Cole Tomas Allen, the suspect in the attempted White House Correspondents’ Dinner shooting, is unusual among attempted assassins — in his normalcy.
His political grievances, laid out in a manifesto and social media posts, are not dissimilar from those of an ordinary Democrat. He believed that President Donald Trump was a lawless, corrupt leader who abused immigrants, perpetrated war crimes, and presented an existential threat to American democracy.
I spoke with five leading experts on political violence in the United States. The picture they painted was complicated; they often didn’t agree on key points. But my best read of the evidence they presented led me to three conclusions.
He is not alone. Ryan Routh, the man who attempted to kill Trump at Mar-a-Lago, displayed notably more bizarre behavior — but had writings that echoed similar themes to Allen’s. While primarily preoccupied with Trump, they join the ranks of Luigi Mangione and Charlie Kirk’s alleged killer, Tyler Robinson, in what has increasingly been called “normie extremism.” These are people who express grievances in the center-left mainstream — for-profit health insurance is wrong, the right shouldn’t spread “hatred” — yet who apparently act on those beliefs in violent ways typically associated with political extremists.
It is not fully clear whether “normie extremism” is a coherent category. There have only been a handful of incidents that might qualify, and they differ from each other in important ways: The two would-be Trump assassins had distinct views from those of either Mangione or Robinson, who were also quite different from each other. Moreover, most of these cases still haven’t gone to trial, meaning we have only a fraction of the insight into motives we might eventually get.
Even so, the incidents are raising a real question: Is the mainstream liberal critique of Trump pushing people toward actual violence?
To call this question “real” is not to endorse the White House’s disingenuous efforts to exploit these incidents by turning the government on enemies like Jimmy Kimmel or James Comey or ordinary Americans. Nor does it ignore the bad faith of Republicans leveling complaints about Democratic rhetoric while supporting Trump, a one-of-one outlier in our political system when it comes to inflaming, mocking, and excusing political violence.
But even if we stipulate all of that, there are still good reasons to take the question seriously.
Trump’s second term has been an extended exercise in attacking democratic fundamentals. Raids by the unaccountable and growing ICE forces; his obsession with trying to undermine elections; his seemingly unpunished corruption and lying; even his lieutenants’ efforts to shut down comedians he doesn’t like — all of these are serious threats to democracy, and none of them have any real Republican opposition. I’m among the many writers who have been sounding alarm bells, and it requires some unavoidably blunt rhetoric to do so, given the gravity of the situation.
But these valid concerns do not justify assassinating the president or anyone else; all mainstream liberals agree on this point, and that the threat of violence makes things worse rather than better. If there is indeed any legitimate concern about “threat to democracy” talk leading to violence, Trump’s critics have an obligation both to the country and their own cause to figure out how best to minimize it.
So what should we do? If you (very reasonably) believe Trump is actively assaulting our democracy, how can you state these fears clearly while also tamping down the risk of destabilizing violence?
To grapple with these issues, I spoke with five leading experts on political violence in the United States. The picture they painted was complicated; they often didn’t agree on key points. But my best read of the evidence they presented led me to three conclusions:
There is, in short, a “right way” to talk about existential risks in a democratic society: one that emphasizes the need to respond through that system, either by voting or peaceful activism.
Trump violates this approach routinely by claiming elections are rigged by shadowy, unaccountable forces and has been deservedly criticized for it. To the extent that Democrats, progressives, and aligned figures stay within the above confines, it is largely unfair to hold them responsible for the actions of people like the WHCD shooter.
To their credit, they overwhelmingly tend to do so. But there are some worrying currents, floating around the periphery of left-leaning conversation, worth taking more seriously in light of these incidents.
The tricky business of connecting rhetoric to violence
It is important, at the outset, to note that it is extremely difficult to link any specific piece of rhetoric to a specific act of violence.
Even when you can precisely trace a killer’s information diet — like with Alexandre Bissonnette, a frequent Ben Shapiro and InfoWars consumer who killed six at a mosque in Quebec City in 2017 — you can’t prove that their media consumption caused the shooting. It could be that they were already violent before they started watching or reading a particular news outlet, or that something other than politicians and pundits pushed them to kill.
It’s also important to note that political violence is still very rare, even as it’s been on the rise. While different datasets tally incidents differently, even higher-end estimates put our yearly tally of politically motivated killings of anyone — from politicians to ordinary people — at somewhere in the dozens. In a country of 340 million people, that’s barely a rounding error. It can be very tricky to draw too many broad conclusions from such a small sample size.
Rather, the small number of incidents tells us that the people who commit political violence are highly unusual. We’re not in a civil war with organized factions directing and normalizing violent acts; the people who commit political violence are, quite frequently, dealing with mental health issues or experiencing severe life challenges.
The rarity of political violence does not make it unimportant. Quite the opposite: political violence is unique in that a single successful attack — like a presidential assassination — can have history-changing implications.
“Humans naturally are inclined away from violence — most of the time, when they’re feeling normal in their day,” says Lilliana Mason, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins and co-author of Radical American Partisanship, a book on American attitudes toward political violence. “To convince them that harming another person is good requires you to take some steps.”
For all these reasons, we should be generally skeptical about claims about the direct causes of political violence in the United States. What is more reasonable, instead, is to talk about the background conditions that make it more likely for any one person — most likely, one with mental health issues — to believe that they must play the violent hero in America’s political movie.
And there is good reason to believe that the rise of a specific kind of inflammatory rhetoric from leaders is one of those conditions.
The existential roots of political violence in the United States
Research on political violence in America, both historical and contemporary, tells us that individuals who commit political violence tend to feel a specific blend of fear and hopelessness.
Fear, in this context, is not the ordinary partisan trepidation felt about losing an election. Rather, it is a sense that the stakes of politics are existential: that if your side loses, there will be no future for your party, the country, or the planet. When the stakes feel that high, people become more likely to turn to violence.
An example is Klan violence in the post-Civil War South. After slavery’s abolition, the white Southern elite believed that their way of life was on the verge of extinction. In this, they were not wrong: the multicultural democracy that Reconstruction was attempting to construct would indeed mean the end of the South’s hierarchical social structure. In that case, this fear was widespread enough to fuel an extremely bloody, and tragically successful, insurgency.
But fear alone is not always enough. Oftentimes, that fear needs to be combined with a collapse of faith in the political process: a sense that whatever you’re afraid of cannot and never will be resolved through electoral means. It’s this sense of hopelessness, or powerlessness, that makes the turn to violence much more likely.
“Terrorism emerges when people feel like their legitimate political avenues have been exhausted,” says Jacob Ware, an expert on domestic terrorism at Georgetown University.
A recent study led by Garen Wintemute, director of the Violence Prevention Program at UC-Davis Medical Center, studied how over 9,000 Americans’ attitudes toward political violence changed between 2022 and 2023. Wintemute’s team found that one of the best predictors of radicalization — whether a person expressed an increased willingness to commit political violence — was whether they said they “gave up on politics” during the study period.
“Violence,” Wintemute told me in a phone call, “is politics by other means.”
Take, for example, the wave of white nationalist shootings targeting Jews (Pittsburgh in 2018), Latinos (El Paso in 2019), and Blacks (Buffalo in 2022). Each of those shooters was explicitly motivated by fears of white demographic replacement — a belief that the United States was not just becoming increasingly populated by people of color, but that the browning of America was a plot to destroy the country as they knew it, and one intended to render future democratic action impossible.
This is a classic existential narrative of politics: If we don’t act now, our way of life will be doomed forever. And it happened at a moment when President Trump was warning of a migrant invasion and stolen elections, and prominent right-wing media figures like Tucker Carlson were accusing Democrats of importing minority voters to lock Republicans out of power forever.
We cannot say, with any confidence, that Trump or Carlson or any other right-wing figure was directly responsible for any one of those instances of political violence. But you can say that they were spreading a narrative of existential political struggle to a wider audience, raising the stakes of politics and making it more likely that such ideas would reach one of the handful of exceptional people who would believe in the Great Replacement enough to see it as justification for violent actions.
Applying the same lens to recent left-coded violence must begin by noting an obvious difference. The “Great Replacement” is a racist conspiracy theory, and liberal claims that Trump is a threat to democracy are straightforwardly true.
Yet we are not talking about truth at the moment. We are talking about consequences: whether a particular narrative, when mainstreamed and widely broadcast, raises the risk that a mentally unwell individual hears it and sees it as justification for violent action. The recent record suggests some reason for worry.
Allen, the WHCD shooting suspect, had a long history of posting this kind of anti-Trump rhetoric on X and Bluesky (including referring to Trump as “Hitler”). In one recent post, he expressed a collapse in faith in the political system to stop the president and a growing frustration with others for not acting more directly, writing that “waiting for someone else to do something about it is not working.”
Routh, who was recently sentenced to life in prison for the Mar-a-Lago attempt, laid out his grievances in a letter to Politico’s Ankush Khardori. While rambly and at times incoherent, the note described Trump as a “dictator” and warned that “we must limit all Presidential power before Trump seizes our country.”
Now, both of these men failed to kill anyone — unlike the white nationalist killers, who have a collective body count in the dozens. And the shooter who actually did nearly kill Trump in Pennsylvania, Thomas Crooks, had no coherent grievance. His Google search history suggests he was interested in shooting Joe Biden and, as an FBI official put it, saw the Trump event as a “target of opportunity.”
But Routh and Allen’s rhetoric is enough, for at least among some experts on political violence, to take worries about violence seriously.
“Does saying ‘Trump is a threat to democracy’ make it more likely that a person with mental distress, or having a mental break, would commit violence against Trump? Yeah, it probably does,” says Rachel Kleinfeld, a senior fellow in Carnegie’s Democracy, Conflict, and Governance Program. “But I’m not sure that one can stop saying something that is true against a leader who is posing a threat [for that reason].”
The right way to talk about existential threats
Not every expert shared Kleinfeld’s fears. Mason, the Johns Hopkins professor, pointed out that Thomas’s manifesto and social media tended to cite specific Trump actions — such as boat killings in the Caribbean or ICE raids — as grievances with the president. For Mason, this suggests that he was reacting less to heated Democratic rhetoric than to actual events: that Trump, by acting radically, inspired a radical response.
“Would this individual guy have been less violent if [media and Democrats] hadn’t said anything critical of Trump, and he had just witnessed ICE attacking and murdering people in Minneapolis?” she asks rhetorically. “Would reality not get through to him if you didn’t talk about it? I think it would.”
Surely, there’s something to that. But political violence is poisonous to a democracy. If indeed Trump is a threat to democracy — and I’m certain he is — it’s incumbent on those of us who believe that to calibrate our rhetoric in order to best minimize the risk of inspiring individuals to act violently, however low that risk may be at baseline.
Happily, every expert I spoke to agreed that there’s a way to do that: to emphasize, at every turn, the immorality of violence and the relative efficacy of political solutions to America’s Trump problem.
“People who want a democracy must speak honestly about existential threats to democracy. That is inherently antagonistic,” says Nathan Kalmoe, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (and Mason’s co-author). “At the same time, we must help people see that the most moral and effective means to defend and build a democracy are usually non-violent.”
Here, I think, there is a categorical difference between left and right — one that makes it less fair to blame mainstream Democrats for violence linked to their ideas than Trump.
When Democrats criticize Trump as an authoritarian, they almost always advocate for change through the political system. They call for people to attend protests, join local activist groups, and (above all else) turn out to vote in the midterm elections. They go out of their way to say the situation isn’t hopeless.
By contrast, Trump and the right’s rhetoric often positions the system as hopelessly broken: compromised by Democrats and the deep state. The clearest example of the dangers here being, of course, January 6.
That day’s violence was a rare case where violence could be traced directly to political rhetoric: the Capitol rioters convened because they believed Trump’s claim that political change was impossible through the system. If the 2020 elections really were rigged, the only alternative was to “fight, fight, fight.”
Similarly, it would make sense that there’s been less right-wing violence recently: Trump won the election, pardoned January 6 convicts, began mass deportations, and generally governed without restraint. This gave the likeliest perpetrators more confidence that the system is working for them: Enrique Tarrio, the head of the Proud Boys, recently told The Atlantic, “we’ve got what we wanted” in Trump’s second term, and that they’ve been a less visible street presence as a result.
Yet the fact that there is a categorical difference between Democrats and Republicans here does not mean the left should be complacent.
To see why, it’s useful to look at two different left-wing movements: the New Left student radicals of the 1960s and ’70s, and the climate movement of today.
Both movements saw politics in existential terms: if they failed, the country (and perhaps even the world) was doomed. Yet while ’60s and ’70s radicals produced one of the most sustained terrorism campaigns in American history, with groups like the Weather Underground bombing government offices and murdering police officers, comparable ecoterrorism in contemporary America is basically unheard of.
That’s because the two movements had fundamentally different views about democracy.
The Weather Underground saw American democracy as a bourgeois, racist, fundamentally irredeemable system; the only redemption could come with its destruction and replacement with some radical left alternative. The climate change movement, by contrast, has been resolutely democratic: seeing hope in policies ranging from market-friendly cap-and-trade proposals to a more expansive Green New Deal. This faith in the political process helps explain why the movement’s existential warnings of human extinction have not, to date, produced meaningful amounts of political violence.
Maintaining this faith takes work, though. That means liberals need to be especially vigilant about doomsaying: pushing back hard on false viral claims that Trump will cancel or invalidate the midterm elections, for example, or posts that mock the value of voting, even as they confront his real threats to election integrity. And it also means guarding against rhetoric that rationalizes or trivializes violence — turning Charlie Kirk’s murder into an edgy meme, say, or treating preventable deaths from a flawed health care system the same as cold-blooded murder.
When I observed the No Kings protests in DC earlier this year, I was struck by the signs I saw depicting guillotines or other violent anti-Trump imagery. It was only a small fraction — consistent with surveys showing No Kings protesters generally reject violence — but enough to be uncomfortable.
When I logged onto Bluesky afterward, I saw a lot of posters treating the signs as kind of a curiosity, or even a joke. Isn’t it funny how radicalized the normie grandmas are getting?
The assumption behind the joke is that these people are too normie to ever be violent. We now know that’s not necessarily the case. And going forward, as Trump’s anti-democratic behavior is likely to escalate, his opponents need to maintain the rhetorical high ground.
