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Stephen Maher
If you are worried the attempted assassination of Donald Trump is likely to lead to more political violence in the United States in the months ahead, you are in good company.
The people who spend their careers studying the question are rattled.
“If the election is close, I expect violence of various sorts,” says Rachel Kleinfeld, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Kleinfeld, whose 2018 book, “A Savage Order,”set out a framework for understanding political violence around the world, is afraid that more American blood will be spilled. This is partly because bad things tend to happen in countries — like the United States — that have a history of political violence.
Kleinfeld pointed out in a recent podcast that Trump has encouraged the intimidation of election workers in swing states, used violent rhetoric about Republicans, like Liz Cheney, who express concern about his anti-democratic tendencies, and uses violence or the threat of it to rally his base.
“I’m not worried about that kind of civil war,” she said. “I am worried about targeted political violence.”
Kleinfeld has been warning about the potential for violence in the United States because of the changing mood in the country. Increasing numbers of Americans think it is justified, on both the right and the left.
About 18 million Americans support the use of force to restore Trump to the presidency, but more — 26 million — believe violence is justified to stop that from happening, according to a recent national survey conducted by University of Chicago professor of political science Robert Pape.
Americans are aware of the increased danger. In a YouGov poll taken after Saturday’s assassination attempt, 67% of respondents said the current environment makes politically motivated violence “more likely.”
Hate crimes are up dramatically — as are threats to Congress. The FBI revealed that a record-setting 11,643 hate crimes were reported by police in 2022, and the ADL has seen a surge in antisemitism in the wake of Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel.
Kleinfeld says there’s no reason to expect a civil war — but that’s because the US military is too powerful to be challenged.
‘You don’t need a civil war’
But full-scale war isn’t necessary when strategic use of political violence will do — or when it can help one side achieve its goals within a democracy. “You don’t need a civil war to try to take over a party with violence, and you don’t need a civil war to try to build your base with violence,” Kleinfeld said in a recent podcast.
The assassination attempt — which is as yet poorly understood — aligns with a story Trump supporters believe, says Amarnath Amarasingam, an extremism researcher at Queens University in Kingston, Ontario. It “fits into everything that the Trump team and MAGA Republicans have been saying since 2015 — that there is a kind of deep-state evil force that’s trying to stop Trump.”
Many Trump supporters still believe the 2020 election was stolen. As of last September, a whopping 63% of Republicans believed Biden’s win was illegitimate, despite evidence to the contrary. Now, Trump’s legal cases and convictions are being characterized as more ways to try to bring him down.
“When all of that failed, here you have them actually trying to kill him,” they think, says Amarasingam.
What fuels the extreme rhetoric?
The sense of a struggle for survival on both sides increases the risk of reprisals, and of more political violence, says Amarasingam. “This is kind of the core of how we think about extremist movements. Once you see an existential threat to you and your in-group, you and your people, then violence is acceptable.”
Lindsay Newman, Eurasia Group’s head of global macro-geopolitics, also believes the risk may get greater after the election but notes that it is unclear whether the risk will come only from the right.
“What do you think happens if Trump wins? What does everybody do? Do all the voters who voted for Biden, or for not-Trump, go home and just wait their turn for next time? What do you think happens if Biden wins? Do all those people who voted for Trump just go home and wait for their next time?,” she wonders.
Most Americans are opposed to political violence, but increasingly large minorities on both sides are not. “Not all of them are going to take up any sort of acts of violence, but some portion of those people will be aggrieved, will be deeply aggrieved,” says Newman.
“And what happens to them? Do they protest? Do the protests turn violent?”
Can the campaigns use this moment to find unity?
It seems unlikely the two campaigns will stop using rhetoric that is convincing so many Americans that the election represents an existential struggle.
After the assassination attempt, Republican Sen. JD Vance blamed Biden for portraying Trump as ”an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs,” saying that rhetoric “led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.”
Joe Bidendelivered a speech calling for unity, but he is continuing to call Trump a “threat to democracy,” which seems to be a necessary part of his struggling campaign.
And on Monday, Trump named Vance as his vice presidential candidate, after which the crowd at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee chanted, “Fight, fight, fight,” echoing Trump’s defiant words after an assassin’s bullet almost ended his life.
The trouble is, neither side can afford to stop using the rhetoric that is encouraging their supporters to see November’s election in such stark terms that they feel they are right to fight.
U.S. President Joe Biden rubs his nose while greeting shoppers inside Mario's Westside Market grocery store in Las Vegas, Nevada, U.S., July 16, 2024.
As Republicans listened to speeches from Donald Trump Jr. and Vice Presidential candidate JD Vance at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee last night, news was leaking that top Democrats are pressuring President Joe Biden to step aside and make way for a different candidate.
The leaks say that Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi have privately urged Biden to step aside because opinion polls show him trailing Donald Trump. Earlier in the day, Rep. Adam Schiff, a close ally of Pelosi, publicly called for Biden to “pass the torch.” It looks like their offices leaked the news to multiple outlets when he didn’t heed their private warnings, a sign that Democrats have decided they have to push him out or lose to Trump.
To make matters worse, Biden has contracted COVID, drawing attention to his frail health at a key moment in the campaign – but could this provide an excuse for a graceful exit from the race? The New York Times is reporting that Biden has become “more receptive” to arguments that he should step aside.
Meanwhile, Republicans listened to Vance deliver a populist speech aimed at working-class voters whose support is key to the Rust Belt states where Trump is currently leading Biden in the polls. Biden is currently on track to lose decisively in November, which explains why Democrats look determined to force him out. In the days ahead, we will see if Trump gets a convention bounce in the polls. Ironically, a big bounce might give the Democrats the argument they need to dump Biden, which could be bad news for the Republicans.
Former US President Donald Trump talks with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau during a North Atlantic Treaty Organization Plenary Session in Britain in 2019.
Check out this excerpt from the superb new Justin Trudeau biography “The Prince,” written by our very own Stephen Maher. Maher takes us inside the worst moment between Trump and Trudeau. It’s a fight from which their relationship never recovered.
___________
On June 9, at a G7 meeting in beautiful Charlevoix, on the north shore of the Saint Lawrence River, Trump had a temper tantrum that brought relations between the two countries to the lowest point since the War of 1812. He arrived for the summit late and left early. Throughout, he felt put upon by the other leaders, who did not share his agenda and harangued him about tariffs, the unilateral American decision to withdraw from the Paris Climate Accord, and the Iranian nuclear deal. They flatly rejected his proposal that Russia be invited back into the fold. A picture from the event captures the vibe. German Chancellor Angela Merkel is leaning on a table, looking exasperated while Trump, arms folded, looks back, defiant. She is flanked by Emmanuel Macron and Shinzō Abe. Bolton stands next to Trump. The top of [Gerald] Butts’s head is visible behind the leaders.
In his book, Bolton describes the tone of his meetings with Trudeau and Macron: “Trump didn’t really like either Trudeau or Macron, but he tolerated them, mockingly crossing swords with them in meetings ... I assume they understood what he was doing, and they responded in kind, playing along because it suited their larger interests not to be in a permanent tiff with the U.S. president.”
In the bilateral with Trudeau, Trump kept talking about how the markets had responded positively when he and Trudeau shared a friendly handshake. The leaders and their sherpas spent many hours wrangling over a communiqué that was of more concern to diplomats than voters in the countries back home. Butts was working closely with Larry Kudlow, director of the National Economic Council of the United States, and Canadian deputy minister Peter Boehm, trying to find language that Trump and the other leaders could agree on, which they ultimately did. Trump left early, bound for Singapore and then North Korea, where he would hold a summit with dictator Kim Jong Un. He was ready to blow up generations of patient American diplomacy on nuclear non-proliferation in exchange for the opportunity to portray himself as a statesman.
On Air Force One, Trump apparently watched Trudeau’s remarks at the closing news conference and became enraged. “Canadians, we are polite, we are reasonable, but we also will not be pushed around,” Trudeau had said. “I reiterated to President Trump that these tariffs threaten to harm industry and workers on both sides of our border.” It was the same kind of thing Trudeau always said about the trade talks, but there was a difference this time: Trump happened to see the interview. “Suddenly he saw that for the first time,” Trudeau told me in an interview later.
In two tweets, Trump attacked Trudeau and withdrew US support for the communiqué everyone had been wrangling about for two days. “PM Justin Trudeau of Canada acted so meek and mild during our @G7 meetings only to give a news conference after I left saying that ‘US Tariffs were kind of insulting’ and he ‘will not be pushed around.’ Very dishonest & weak.” And then the bombshell: “Based on Justin’s false statements at his news conference, and the fact that Canada is charging massive Tariffs to our U.S. farmers, workers and companies, I have instructed our U.S. Reps not to endorse the Communique as we look at Tariffs on automobiles flooding the U.S. Market!”
Butts was enjoying a celebratory drink in Quebec, toasting a successful summit, when press secretary Cameron Ahmad came in, looking distressed. Ahmad had been relieved that the summit had gone well until he saw Trump’s tweet. “His eyes are bulging,” says Butts. “And he hands me his BlackBerry and I look at him, ‘Is this a joke?’ And then I see the little blue check mark by Donald Trump and it’s like, ‘Nope. It’s not a joke.’ So I call Larry Kudlow immediately.”
Trump asked Kudlow and Navarro to attack Trudeau on the Sunday panel shows, Bolton wrote in his book: “Just go after Trudeau. Don’t knock the others. Trudeau’s a ‘behind your back’ guy.” Navarro may have exceeded his brief on Fox News the next Sunday. “There’s a special place in hell for any foreign leader that engages in bad-faith diplomacy with President Donald J. Trump and then tries to stab him in the back on the way out the door,” he said. “And that’s what bad-faith Justin Trudeau did with that stunt press conference.”
Jun 24, 2024; Sunrise, Florida, USA; Florida Panthers forward Aleksander Barkov (16) hoists the Stanley Cup after defeating the Edmonton Oilers in game seven of the 2024 Stanley Cup Final at Amerant Bank Arena
On Monday night, the Florida Panthers managed, with some difficulty, to win the Stanley Cup, sending the plucky Edmonton Oilers home disappointed – a sentiment matched by 8.6 million Canadians who helplessly watched the Panthers protect their 2-1 lead.
The Canadians should be used to it by now. No team from the Great White North has won a cup since the Montreal Canadiens beat the LA Kings — featuring superstar Wayne Gretzky — back in 1993.
Since there are seven Canadian teams in the 32-team league, that would seem to be a statistical anomaly. Randomly, a Canadian team ought to win once every four or five years.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis rubbed salt in Canadian wounds on Tuesday night, tweeting that the Sunshine State has won three cups under his tenure, while Canada has won zero under Trudeau.
DeSantis’s free enterprise ways may have something to do with the long Canadian drought. There are many theories as to why Canada keeps getting shut out. Close observers note that NHL teams in the United States offer a huge tax advantage to high-scoring superstars, which may make it harder to lure them north. But there’s also the winter weather, which some find more pleasant in Miami than in Edmonton.
Westchester County Executive George Latimer celebrates with supporters in White Plains, N.Y. after winning the Democratic primary for New York's 16th congressional district seat June 25, 2024. Latimer defeated incumbent Rep. Jamaal Bowman.
Bucking the trend toward greater polarization, American primary voters sent a prominent progressive packing and chose three moderates over Trump-backed candidates on Tuesday night, suggesting the center can, sometimes, hold.
For progressive Democrats, the loss of Jamaal Bowman in New York was a big setback. Bowman lost by 17 points to George Latimer, a pro-Israel centrist, in an expensive and emotional contest. Bowman, who launched controversial attacks on Israel’s conduct of the war in Gaza, was not helped by a rescue mission led by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, suggesting that a loss of focus on bread-and-butter issues gave voters second thoughts about Bowman.
In red states, moderates triumphed over the right wing in three states, with voters in Utah choosing Trump skeptic John Curtis over Trump’s candidate, Trent Staggs, to replace Mitt Romney in the Senate. Trump-backed candidates also lost in South Carolina and Colorado, a victory for establishment Republicans.
The centrists might be pleased to have more amicable colleagues, but they won’t get much of a break. Trump favorite Lauren Boeberteasily won a primary in a safe Colorado district after deciding not to risk losing her current district, where Democrats had a shot at taking her down. Moderation has its limits.
“Tuesday’s race showed that the center is indeed holding across many races,” says Clayton Allen, US director at Eurasia Group. “This is especially true with Democrats, where Bowman’s loss and Biden’s pivot toward the middle on border security leave progressives look weaker than they have since 2020. Behind that, the primaries do little to alter the main theme of the election: Biden’s age versus Trump’s temperament.”
A drone view of three berths able to load vessels with oil is seen after their construction at Westridge Marine Terminal, the terminus of the Canadian government-owned Trans Mountain pipeline expansion project in Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada, April 26, 2024.
A pipeline that gave Prime Minister Justin Trudeau a huge headache is finally delivering benefits — to oil companies, at least — although Trudeau should not expect to get political rewards for his troubles.
Refineries in Washington state and Oregon are displacing Iraqi crude with cheaper oil from Alberta that is now available thanks to the expansion of the Trans Mountain Pipeline, which moves bitumen-heavy Alberta crude from the oil sands in the north to the British Columbia coast.
Trudeau’s government has endured withering criticism from Western Canadians for failing to back the aggressive expansion of the emissions-intensive Alberta oil production. On the other hand, British Columbians opposed a potentially dangerous pipeline running to their beautiful coastal waters. Still, Trudeau brokered an uneasy compromise with Albertans, who couldn’t believe they had to sell their oil at a discount because of transport bottlenecks. To try to please both sides, in 2018, Trudeau bought the pipeline from Kinder Morgan for CDN $4.5 billion, which pleased nobody.
That decision is now looking like a win for the Canadian economy. There were huge cost overruns, but it will earn an estimated CA$26 to $38 billion over the next 20 years — and oil exporters don’t have to ship their product by railcar, which should get them higher prices, since they can reach new markets. The new oil in US refineries may give Americans slightly cheaper gas and, but the big winners are Canadian taxpayers, who are likely to benefit thanks to royalties and tax revenue for decades to come. Still, while it’s a big win for Alberta, Trudeau is unlikely to win any votes in the staunchly conservative oil patch, where his name is mud.
Spare a thought for Liberal Canadian hockey fans, who have had a tough week.
They cried into their beer Monday night as the Florida Panthers, rather than the Edmonton Oilers, skated away with the Stanley Cup. Then they tasted ashes Wednesday morning when they awoke to the news that the Liberals had lost a normally safe Toronto seat in a by-election.
While the bruised and bearded Oilers are headed to the golf course, the Liberal team has to stay on the ice and keep getting smashed into the boards by opponents, the fearsome Conservatives, who have a huge lead.
Whenever a team keeps losing, as the Liberals do, it’s normal to fire the manager, as the Oilers did Thursday. That’s terrible news for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, the player/coach singularly responsible for the upset in Toronto.
It is a bad enough blow that everyone in the rink is now wondering if dumping Trudeau can spare the Liberals the drubbing they expect from the Conservatives.
Toronto-St. Paul’s — the riding the Liberals lost on Monday — has been held by the Liberal party since 1993, when Brian Mulroney’s Progressive Conservatives were swept from office. In the decades since, even when Stephen Harper presided over a Conservative majority government, Toronto-St. Paul’s and similar downtown ridings were unassailable Liberal bastions. Now and then, the left-wing NDP would take a seat or two in the grittier heart of the city, and the Conservatives nipped at the suburban edges, but most of Canada’s biggest city was safe for Liberal MPs.
Tired of Trudeau
Tuesday’s loss is a sign that the Liberals are losing even the progressive, well-educated urban professionals whose support they can normally take for granted. A low-profile Conservative candidate managed to beat a hard-working and talented Liberal by 590 votes in a riding the Liberals won by almost 14,000 votes in 2021. That’s a 25-point swing to the Conservatives.
“It’s an effing debacle of proportions I cannot even describe to a non-organizer,” one veteran party worker texted me. “We don’t lose those ridings.”
If there was a similar result in a general election, the Liberals would lose all but a handful of their seats in Ontario, a wipeout that would land them in third or fourth place, worse even than their position when Trudeau became leader.
Trudeau was a once-in-a-generation phenomenon. With his good looks and a dynastic connection to voters, he carried the party back to power when it was headed to oblivion. But the magic is gone. Trudeaumania has turned to Trudeau hate.
Ever since Conservatives elected Pierre Poilievre as leader in 2022, Trudeau has trailed him distantly in the polls. It doesn’t matter what he does. Having misread the public mood on immigration, housing, and cost-of-living concerns, he undertook a comprehensive reboot with his budget this spring, rolling out carefully designed new policies over several weeks in an expertly orchestrated campaign – and it did not move the dial at all. Canadians are tired of him and want a change, as they made clear in Toronto-St. Paul’s on Monday. They will get that change. The only question is how.
Many contenders
If Trudeau hangs on as long as he can – to the fall of 2025 – voters will get the change by wiping out the Liberals and electing Poilievre’s Conservatives. If Trudeau leaves now, the Liberals can try to give voters change in the form of a new leader.
After the loss, cabinet ministers went out to say Trudeau has their support and should stay, but insiders are nervously awaiting backbenchers or former ministers to call for Trudeau’s head. “That’s the part he doesn’t control,” said one. “And those voices might come from inside the house or outside the house.”
Trudeau wouldn’t have to heed those calls, but they could make his position untenable.
“Some people say, ‘Well, it’s impossible to push out a prime minister who doesn't want to go,’” says a well-connected Liberal. “Well, it's also hard to govern if you don’t have your caucus behind you.”
If Trudeau does announce soon that he will go, the party could hold a leadership race to end this fall with a new prime minister. There is no obvious successor, but there are promising contenders who could hope to prove themselves in a race, including Anita Anand, Mark Carney, François-Philippe Champagne, Sean Fraser, Mélanie Joly, and Dominic LeBlanc.
Until the whistle blows and we see how they skate, we won’t if any of them can handle a puck. None of them might have what it takes, but it is clear that until Trudeau is gone, nobody is going to be able to take a critical look at Poilievre, the man who wants to replace him.
If Trudeau is the Liberal candidate in the next election, it will be a referendum on him. If it is someone else, it might turn on a different question, like Poilievre’s as-yet-unknown plans for the country.
Of course, there is a good chance that whatever the Liberals do, they will lose. A leadership race may be dominated by debates about Gaza, creating a divisive spectacle that helps convince voters that it’s time to turn the page and bring in the Conservatives.
Dumping Trudeau is like pulling the goalie in the last seconds of a hockey game when you are down 2-1, as the Oilers did Tuesday night. It didn’t help in the end, but it might have, and they were going to lose if they didn’t.
The most powerful business lobby group in Canada on Wednesday sent an open letter to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau warning that Canada faces “diplomatic isolation” if it doesn’t come up with a plan to raise defense spending to meet NATO's target of 2% of GDP.
Next month, NATO leaders will meet for a summit in Washington, DC, where Trudeau can be expected to face more of this pressure. Canada has traditionally come up short of NATO spending guidelines, relying on Uncle Sam’s continental defense to stay safe.
Liberal plans to increase spending will bring the level only to 1.76% of GDP by the end of the decade. With Trudeau facing financial pressure from all sides, there’s little prospect of that changing.
Why is the Business Council of Canada weighing in on an issue like this? It says that failing to spend enough “will put lives and livelihoods at risk.”
But the specter of a second Trump presidency is probably also at work here: Business leaders may be worried that Trump, who famously has little patience for NATO spending laggards, might take out his frustration on Canada in other areas of policy such as trade or investment.