Only three weeks ago, the President of the United States was threatening an entire country with annihilation.
Four weeks ago, he was celebrating the death of a former FBI director. “Good, I’m glad he’s dead,” Donald Trump said of Robert Mueller, who led the investigation into alleged Russian interference in his 2016 presidential campaign.
Trump has joked about migrants being attacked by alligators. He mocked the husband of a senior Democrat whose skull was fractured by a hammer-wielding assailant. He urged supporters to “knock the crap out” of protesters. He threatened to gun down civilians. He told his Maga base to “Fight like hell” after he lost the 2020 election, culminating in the deadly storming of the US Capitol.
During two terms in office, Trump has made a sport of demonising those who defy him. He has unflinchingly deployed incendiary rhetoric, and revelled in violence.
Yet, listening to Trump’s claims now, one might think the President was an innocent victim. To hear him speak, you might believe America’s culture of violence was nothing to do with him, and a creation of his enemies: “Leftists”, “Communists” and Democrats.
Trump and Melania were evacuated from the stage after shots rang out at the Washington Hilton hotel (Photo: Fox News/YouTube)On Monday, after a third potential attempt on his life, the President returned to his well-trodden path, laying the blame squarely at the feet of Democrats and their “very dangerous” speech.
His White House Press Secretary, Karoline Leavitt, branded the Democrats a “left-wing cult of hatred”.
“This hateful and constant and violent rhetoric directed at President Trump, day after day after day for 11 years, has helped to legitimise this violence and bring us to this dark moment,” Leavitt said. She added that those “who constantly falsely label and slander the President as a fascist, as a threat to democracy and compare him to Hitler” were “fuelling violence against the President”.
The usually taciturn First Lady, Melania Trump, weighed in with an attack on the comedian Jimmy Kimmel – a favourite target of her husband – accusing him of “hateful and violent rhetoric” intended to “divide our country”.
Kimmel’s crime? A joke at the Trumps’ expense days before Saturday’s shooting at the White House correspondents’ dinner. During a skit last Thursday about the then-upcoming dinner – where in past years comedians have engaged in light-hearted mockery of the President of the day – Kimmel said: “Our First Lady is here. Look at Melania, so beautiful. Mrs Trump you have a glow like an expectant widow.”
Trump said US television host Jimmy Kimmel ‘should be immediately fired by Disney and ABC’ for a joke made before the dinner (Photo: Chris Delmas / AFP via Getty Images)The President claimed the joke was a “despicable call to violence”. Kimmel denied it was anything more than “a very light roast joke about the fact that [Trump] is almost 80 and she’s younger than I am”. He added: “It was not by any stretch of the definition a call to assassination and they know that. I’ve been very vocal for many years speaking out against gun violence.”
That hasn’t stopped Trump calling for Kimmel to be fired by his network, ABC, the latest move in a crusade against media organisations hostile to his presidency. Last September, Trump pushed for Kimmel’s removal after the comedian accused “many in Maga-land [of] working very hard to capitalise on the murder of Charlie Kirk”, the conservative activist.
Kimmel’s comment points to a disturbing truth about the United States. Even for a country long rife with gun violence, a third major attempt at killing the President in less than two years is extreme.
“It’s clear that polarisation and political tensions are very high in the US, and have been for some time,” said Julie Norman, associate professor in politics and international relations at University College London. “Nothing brings this into sharper focus than episodes of political violence, which we have seen increasing across the political spectrum in recent years.”
She added: “My research has also shown that people are more likely to condone political violence when it is in line with their political ideology, while condemning equivalent acts that go against their views.”
While the majority of Americans reject all violence, a recent poll showed that 72 per cent of Republicans thought Democrats were responsible for most political violence, while 73 per cent of Democrats said Republicans were most responsible.
Democrats have also been victims. Last summer, a lone gunman with a target list of Democrat politicians assassinated a state lawmaker, Melissa Hortman, and her husband. Last April, a man set fire to the home of the Democrat governor of Pennsylvania, Josh Shapiro. In 2020, 13 men were arrested over a terror plot to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer.
A makeshift memorial for Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark Hortman, at the Minnesota State Capitol building after they were shot at their home (Photo: Steven Garcia/Getty Images)Trump has repeatedly claimed that the “radical Left” is behind the uptick in violence. He appeared to suggest that right-wingers who commit political violence were more justified because they “don’t want to see crime”, and were worried about “valid” issues like migration.
But Trump’s arrival as a political power has coincided with a surge in violent rhetoric.
“Political violence increased in the mid-2010s in the United States, around the time of Trump’s first run for the presidency, and it has escalated further in more recent years,” said Frank Foley, a senior lecturer in the Department of War Studies at King’s College London.
“A leader like Trump does not directly control violence,” he added. “But they can shape the climate in which it becomes more or less likely. Political violence has increased over the last decade as has the number of Americans justifying the use of violence against their political opponents in opinion surveys.”
A growing minority of Americans – around 10–15 per cent of survey respondents – now say that political violence can be justified under certain circumstances, Foley said.
Cole Tomas Allen, 31, the alleged attacker at the White House correspondent’s dinner, compared Trump to Adolf Hitler in a manifesto. However, other attackers’ motivations have been more ambiguous.
Trump was rushed offstage after he was targeted by a shooter during a rally on 13 July 2024 in Butler, Pennsylvania (Photo: Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)While Trump supporters attempted to present the first would-be Trump assassin, Thomas Matthew Crooks, as a leftist, he was a registered Republican.
Charlie Kirk’s killer, however, appeared to target him for spreading “hatred”.
When it comes to political violence in the US, studies come to the same conclusion: there is more right-wing terrorism. “Studies have shown that historically and over the last decade, right-wing extremism has been the dominant source of deadly violence in the United States. Left-wing violence has been growing, notably during 2025, but this is a problem on the fringes of both sides of the political divide – not just one,” said Foley.
A study from the libertarian Cato Institute last year tracked about 3,600 politically motivated murders over the past 50 years. After terror attacks motivated by Islamism, right-wing ideology was the second most common motivator, accounting for 391 murders, or 11 per cent of the total. Left-wing terrorists murdered 65 people, about 2 per cent of the total. Since 2020, 44 people were killed by those on the right – 54 per cent – compared with 18 killed by left-wingers – 22 per cent.
A report from the US Government’s Department of Justice (DoJ) research agency, the National Institute of Justice, came to the same conclusion in 2024. Since 1990, far-right extremists killed more than six times as many people in ideologically motivated attacks (520 people killed in 227 attacks) as far-left extremists (78 in 42 attacks). Last September, after Kirk’s murder, the DoJ quietly removed any trace of that study from its website.
Even a study that found an increase in the number of left-wing terrorist attacks and plots in the US pointed out that this was a rise from very low levels. These “remained much lower than historical levels of violence carried out by right-wing and jihadist attackers”, the Center for Strategic and International Studies said in September.
For the American public, it is clear that their lawmakers, led by their President, are feeding an ever more febrile political atmosphere in which division rather than unity is the norm. As those divisions harden with every shooting, manifesto or attempted assassination, the US risks descending into ever more dangerous depths.
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