On Sunday, Trump survived an attempt on his life for the second time in this presidential campaign season. The suspected assailant, Ryan Wesley Routh, apparently hunkered down and waited for his target behind a fence armed with a semiautomatic rifle, with a clear sightline of the Trump International Golf Course West Palm Beach. Routh fled in his car after being spotted by the Secret Service, and was eventually apprehended on the highway. His actions once again push Americans to reckon with the broader reality of political violence in the United States.
Routh appears to fall in the category of the “lone wolf” assailant, acting without direction or support from a larger group of like-minded individuals. His motives are unclear as of yet, but a profile on Routh from CNN reveals a man with delusions of grandeur, rather than a particular political streak. Routh voted for Trump in 2016, but not in 2020, when he instead donated to a variety of Democratic primary candidates across the party’s political spectrum, from Elizabeth Warren to Tom Steyer. Routh was very active on social media, contacting world leaders like Kim Jong-Un and Volodimir Zelensky directly on Twitter, requesting audiences and recommending policy. He became a dedicated supporter of Ukraine after Russia’s invasion in 2022, traveling there and repeatedly contacting the Ukrainian armed forces with plans to bring in foreign recruits. A representative of the Ukraine Land Forces Command told CNN Routh was never part of the foreign legion and that “his offers were not realistic.”
Routh does not appear to have much in common with Thomas Matthew Crooks, who also attempted to assassinate Trump barely two months ago. Crooks was killed on site and left little behind to explain what motivated him. A case that instead reflects some of Routh’s traits is that of Nicholas Roske, who traveled to the home of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh on June 8, 2022, with the intent of killing him and then committing suicide. Roske’s stated goal, according to investigators, was to prevent the overturning of Roe v. Wade, as well as “giving his life purpose,” which overlaps somewhat with Routh’s wild attempts to affect forces beyond his (or any one person’s) control. Roske ended up calling the authorities and turning himself in without incident.
Beyond the pattern of lone wolves targeting particular public officials, political violence has grown more frequent in organized forms as well. In 2018, white supremacists taking part in the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville violently assaulted counter-protesters, murdering an activist, Heather Heyer, by vehicular homicide. The BLM protest movement following the death of George Floyd at the hands of police at times devolved to violence in cities like Portland, where rioters firebombed a federal courthouse, or in Minneapolis (the site of Floyd’s murder), where a police precinct was burned to the ground, though in both cases no one was injured. Most significant of any of these in our recent history was the attack on Capitol Hill on January 6th, a violent coup attempt perpetrated by right-wing organizations like the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, among others, which not only threatened our system of government but left five people dead in its wake.
These instances present a chaotic picture of American political discourse, and could leave one with the impression that violence is being promoted and carried out equally across the political spectrum. Indeed, Republican politicians and pundits are pointing to the recent attacks on Trump as prima facie evidence of incitement to violence from their political opponents. However, as stated above, neither of Trump’s attackers presented any allegiance to a particular party or ideology, and targeting a politician does not denote political motivation on its own – John Hinckley shot Ronald Reagan just to impress Jodie Foster.
The only way to reach any solid conclusions is to take a broader view and analyze incidents systematically over a longer period of time, rather than singling out a few events. A variety of academic projects have done just that, and a consensus is emerging that while no group has an outright monopoly on political violence, right-wing extremism has far outweighed its left-wing counterparts in damage and scope over the past decade. Gary LaFree, a criminologist and former director of the UMD National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START Center), has noted an overall uptick in political terrorism over the last ten years, not unlike the spate of attacks that typified the 1970s, but with one major difference: “The big players right now are right-wing groups.” Another set of data gathered by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) found only one death caused by the left-wing activist collective, Antifa, between 1994 and 2020, while 329 murders were associated with the far-right over the same period. One of the experts that collected the data for CSIS, Seth Jones, stated that “left-wing violence has not been a major terrorism threat.”
Experts are also wary of what lies ahead. A quarterly report called the Violence and Democracy Impact Tracker (VDIT), which polls academics studying political violence around the world, shows they are increasingly concerned about the ramifications of political violence in the United States. In June, prior to the attacks on Trump, 44% of respondents already agreed that the current overall impact of violence on U.S democracy presented a “significant erosion of democratic quality” and a “risk of future breakdown.”
