The assassination of a Minnesota democratic legislator And her husband and the shooting of another legislator and his wife at their home are only the last addition to a long and disturbing call of political violence In the United States.
The list, in the past two months only: the murder of two Israeli embassy Washington staff members, the Fire bombs of a Colorado step Appeal to the release of Israeli hostages and the bombing of fires of the official residence From the Governor of Pennsylvania – during a Jewish party while he and his family were inside.
Visitors pass in front of a photo of Israeli Embassy staff of Israeli Yaron Lischinsky, on the left, and Sarah Milgrim, on the right, before a service to mark the reopening of the Jewish museum of the capital after the two were killed after an event at the museum, on Thursday, May 29, 2025, in Washington. (AP photo / Mark Schiefelbein)
And here is just a sample of a few other attacks before that – the murder of a Director of health care In the streets of New York at the end of last year, the assassination attempt of Donald Trump In Pennsylvania in small town during its presidential campaign last year, the 2022 attack on the husband of the former speaker of the Nancy Pelosi Chamber by a believer to the theories of the right -wing conspiracy and 2017 shooting By a liberal shooter in a GOP practice for the Congress softball match.
“We have concluded this particularly frightening period in the country where it feels the kind of standards, rhetoric and rules that would write violence have been lifted,” said Matt Dallek, political scientist at the University of George Washington who studies extremism. “Many people receive culture signals.”
Policy behind individual shots and massacres
Politics has also conducted large -scale massacres. Armed men who killed 11 worshipers in a Synagogue in Pittsburgh In 2018, 23 buyers in a sink Walmart in El Paso in 2019 and 10 blacks in a Buffalo grocery store In 2022, everyone quoted the conspiracy theory that a secret cabale of Jews tried to replace the whites with people of color. This has become a basic food on certain parts of the law supporting Trump’s push to limit immigration.
The Anti-Diffimation League noted that from 2022 to 2024, the 61 political kills in the United States were committed by right-wing extremists. This changed the first day of 2025, when a man from Texas piloting the flag of the Islamic State group killed 14 people by driving his truck through a Street from New Orleans crowded Before being fatally killed by the police.
“You see acts of violence of all different ideologies,” said Jacob Ware, a member of the foreign relations council that is researching terrorism. “It seems more random and chaotic and more frequent.”
The United States has a long and dark story of political violence, presidential assassinations dating back to the murder of President Abraham Lincoln, lynching and violence targeting blacks in the South, the shooting of 1954 inside the congress by four Puerto Rican nationalists. Experts say that in recent years, however, have probably reached a level that has not been seen since the tumultuous days of the 1960s and 1970s, when icons like Martin Luther King Jr., John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X and Robert F. Kennedy have been murdered.
Ware noted that the most recent push occurs after the new Trump administration has closed units that focus on the study of white supremacist extremism and have pushed federal police to devote less time to anti-terrorism and more on the detention of people who are illegally found in the country.
“We are to the point, after these six weeks, where we must ask ourselves how the Trump administration is fighting terrorism,” said Ware.
Of course, one of the first acts of Trump in power was to Forgive people involved in the greatest act of internal political violence this century – the January 6, 2021Assault against the American Capitol, intended to prevent Congress from certifying Trump’s electoral loss in 2020.
These greats signal For potential extremists on each side of the political debate, Dallek said: “They sent a very strong message that violence, as long as you are a Trump supporter, is authorized and can be rewarded.”
Ideologies are not always aligned – or consistent
Often those who engage in political violence have no clearly defined ideologies that easily adapt to the partisan divisions of the country. A man who died after him Hot a car detonated Apart from a Palm Springs fertility clinic last month, let the writings urging people not to procreate and expressed what the FBI called “nihilist ideas”.
But, like Clockwork, each political attack seems to inspire supporters to find evidence that the attacker is on the other side. We knew little about man identified as a suspect during Minnesota attacks, Vance Boelter, 57. The authorities say they have found a list of other apparent targets which included other democratic officials, abortion clinics and defenders of abortion rights, as well as leaflets for the anti-top parades of the day.
The online conservatives seized the flyers – and the fact that Boetler was apparently appointed to a board of directors of the state labor by the Democratic Governor Tim Walz – to say that the suspect must be a liberal. “The extreme left is violent murderous,” published the billionaire Elon Musk on his social media site, X.
This recalled the fallout from the attack by Paul Pelosi, the husband of the former orator of the room, then aged 82, who was seriously injured by a man brandishing a hammer. Right figures theorized that the aggressor was a secret lover rather than what the authorities said he was: a believer to the theories of the pro-Trump conspiracy that burst into the house of Pelosi echoing the riots of January 6 which burst into the Capitol: “Where is Nancy?”
On Saturday, Nancy Pelosi published a declaration on X denouncing the attack on Minnesota. “We must all remember that it is not only the act of violence, but also the reaction to that, which can normalize it,” she wrote.
Trump had made fun of the lawn after the 2022 attack, but on Saturday, he joined the official bipartite conviction of Minnesota, calling them “horrible violence”. The president, however, constantly inaugurated a new field with his bellicose rhetoric towards his political opponents, which he regularly calls “sick” and “bad”, and has spoke several times about the way violence is necessary to suppress manifestations.
Minnesota’s attack occurred after Trump took the extraordinary step to mobilize the military to try to control the demonstrations against the immigration operations of his administration in Los Angeles during last week, when he promised to “strike” Dressious demonstrators and warned against an “invasion of migrants” in the city.
Dallek said Trump was “both a victim and an accelerator” of the accused and dehumanizing political rhetoric that floods the country.
“It looks like the extremists are in the saddle,” he said, “and the extremists are those who lead our rhetoric and our politics.”
___
This story has been corrected to reflect that Matt Dallek is a professor at George Washington University, not Georgetown.