Incidents of political violence have increased in the United States over the past five years. The start date of this trend is in 2016, around the time Donald Trump first ran for president, according to comparing databases of domestic terrorism incidents between 1970 and 2020. But since the attack on the Capitol in January 2021 the index has multiplied exponentially, with the Portal agency registering 213 cases. The United States is now grappling with the largest and most sustained increase in political violence since the 1970s.
That kind of violence, a correlate of the country’s increasing polarization, has claimed the lives of 40 people, according to Portal. The manifestations of this tension are many, but few are as cinematic as the death of a man shot dead by the FBI on Wednesday when a patrol attempted to stop him and search his home after he was accused of threatening President Joe Biden to have. It happened in Provo, Utah, hours before the president attended a campaign rally in nearby Salt Lake City. The individual, Craig D. Robertson, 75, was armed and had also threatened to shoot other elected officials, including Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who in April indicted Donald Trump in the Stormy Daniels case. The allegation against Robertson had been formulated the day before before the court in Salt Lake City, which is why the FBI had intervened.
The Utah case shows how, particularly since 2020, after Trump lost the election and denounced a non-existent voter fraud culminating in the attack on the Capitol — which cost him his third indictment in four months — the normalization of violence as a normalized one Gun policy is a growing reality. In an Ipsos poll of nearly 4,500 registered voters conducted for Portal in May, about 20% of respondents, both Democrats and Republicans, thought violence was “acceptable” when it was used to “realize my vision of a better society.” However, in another poll conducted between March and April, 65% of respondents expressed concern “about acts of violence committed out of political beliefs”.
Deadly fights over individual discussions, organized attacks such as those suffered by numerous campaign workers after the 2020 presidential election; Shootings, like two in the city of Portland, one between Trump supporters and supporters of the Black Lives Matter movement, and another by a far right who injured five protesters demanding social justice… The hydra of violence adapts to places and circumstances, with which the widespread proliferation of weapons in the country is by no means independent. Politically motivated mass killings claimed 24 lives during that period, including the May 2022 shooting in Buffalo, New York, in which a white supremacist killed ten supermarket customers, all black, after posting a race war manifesto on networks.
FBI Director Christopher Wray told Congress in September 2021 that the attack on the Capitol was not an isolated case and that “the problem of domestic terrorism has been spreading across the country for several years.” This is confirmed by the records since 2014, with exponential growth, particularly pronounced in 2020 and 2021. After the Mar-a-Lago search, the Trump mansion in Florida was found where the secret documents he obtained from the White Wray himself denounced an avalanche of threats against the agency.
About two-thirds of the politically violent incidents documented by the Portal investigation were individual assaults or confrontations between rival groups at public events called in protest of police operations, abortion rights and the rights of transgender people, thus transgender people use The Republican Argument to attack the Democrats, and by extension everything that sounds like it has woken up. The remaining incidents often involved property damage, often occurring during protests, and were generally attributed by police to left-wing militants.
Join EL PAÍS to follow all the news and read without restrictions.
subscribe to
Political violence has escalated for nearly a decade since the assassination of the two Kennedy brothers in the 1960s, with nearly half a thousand cases in the 1970s, mostly attacks by radical leftists on government buildings as political pressure. In the 1980s, it was a relatively rare phenomenon, and a decade later, there were serious flare-ups, such as the 1995 Oklahoma bombing that killed 168 people, according to the FBI the worst domestic terrorist attack in the country. Trump’s leap into the political arena in 2016 marked a new milestone, but unlike the 1970s when attackers sought to pressure politicians, Trump-era violence has come from the right and has become personal: the The goal is the rival, the antagonist, the one who thinks differently. Of the 14 fatal political attacks since the Capitol riot documented by Portal, 13 were perpetrators from the right.
Follow all international information on Facebook and Twitteror in our weekly newsletter.