Political Violence 2025

12 September
Violence As Policy in Trump’s America
Jan-Werner Mueller
Both Republicans and Democrats have been victims of violent attacks this year, but the murder of the right-wing activist Charlie Kirk has once again highlighted the fundamental asymmetry of contemporary American politics. Unlike the Democrats and most Americans, many leaders on the right view their supporters’ violence as legitimate.
(Project Syndicate) The horrendous killing of the far-right activist Charlie Kirk has been met with calming, statesman-like responses on both sides of the political aisle. But it has also demonstrated yet again the fundamental asymmetry of contemporary American politics. Many prominent figures on the right, all the way up to President Donald Trump, have called for nothing less than retribution against the “radical left” – all in the absence of information about the killer and his motivation.
Trump has been signaling for a decade or so that political violence committed by his supporters is acceptable and might even be rewarded. Those he pardoned for their participation in the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the US Capitol included many convicted of violent crimes. But Trump and many of his acolytes frame such conduct not as violence, but as legitimate, even patriotic, self-defense; like other right-wing populists, they portray themselves as perpetual victims. There have been some deeply distasteful postings about Kirk’s killing by apparent leftists on social media, pointing out with schadenfreude that Kirk had claimed that gun deaths were an acceptable price to pay for the right to bear arms. But, on the whole, liberal commentators have gone out of their way not just to condemn violence but to recognize Kirk as a good-faith debater with a “taste for disagreement.” On the right, by contrast, prominent voices have called for repression – invoking the illegal practices of FBI founder J. Edgar Hoover as a model – if not outright “war.” More worrying still, Trump himself seems to relish the occasion as a pretext to attack civil-society organizations not to his liking. Members of his administration had already declared the Democratic Party itself to be a “domestic terror organization.” Given that Trump has shown absolutely no restraint in unleashing the powers of the federal government on any individual or organization, the implied threat of prosecuting the opposition should set off alarm bells for any democrat (not just Democrats).
3 September
Stephen Miller Calls Democrats a “Domestic Extremist Organization”
Congressional Democrats should demand that he retract his grotesque claims or resign.
Charlie Kirk’s murder is the latest example of violence tearing through American politics
Through the first half of 2025, the US saw some 150 politically motivated attacks, said Michael Jensen, a University of Maryland researcher who tracks terrorism incidents. That’s nearly twice as many as the same period last year – a spike he said reflects growing discontent with the political system and its policies.

11 October
Trump deploys tactics and language of war against perceived domestic threats
It represents a dramatic shift in the use of the military, which has been focused for most of American history on threats from abroad.
(WaPo) Through public statements, orders and a little-noticed policy directive, President Donald Trump has made clear that he is eager to use the might of the American military and the resources of the federal government to crack down on what he sees as domestic threats: violent crime, illegal immigration and the antifa movement.
Over the past two weeks, Trump has called on the National Guard, the nation’s reserve military force, to staff the front lines of his campaign against crime and undocumented immigration in four Democratic-run cities. And he has increasingly used the language of war to describe domestic issues.

24 September
ICE shooting shows how easily political violence boomerangs
A shooter at a Dallas Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility on Wednesday was apparently targeting law enforcement but shot three detainees instead. The horrific episode serves as an allegory for how politically motivated violence almost never achieves its intended goal.
Something similar happened in Atlanta last month when an anti-vaccine shooter fired hundreds of bullets at six buildings at the headquarters of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. His rampage killed a responding police officer — a father of two children, with a third on the way — who had nothing to do with vaccines. …

22 September
Trump signs order designating antifa as a ‘domestic terrorist organization’
Executive order revives controversial pledge from Trump’s first presidency in wake of Charlie Kirk’s killing
“Antifa is a militarist, anarchist enterprise that explicitly calls for the overthrow of the United States Government, law enforcement authorities, and our system of law,” the order reads.
Some extremist experts are however questioning the president’s authority to make such a designation. Unlike foreign terrorist organizations like Islamic State, no legal framework exists for designating domestic groups as terrorist organizations due to first amendment concerns about criminalizing political ideologies.
Stephen Miller’s Hypocrisy Is Right There in His Speech
In the White House adviser’s view, violent rhetoric is allowed only when he and Trump are the ones spewing it.
By Jonathan Chait
(The Atlantic) Yesterday, Stephen Miller delivered a eulogy for Charlie Kirk that served as a battle cry for the Trump administration’s state-sponsored war on his perceived foes—a war for which Miller is the primary strategist. The speech was a jarring piece of rhetoric. It is a perfect encapsulation of the ethos of Trumpism, boiling away the president’s idiosyncratic habits of mixing insult comedy and weird digressions into his rhetoric and leaving, in Miller’s tongue, the residue of pure ideology and will to power.

17 September
Obama says Trump deepened US divide in rush to ‘identify enemy’ after Charlie Kirk shooting
Ex-president says US in ‘dangerous moment’, after White House response to killings of Kirk and Melissa Hortman

16 September
Charlie Kirk, Redeemed: A Political Class Finds Its Lost Cause
By ignoring the rhetoric and actions of the Turning Point USA founder, pundits and politicians are sanitizing his legacy.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
(Vanity Fair) Before he was killed last week, Charlie Kirk left a helpful compendium of words—ones that would greatly aid those who sought to understand his legacy and import. It is somewhat difficult to match these words with the manner in which Kirk is presently being memorialized in mainstream discourse. New York Times columnist Ezra Klein dubbed Kirk “one of the era’s most effective practitioners of persuasion” and a man who “was practicing politics in exactly the right way.” …
There is, after all, a pervasive worry, among the political class, that college students, ensconced in their own bubbles, could use a bit of shock therapy from a man unconcerned with preferred pronouns, trigger warnings, and the humanity of Palestinians. But it also shows how the political class’s obsession with universities blinds it to everything else. And the everything-else of Kirk’s politics amounted to little more than a loathing of those whose mere existence provoked his ire.
It is not just, for instance, that Kirk held disagreeable views—that he was pro-life, that he believed in public executions, or that he rejected the separation of church and state. It’s that Kirk reveled in open bigotry. Indeed, claims of Kirk’s “civility” are tough to square with his penchant for demeaning members of the LGBTQ+ community as “freaks” and referring to trans people with the slur “tranny.” Faced with the prospect of a Kamala Harris presidency, Kirk told his audience that the threat had to be averted because Harris wanted to “kidnap your child via the trans agenda.” Garden-variety transphobia is sadly unremarkable. But Kirk was a master of folding seemingly discordant bigotries into each other, as when he defined “the American way of life” as marriage, home ownership, and child-rearing free of “the lesbian, gay, transgender garbage in their school,” adding that he did not want kids to “have to hear the Muslim call to prayer five times a day.” The American way of life was “Christendom,” Kirk claimed, and Islam—“the sword the left is using to slit the throat of America”—was antithetical to that. …

15 September
‘We will do it in Charlie’s name’: Stephen Miller vows vengeance for Kirk’s murder
Vice President JD Vance, hosting the podcast once helmed by Kirk, also encouraged people to make trouble for those who were “celebrating” the conservative activist’s death.
White House Plans Broad Crackdown on Liberal Groups
Some of the highest-ranking officials in the federal government used Charlie Kirk’s podcast, guest-hosted by Vice President JD Vance, to lay out their plans
(NYT) President Trump and his top advisers threatened on Monday to unleash the power of the federal government to punish what they alleged was a left-wing network that funds and incites violence, seizing on Charlie Kirk’s killing to make broad and unsubstantiated claims about their political opponents.
Investigators were still working to identify a motive in the death of Mr. Kirk, a prominent conservative activist who was shot last week in Utah. The Republican governor of Utah, Spencer Cox, has said that the suspect had a “leftist ideology” and that he acted alone.
But Mr. Trump and his top allies suggested that the suspect was part of a coordinated movement that was fomenting violence against conservatives, without presenting evidence that such a network existed. America has seen a wave of violence across the political spectrum, targeting Democrats and Republicans.

13 September
Wrestling Over Charlie Kirk’s Legacy and the Divide in America
Historians say the lessons of this particular time will depend on Americans themselves, and what kind of a nation they want it to be.
(NYT) Americans are now grappling with the brutal killing of a young leader who is viewed through radically different lenses. On the right, Mr. Kirk has been lionized as an inspiration to a new generation of Republicans. On the left, he has been pilloried as a divider who attacked civil rights, transgender rights, feminism and Islam.
Bondi Prompts Broad Backlash After Saying She’ll Target ‘Hate Speech’
The attorney general also said she could investigate businesses that refused to print Charlie Kirk vigil posters as the Trump administration pushes to punish anyone who celebrated his killing.

11-15 September
Utah governor says the motive in Kirk shooting is not yet certain but the suspect was on the left
“There clearly was a leftist ideology,” Cox said on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” citing interviews with Robinson’s relatives and acquaintances. “Friends have confirmed that there was kind of that deep, dark internet, the Reddit culture, and these other dark places of the internet where this person was going deep.”
After Kirk’s killing a growing chorus of conservatives wants his critics ostracized or fired
A campaign by public officials and others on the right has led just days after the conservative activist’s death to the firing or punishment of teachers, an Office Depot employee, government workers, a TV pundit and the expectation of more dismissals coming.
Charlie Kirk shooting suspect not cooperating with authorities, Utah governor says
(Reuters) – The man arrested in the killing of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk is not cooperating with authorities, but investigators are working to establish a motive for the shooting by talking to his friends and family, Utah Governor Spencer Cox said on Sunday.
Cox said the accused gunman, Tyler Robinson, 22, would be formally charged on Tuesday. He remains in custody in Utah.
Charlie Kirk’s rhetoric inspired supporters, enraged foes
Kirk’s rhetoric often involved anti-immigration and anti-LGBTQ remarks
Views often aligned with far-right elements of the Republican Party
Kirk’s Turning Point USA organization says it has 250,000 members
(Reuters) – Moments before he was killed at a Utah university Wednesday, Charlie Kirk was taking a question about transgender people and mass shootings.
“Do you know how many transgender Americans have been mass shooters over the last 10 years?” the event attendee asked.
“Too many,” Kirk replied.
Data shows trans people conduct a very small percentage of mass shootings, according to the fact-checking website PolitiFact. But the reply was vintage stuff for the conservative activist and provocateur who became a MAGA celebrity over the past decade and is credited with inspiring a generation of college students to become politically active and turn out for President Donald Trump.
Heather Cox Richardson September 12, 2025
… Condemnation of the shooting was widespread. Perhaps eager to distance themselves from accusations that anyone who does not support MAGA endorses political violence, commenters portrayed Kirk as someone embracing the reasoned debate central to democracy, although he became famous by establishing a database designed to dox professors who expressed opinions he disliked so they would be silenced (I am included on this list).
Meanwhile, it was not clear the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) was up to the task of finding the killer. FBI director Kash Patel and deputy director Dan Bongino were both MAGA influencers without law enforcement experience when Trump put them in charge of the agency. Once there, they focused on purging the agency of those they considered insufficiently loyal to Trump or “DEI hires.” In early August, they forced out the leader of the Salt Lake City, Utah, field office, Mehtab Syed, a decorated female Pakistani American counterterrorism agent.
Meanwhile, David J. Bier of the Cato Institute reported that one in five FBI agents have been diverted from their jobs to conduct immigration raids with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and just hours before the shooting, three former top officials at the FBI filed a lawsuit against Patel, the FBI, Attorney General Pam Bondi, the Department of Justice, and the president accusing them of unlawfully politicizing the FBI, purging it of anyone who had ever worked on a criminal investigation of Trump. The lawsuit suggests Bongino had an “intense focus on [using] his social media profiles to change his followers’ perceptions of the FBI.”
As Quinta Jurecic reported today in The Atlantic, hours after the shooting, Patel’s personal social media account posted a picture of himself and Kirk; minutes later, Patel’s official FBI account posted that the shooter was already in custody and then, an hour and a half later, said the suspect had been released. Both Patel and Bongino appeared to be focused more on posting than on doing the work to find the shooter.
Charlie Kirk’s open-air debates made him a draw on college campuses. They also made him vulnerable
(AP) — The same scene played out at campuses across the country. Charlie Kirk would grab a microphone, take a seat under a canopy — often in busy campus hubs — and invite debate from anyone who came along. His prompt: “Prove me wrong.”
Kirk’s open and engaging approach veered from the well-worn tracks of provocateurs who rile audiences in campus lecture halls. It made him a phenomenon, attracting hundreds who crowded around his tent as challengers sparred with one of the nation’s most influential conservatives.
…many saw Kirk’s campus debates as a refreshing change of pace, said Jonathan Zimmerman, a historian and campus speech scholar at the University of Pennsylvania. Armed with charisma and wit, he made conservativism seem fun and edgy to many young people. Kirk promoted open dialogue, even if his goal was often to score political points rather than engage in meaningful debate, Zimmerman said.
Some observers see this moment as an inflection point in the campus speech debate. Universities may become more reluctant to host controversial speakers amid safety concerns, or they may double down on their role as intellectual laboratories where students can grapple with views different from their own.
As Political Violence Rises, Trump Condemns One Side
In the wake of Charlie Kirk’s killing, President Trump captured the raw sentiment of his conservative base. But he addressed only part of the alarming cycle of violence in America
The president made no mention of the recent killings in Minnesota of a Democratic state lawmaker and her husband, who were on a hit list of dozens of left-wing figures; the arson attack on the home of Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, while he and his family slept; a shooter’s attack on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; a hammer assault on the husband of former Speaker Nancy Pelosi; the shootings at an Arizona campaign office of Kamala Harris; or the Jan. 6 pro-Trump mob attack on the Capitol that injured roughly 150 police officers.
In doing so, experts said, Mr. Trump captured the raw sentiment of his conservative base — the feeling of being under constant threat from the left in a country that is abandoning them. But the remarks addressed only part of the seemingly endless cycle of political violence America is experiencing.
Political violence fears grow as Michigan officials and organizations face threats
Following the assassination of Charlie Kirk, bomb threats have been made against several Michigan lawmakers and historically Black colleges, leading to heightened safety concern

10 September
A new dark normal of political violence still shocks the nation
The shooting death of conservative activist Charlie Kirk follows a surge in threats and attacks against political figures for the second summer in a row.
It’s become a macabre American ritual: a violent attack against a political figure, followed by condemnations, calls for introspection and a vow to prevent it from happening again.
And then it does.
…former Democratic Rep. Gabby Giffords… was shot in the head by a gunman in 2011. In the 14 years since, attacks and threats against political figures have surged. Just three months ago, a masked gunman shot two Minnesota state lawmakers, killing one. Two months before that, an arsonist set fire to the Pennsylvania governor’s mansion while Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro and his family slept inside.

21 July
Political violence is on the rise again, at home and abroad
(GZERO media) Across the democratic world, political violence and violent political language are becoming more common again as polarization deepens, viewpoints harden, and political differences start to feel like existential battles. Here in the US last year, there were more than 8,000 threats of violence against federal lawmakers alone, a tenfold increase since 2016. And as we head into the most contentious and high-stakes election in America’s modern history, people are bracing for more. A poll taken just after the attempt on Trump’s life showed that two-thirds of Americans think the current environment makes political violence more likely. Who is responsible for stopping this slide into violence? Is it our leaders, our media outlets, or our social media platforms? Is it ourselves? Unless things change, we will be lucky if it’s another 40 years before this happens again in the US.

14 June
2 Minnesota state lawmakers shot, 1 killed, in ‘politically motivated’ attack
Former state House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband were killed.
Two Minnesota state lawmakers and their spouses were shot in their homes early Saturday, in what Gov. Tim Walz called “politically motivated” violence.
“An unspeakable tragedy has unfolded in Minnesota,” Walz said at a press briefing later Saturday morning. “My good friend and colleague, [former] Speaker Melissa Hortman, and her husband Mark, were shot and killed early this morning in what appears to be a politically-motivated assassination.”
Walz said that state Sen. John Hoffman and his wife, Yvette, were also “each shot multiple times,” but both were out of surgery as of mid-morning.
The pair of shootings, which rocked Minnesota and drew a wave of condemnation nationwide, appears to be just the latest incident of politically fueled violence in the country, including two Israeli embassy staffers killed in Washington last month.

13 April
Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro – with his wife, their four children, two dogs and another family – were forced to flee after someone threw a Molotov cocktail into the governor’s mansion, severely damaging the home hours after the family hosted a Passover dinner.
The suspect said he targeted the Democratic governor in part because of what he believed were Shapiro’s views on the war in Gaza, search warrants show. The Pennsylvania man faces seven charges, including attempted homicide, burglary, attempted assault and arson.

2024

15 September
violence tearing through American politics
(CNN) A man was arrested soon after a rifle was spotted in the bushes along the perimeter of the Trump International Golf Club in Florida while Trump, campaigning for a second term, was playing. The suspect…was indicted for trying to kill Trump, among other federal charges. His trial is underway.
13 July
A young Pennsylvania man shot at Trump during a re-election rally in the state, injuring the presidential candidate, wounding two rally attendees and killing another. Secret Service agents killed the gunman at the scene.

7 December 2023
Final Sentences Ordered in Whitmer Kidnap Plot
Today the final two remaining defendants related to Whitmer Kidnapping Plot were sentenced by Judge Charles Hamlyn of the 13th Circuit Court in Antrim County, announced Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel.
Oct. 8, 2020 — 13 charged in plot to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer
CNN — Thirteen people were charged Thursday in an alleged domestic terrorism plot to kidnap Michigan Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, federal and state officials announced.
The alleged scheme included plans to overthrow several state governments that the suspects “believe are violating the US Constitution,” including the government of Michigan and Whitmer, according to a federal criminal complaint.