo about using nuclear weapons in a conventional conflict is gone,” he says.
Meanwhile, America should not lose sight of the "insider threat" to its democracy, particularly with midterms just days away.
Podcast: America at risk: assessing Russia, China, and domestic threats
Listen: From Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to China’s vision for a new global order, there’s plenty keeping President Joe Biden’s national security officials up at night. On the GZERO World podcast, Ian Bremmer and New York Times national security correspondent David Sanger break down the top foreign and domestic threats outlined in the Biden administration's recently released National Security Strategy document.
According to the report, the No. 1 external danger is not Russia but rather China. Sanger explains why he believes Taiwan's status as a semiconductor superpower may be staving off a Chinese invasion. As for the Russia-Ukraine war, Sanger talks about the "Ukraine paradox" - the better Ukraine gets at resisting Russia, the more likely Vladimir Putin might launch a tactical nuke (and, Sanger notes, he might just get away with it.)
But the biggest threat to America's national security could well be at home —an “insider threat" to the stability of the election system coming from Americans willing to engage in political violence.
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