For the second time in as many months, someone has allegedly launched a plot to assassinate former President Donald Trump.
I wanted to read the news reports carefully before writing about this, but unfortunately my suspicions have been confirmed. The incident on a Florida golf course where a man was arrested after pointing a rifle at Trump doesn’t seem to be as big a deal to people as the last time.
The first assassination attempt in July, when a gunman opened fire at President Trump’s reelection rally in Pennsylvania, leaving him bleeding from his ear, appears to have desensitized people to some of this political violence, in part because the first attempt was so close, coming within inches of killing the Republican presidential nominee.
But I also think it’s because the more common something becomes, the less attention we pay to it. We should treat every instance of political violence as a wake-up call for America.
Normalization of political violence is unacceptable
None of these things are normal, and none of them should be treated as normal.
As school shootings make the news, assassination attempts against politicians are becoming less and less shocking. For years, we have expected our children to weather the reality of school shootings with little change in their own safety. We are beginning to do the same with politically motivated violence.
Over the past few years, there have been too many incidents of political violence, including the assassination attempt on President Trump, the attack on Representative Nancy Pelosi’s husband Paul Pelosi, the assassination attempt on Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, and the baseball stadium shooting. All of these murder attempts had political motives. Chances are you’ve already forgotten about them.
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These alone have meant countless mass shootings, riots ravaged cities, and open attempts to forcibly disrupt the peaceful transfer of power.
None of this is normal, and it is to some extent our political leaders who are fueling this escalation of violence. I believe that the vast majority of political leaders do not want violence to happen in their name, but they must be careful about when their words are perceived as a call for such action.
Can our elected leaders do better?
There will always be those who wish to become violent, but in politics, tempering emotions helps stop fueling the fire. Politicians have a responsibility not to incite their most violent supporters.
This is in no way to blame any particular party or politician for this increase – everyone has a hand in this.
But leaders are in a position to lead, and if political tensions get out of hand, it is the responsibility of those in power to do what they can to calm them down. The alarm bell should not sound until someone is killed, when it is already too late.
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Whether it’s years of incendiary rhetoric from Democrats about Trump or Trump’s false claims that Democrats stole the election, all of this needs to stop.
So far, that has not happened. Trump did not stop claiming the election was stolen from him after the January 6, 2021, storming of the U.S. Capitol. Democrats did not stop their bold smears against the Supreme Court after the attack on Justice Kavanaugh. Too often, political violence is met with an escalation.
I urge our leaders to stop assuming that an election victory marks the end of democracy. We’ve seen time and time again that it only makes things worse.
My fellow Americans, we need to take political violence seriously whenever it occurs. We need to let our leaders know that living in this political climate is unacceptable. No sensible American wants political violence to become the norm.
We have an obligation to make it clear that the status quo is unacceptable.
Dais Potas is an opinion columnist for USA Today and holds a degree in political science from DePaul University.
