The assassination of a Democratic Minnesota state lawmaker and her husband and the shooting of another lawmaker and his wife at their homes are just the latest addition to a long and unsettling roll call of political violence in the United States.
\nThe list, in the past two months alone: the killing of two Israeli embassy staffers in Washington, the firebombing of a Colorado march calling for the release of Israeli hostages, and the firebombing of the official residence of Pennsylvania\u2019s governor \u2014 on a Jewish holiday while he and his family were inside.
\nAnd here\u2019s just a sampling of some other attacks before that \u2014 the killing of a health care executive on the streets of New York late last year, the attempted assassination of Donald Trump in small-town Pennsylvania during his presidential campaign last year, the 2022 attack on the husband of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi by a believer in right-wing conspiracy theories, and the 2017 shooting by a liberal gunman at a GOP practice for the congressional softball game.
\n\u201cWe\u2019ve entered into this especially scary time in the country where it feels the sort of norms and rhetoric and rules that would tamp down on violence have been lifted,\u201d said Matt Dallek, a political scientist at George Washington University who studies extremism. \u201cA lot of people are receiving signals from the culture.\u201d
\nPolitics behind both individual shootings and massacres
\nPolitics have also driven large-scale massacres. Gunmen who killed 11 worshippers at a synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018, 23 shoppers at a heavily Latino Walmart in El Paso in 2019 and 10 Black people at a Buffalo grocery store in 2022 each cited the conspiracy theory that a secret cabal of Jews were trying to replace white people with people of color. That has become a staple on parts of the right who support Trump\u2019s push to limit immigration.
\nThe Anti-Defamation League found that from 2022 through 2024, all of the 61 political killings in the United States were committed by right-wing extremists. That changed on the first day of 2025, when a Texas man flying the flag of the Daesh group killed 14 people by driving his truck through a crowded New Orleans street before being fatally shot by police.
\n\u201cYou\u2019re seeing acts of violence from all different ideologies,\u201d said Jacob Ware, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who researches terrorism. \u201cIt feels more random and chaotic and more frequent.\u201d
\nThe United States has a long and grim history of political violence, from presidential assassinations dating back to the killing of President Abraham Lincoln, lynching and violence aimed at Black people in the South, the 1954 shooting inside Congress by four Puerto Rican nationalists. Experts say the past few years, however, have most likely reached a level not 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 were assassinated.
\nWare noted that the most recent surge comes after the new Trump administration has shuttered units that focus on investigating white supremacist extremism and pushed federal law enforcement to spend less time on anti-terrorism and more on detaining people who are in the country illegally.
\n\u201cWe\u2019re at the point, after these six weeks, where we have to ask about how effectively the Trump administration is combating terrorism,\u201d Ware said.
\nOf course, one of Trump\u2019s first acts in office was to pardon those involved in the largest act of domestic political violence this century \u2014 the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the US Capitol, intended to prevent Congress from certifying Trump\u2019s 2020 election loss.
\nThose pardons broadcast a signal to would-be extremists on either side of the political debate, Dallek said: \u201cThey sent a very strong message that violence, as long as you\u2019re a Trump supporter, will be permitted and may be rewarded.\u201d
\nIdeologies aren\u2019t always aligned \u2014 or coherent
\nOften, those who engage in political violence don\u2019t have clearly defined ideologies that easily map onto the country\u2019s partisan divides. A man who died after he detonated a car bomb outside a Palm Springs fertility clinic last month left writings urging people not to procreate and expressed what the FBI called \u201cnihilistic ideations.\u201d
\nBut, like clockwork, each political attack seems to inspire partisans to find evidence the attacker is on the other side. Little was known about the man police identified as a suspect in the Minnesota attacks, 57-year-old Vance Boelter. Authorities say they found a list of other apparent targets that included other Democratic officials, abortion clinics and abortion rights advocates, as well as flyers for the day\u2019s anti-Trump parades.
\nConservatives online seized on the flyers \u2014 and the fact that Boetler had apparently once been appointed to a state workforce development board by Democratic Gov. Tim Walz \u2014 to claim the suspect must be a liberal. \u201cThe far left is murderously violent,\u201d billionaire Elon Musk posted on his social media site, X.
\nIt was reminiscent of the fallout from the attack on Paul Pelosi, the former House speaker\u2019s then-82-year-old husband, who was seriously injured by a man wielding a hammer. Right-wing figures theorized the assailant was a secret lover rather than what authorities said he was: a believer in pro-Trump conspiracy theories who broke into the Pelosi home echoing Jan. 6 rioters who broke into the Capitol by saying: \u201cWhere is Nancy?!\u201d
\nOn Saturday, Nancy Pelosi posted a statement on X decrying the Minnesota attack. \u201cAll of us must remember that it\u2019s not only the act of violence, but also the reaction to it, that can normalize it,\u201d she wrote.
\nTrump had mocked the Pelosis after the 2022 attack, but on Saturday he joined in the official bipartisan condemnation of the Minnesota shootings, calling them \u201chorrific violence.\u201d The president has, however, consistently broken new ground with his bellicose rhetoric toward his political opponents, whom he routinely calls \u201csick\u201d and \u201cevil,\u201d and has talked repeatedly about how violence is needed to quell protests.
\nThe Minnesota attack occurred after Trump took the extraordinary step of mobilizing the military to try to control protests against his administration\u2019s immigration operations in Los Angeles during the past week, when he pledged to \u201cHIT\u201d disrespectful protesters and warned of a \u201cmigrant invasion\u201d of the city.
\nDallek said Trump has been \u201cboth a victim and an accelerant\u201d of the charged, dehumanizing political rhetoric that is flooding the country.
\n\u201cIt feels as if the extremists are in the saddle,\u201d he said, \u201cand the extremists are the ones driving our rhetoric and politics.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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