One year on from Trump shooting, analysts say political violence and threats on the rise

Record ID: 1996717

  • Title: One year on from Trump shooting, analysts say political violence and threats on the rise
  • Date: 10th July 2025
  • Summary: STATE COLLEGE, PENNSYLVANIA, UNITED STATES (JULY 9, 2025) (REUTERS) (SOUNDBITE) (English) PROFESSOR OF POLITICAL SCIENCE AT PENN STATE UNIVERSITY, JAMES A. PIAZZA, SAYING: "I was hopeful that what would happen would be that the assassination attempt in Butler would sort of incentivize politicians to calm things down, that there would be sort of much more bipartisan agreeme
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  • Keywords: Butler Pennsylvania Political Violence Trump assassination attempt analysis anniersary
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  • Country: US
  • Topics: North America,Government/Politics
  • Reuters ID: LVA00C869209072025RP1
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    It will be one year on Sunday (July 13) since gunfire interrupted a Donald Trump campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.
    Trump had just begun speaking on July 13, 2024, when shots rang out as he addressed a crowd of supporters. Trump grabbed his right ear — grazed by a bullet — and ducked behind the podium as Secret Service agents rushed in. One supporter was killed, two others wounded, and the suspected shooter, 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks, was fatally shot by law enforcement.
    Video footage showed Trump being helped off the stage, his face bloodied. Moments later, he raised a clenched fist to the crowd as he was rushed to a waiting vehicle.
    "Whenever we see political violence rise in the United States or internationally, it's almost always linked to politicians normalizing violence within their rhetoric,” explained Rachel Kleinfeld, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington D.C.
    “They hear politicians talk about other people in really violent terms, they think, oh, maybe I should target those people instead. And so you see an increase. And then, as more and more regular people start normalizing violence, you get a further increase. And that's precisely what we're seeing in the United States, is the rhetoric has been up,” she added.
    After the shooting at Trump’s Pennsylvania rally, then-President Joe Biden called for unity in the aftermath, warning that politics “must never be a literal battlefield.”
    "I was hopeful that what would happen would be that the assassination attempt in Butler would sort of incentivize politicians to calm things down, that there would be sort of much more bipartisan agreement to cool down the rhetoric and so on,” said James A. Piazza, a professor of political science at Penn State University.
    “It's really puzzling to me why the attempted assassination did not have the profound dramatic and media effect on our political discourse and dogma. To my knowledge, you know, it didn't shake up the race that much," he added.
    The attack came just ahead of the Republican National Convention, where Trump appeared with a bandage on his ear and formally accepted his party’s nomination. He frequently referenced the shooting on the campaign trail.
    Anti-violence campaigners have raised concerns about escalatory rhetoric in the U.S. due to political polarization in recent years and more recently due to rising Islamophobia and antisemitism during the Israel-Gaza war.
    U.S. lawmakers have also demanded tighter security in the wake of last month’s assassination of Minnesota state legislator Melissa Hortman and her husband in their home. Minnesota state Senator John Hoffman and his wife were also shot multiple times on the same day by the same gunman but survived.
    After Hortman’s assassination, law enforcement officials responsible for securing the U.S. Capitol complex and its 535 members of Congress briefed Republican and Democratic senators on steps already undertaken and considered to enhance safety.
    Members of the federal judiciary also have requested more security funding, noting increasing threats against judges.
    For several years, members of Congress have noted escalating threats to them and their staffs. The U.S. Capitol Police in May said it had seen 9,400 threats against members of Congress last year, more than double the rate of a decade earlier.
    President Donald Trump was also the target of two assassination attempts last year, including the one in which he was wounded.
    "The United States, unfortunately, has a long history of attempted presidential assassinations, and some have been successful, of course. And the vast majority of them are not from particularly partisan people. The Trump assassin, or would-be assassin, is not uncommon. They're often people who have very personalistic motives… Most of our violence is individuals, and most of them are drawing on a community online that they're trying to aggrandize themselves with," said Kleinfeld.
    (Production: Omar Younis)
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