As the President of the United States prepared to throw himself a little birthday military parade and aimed the armed forces at Americans protesting him in Los Angeles, somebody was aiming a firearm at Democratic lawmakers in their state. Dressed as a police officer, they assassinated representative Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark, and critically wounded senator John A Hoffman and his wife, Yvette. The shootings set off a national manhunt, and police discovered a hit list with Democratic politicians, including Governor Tim Walz, and Planned Parenthood centres.
These assassinations, attempted murders and planned attacks are all shocking acts of political violence. They’re also familiar. We don’t yet know for sure the shooter’s motives. But their target list, reported support for President Donald Trump and anti-abortion views offer some strong hints. In the US, political violence of all stripes is a problem, but the bulk of the violence comes from the right. And while that violence has been growing in recent years, a dynamic many researchers attribute to extremism and polarisation fuelled by President Trump, one right-wing movement in the US has a starker track record of extreme violence than just about any other, at least among those still considered “mainstream”: the so-called “pro-life” movement.
In America, anti-abortion terrorists have murdered 11 people and committed 42 bombings, some 200 arsons and more than 500 assaults. And while much of this violence has been committed against doctors, nurses and clinic workers, the carnage has sometimes spilled over into other segments of society – anti-abortion extremist Eric Rudolph, for example, set bombs off at the 1996 summer Olympics in Atlanta, which killed one and injured 111 others. Murder in defence of foetal life became such a threat that clinics regularly installed bulletproof glass, implemented strict security protocols and hired security guards.
One anti-abortion group famously made “wanted” posters of abortion providers with their faces and personal information, mimicking the old western-style “wanted” signs that placed bounties on the heads of criminals. Instead of rejecting this strategy, the anti-abortion movement has in recent years formally embraced it. Even before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and ended the era of legal abortion in the United States in 2022, the state of Texas passed what amounted to an abortion bounty law, offering a handsome cash payout to anyone who sued not just abortion providers but anyone who chose to “aid and abet” a woman seeking an abortion.
Left-wing movements have their fringe groups too, and are certainly not immune to the thrill of violence. Random progressives on social media have at times cheered on acts of violence committed in the name of causes they support – for example, when Luigi Mangione murdered a United Healthcare CEO, he became a cult figure on social media. Left-wing movements have also sometimes embraced the rhetoric of violence, as when factions of the pro-Palestinian movement have demanded an end to the state of Israel and a Palestinian state “by any means necessary”, a call that seems to have been heeded by a handful of extremists who have targeted Jews and Israelis for assaults and murders. But it’s exceedingly rare to see Democratic politicians excuse, let alone embrace, those who commit dangerous acts in their name. Not so with today’s Republican Party, and today’s president.
In 2023, Reuters identified 213 cases of political violence in the year and a half following the 6 January 2021 insurrection at the Capitol – itself an act of violence, the perpetrators of which were then pardoned by the President. In the aftermath of Trump’s Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him, election workers became a target of both the president and his followers. He singled out officials by name, forcing some to flee their homes after death threats and attacks. Others found themselves under threat from the Maga right simply because they worked at election sites. Judges, too, and even their clerks, have faced serious threats after Trump put them in his crosshairs.
There has not yet been any reckoning with how this kind of targeting has put lives at risk and badly degraded public life. In fact, it’s been the opposite. The Maga right has taken a violent assault on the Capitol – an attempt to overturn the results of a free and fair election – and rebranded it as righteous. When some of the perpetrators of the Capitol attack where arrested, tried, and convicted, the Maga movement and the president spoke of them not as violent criminal hoodlums, but as political prisoners. And Trump has now set them free, not in an act of mercy or because they demonstrated any contrition for their actions, but because in this new telling their actions weren’t anything to be contrite about. They weren’t trying to steal an election, the argument now goes; they were rightfully protesting a stolen one.
This bizarre inversion of the truth is already showing up in the Minnesota case. Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and owner of X, suggested that the Minnesota killer was “far left” and said that the left is “murderously violent”. And while any decent person would be disgusted and outraged by political violence, some prominent Maga leaders seem to find it funny. “Nightmare on Waltz Street”, staunchly pro-Trump Senator Mike Lee tweeted, along with images of the alleged killer, who had targeted Tim Walz. This kind of disgusting behaviour is hardly unprecedented: after a man broke into the home of Nany Pelosi and nearly killed her husband Paul by bashing his skull in with a hammer, Donald Trump Jr tweeted a picture of white men’s underwear, a hammer and the words “Got my Paul Pelosi Halloween costume ready.”
It’s hard to imagine prominent Democrats making a hero of, say, the man who tried to assassinate Donald Trump. But Kyle Rittenhouse, who killed demonstrators at a Black Lives Matter protest, has been offered congressional internships and presidential praise. Acts of political violence may be carried out by individuals with views across the political spectrum, and often by people who are somewhat unstable and whose views may as a result be somewhat incoherent. But only one political party in the US today is creating the permission structure for this violence.
With his dispatching of the National Guard to small immigrants-rights protests in Los Angeles, Donald Trump has made clear that he plans to use the force of the state against his own people. When asked about potential protests at his military parade, he said the same: that he would target US citizens engaged in constitutionally protected protest with the armed forces. When acts of violence are committed in his name, or for his cause, he routinely denies any culpability and refuses to change the rhetoric that dozens of violent men and women have said inspired them. Political violence is abhorrent no matter who commits it. But while individuals on both sides have committed acts of violence, in the US today, political violence is not a problem on both sides equally. One side condemns it and takes it seriously. The other has long enabled it, codified the ideology behind it, embraced it, laughed at it and pardoned it. And as a result, they have virtually guaranteed we will see more of it.
[See also: Los Angeles, Donald Trump and the moronic inferno]
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