Political violence is a consequence of the politics of anathema

The latest attempt to assassinate President Donald Trump demonstrates anew that, like the toleration of antisemitism, the demonization of opponents leads to the unthinkable.

We’ve been through this so many times that perhaps it’s futile even to raise the possibility that the temperature of political discourse should be lowered. But after the third attempt to assassinate President Donald Trump in less than two years, combined with other acts of political violence such as the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, the subject is unavoidable.

American politics is now being conducted in a manner in which it is no longer possible to argue that there is no connection between the determination of his political opponents to demonize Trump and the willingness of extremists or disturbed persons to act on such rhetoric.

In the aftermath of the failed attempt to kill the president, as well as his wife and other members of the administration attending the White House Correspondents Dinner in Washington, D.C., on Saturday night, the discussion about political rhetoric has predictably devolved into yet another version of the same sterile debate we’ve heard every time something like this happens.

‘I’m rubber, you’re glue’
The administration and Trump supporters list all of the extreme statements made by Democrats and the president’s foes that could be construed as calls to violence. In return, Democrats and their liberal media cheering section reply by citing all of the president’s own statements that could be interpreted as crossing the line between normal debate and incitement.

The exercise is just a grown-up version of the childhood taunt in which antagonists respond to insults with the expression, “If I’m rubber, you’re glue.”

Let’s take it as a given that nothing that happened at the Hilton Hotel in Washington is going to convince anyone to tone down their reckless rhetoric. This being the case, there is still an obligation to point out that analogizing Trump to Adolf Hitler, the Nazis or fascists—is so commonplace that such comments barely merit a mention—comes with a price.

The cost of the politics of demonization is political violence. That is always going to be true, no matter which country we’re discussing, or which leaders or factions are treated in this manner. And if we want this to change, we’re going to have to stop treating our political opponents as not merely mistaken, but monsters that must be punished and destroyed.

It’s not a stretch to argue that the anger that Trump has inspired among the half of the country that opposes him has long since crossed over into something not so much a function of political debate, but the sort of conviction that inspired religious wars in previous ages. And that has to stop, not so much for the sake of Trump’s safety or the cause of sane political discourse, but because it is a slippery slope that can only lead to more and more violence.

We already know that in this bifurcated nation, the reaction to such horrible events as an attempted assassination of a president tells us everything we need to know about the mental health of a society.

The essence of the American system and any functioning democracy is agreeing to accept that sometimes, your side is going to lose, and the people and leaders you don’t like are going to be in power. Americans have been angry at each other over political differences and personalities before. Scandalmongering, name-calling and mudslinging of even the most debased kind is as old as the republic. The appetite for impugning those who disagree with your faction or party, accusing them of corruption and all sorts of crimes, is hardly new.

Still, in earlier eras of American history, assassinations inspired widespread horror that cut across even the starkest political divisions. In 2026, all it does is fuel a news cycle that is treated as just another excuse to rehearse grudges and recriminations.

The price of ‘denial’
The reaction to political violence is now just as likely to be denial, rather than soul-searching. The avalanche of social-media comments from Trump haters online—saying the attempted assassination was not genuine, combined with the smaller but still numerous expressions of disappointment that it didn’t succeed—speaks loudly to the dysfunctional nature of American society, let alone its political discourse.

Nor is this solely limited to rhetorical attacks on Trump. We’ve seen the same thing with respect to reactions to the Hamas-led Palestinian-Arab terror attacks on Israeli communities on Oct. 7, 2023.

The willingness of so many to engage in denial of the atrocities committed that day, combined with support for the general concept of “resistance” to the presence of Israelis living in their own country, is not merely despicable in and of itself. It’s part of the same mindset that justifies chants for Jewish genocide (“From the river to the sea”) and for terrorism against Jews everywhere (“globalize the intifada”) heard on college campuses and in the streets of American cities in the last 31 months. And that, in turn, has helped create an atmosphere in which acts of intimidation and violence up to and including murder in the name of the cause of “Free Palestine,” such as the killing of two young Israeli embassy staff last spring in Washington, becomes imaginable.

That shows us what happens when antisemitism is normalized. There is a general consensus that we are living through a surge of Jew-hatred that is unlike anything experienced in living memory. But there is still a widespread refusal, especially on the mainstream left and the far right, about whether one can connect the dots between the hatred and blood libels against Israel and the Jews with what is happening in American society.

The same thing happens when politics becomes the stage on which the derangement syndrome that an unorthodox president has inspired in his political foes is acted out.

From the start of his political career in 2015 during his first presidential campaign, Trump broke all the rules that had governed politics in previous eras. There has never been anyone like him in American political history in the way he both speaks and acts. And, unsurprisingly, the character of the opposition to him is unlike that experienced by any presidential predecessor.

‘Resistance’ politics leads to violence
Even before his first term began, his opponents were determined to delegitimize him by falsely accusing him of colluding with a hostile foreign power to steal the election. No other president has faced a “resistance”—aided and abetted by mainstream media outlets—rather than a loyal opposition in this manner. His opponents are committed to the idea that he is a singular threat to democracy and the end of all they hold sacred. Not even the survival of the system throughout the nearly five-and-a-half years of his presidency is enough to convince them that their reactions are disproportionate to any reasonable critique of his policies.

Other presidents, including his immediate predecessors, Barack Obama and Joe Biden, acted in a high-handed and arguably unconstitutional manner to get their way on certain issues, like immigration. And they engaged in disastrous foreign policies such as appeasing the Islamist terror regime in Iran. However, it is Trump who is routinely denounced with rhetoric and false analogies to mass murderers. And those accusing him are the same people who condemned every critique of Obama and Biden as crossing the line into incitement.

It is also entirely true that Trump’s rhetoric in speeches and his ubiquitous social-media posts is over-the-top and often coarse, as well as unpresidential.

Still, that doesn’t excuse the kind of discourse we expect from his opponents, in which the debate over his policies has crossed over into delegitimization of an unprecedented kind. And that is where the “both sides” argument about rhetoric and violence breaks down.

That’s not just because Trump’s political opponents have never hesitated to make claims that his comments or those of conservatives in general can also be linked to violence. They refuse to accept their own responsibility for encouraging their side to think that there is virtually no tactic or accusation that can be considered beyond the pale when it comes to taking him down.

Some jokes aren’t funny
That includes the efforts to bankrupt and jail Trump when he was out of office, while Biden was president. And it carries over to the discussion that has already begun about impeaching him for a third time should the Democrats win back control of Congress this fall or for hounding him with another round of lawfare after his second term ends in 2028.

It is no secret that many opponents of Trump’s decision to strike Iran to prevent it from obtaining nuclear weapons are so angry at him that they would rather see the Islamist regime triumph rather than give him credit for achieving a policy objective that Democratic presidents have also pursued. Some, like New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman, have admitted this openly, while putting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the same category as a political leader who should be treated as worse than Tehran’s terrorist thugs.

This sort of invective, along with the Hitler analogies, goes beyond “jokes” about Trump’s death heard from mainstream television personalities like comedian Jimmy Kimmel, though that sort of “satire” is as irresponsible as it is tasteless.

When this sort of discourse is not only tolerated, but encouraged and even cheered, how can anyone be surprised when someone who agrees that Trump is insufferable will resort to violence?

The really scary thing about all this is the sense that none of Trump’s critics are chastened by the assassination attempts or the murder of Kirk. Trump’s opponents toned down their anger in the aftermath of his near-death experience in Butler, Pa., and then his re-election victory in 2024. But with Trump now experiencing the problems and polling that usually come with second terms, we seem to be back where we were two years ago when depictions of him as Hitler were in fashion, and jokes about his death were being told.

There is still no evidence that most Americans want to live in a country governed by conspiracy theorists or to see our political leaders demonized. Extremism exists at both ends of the political spectrum. Nevertheless, the push to anathematize Trump has become so pervasive that the pro forma denunciations of the would-be assassin ring hollow.

We should not be shocked that a political culture that treats antisemitism as tolerable—and even fashionable—would be one where political violence would also become normalized. If reactions to calls for Jewish genocide are said to depend on the “context” to generate outrage, then it is equally possible to imagine violence against political opponents being similarly accepted.

The problem today is not the attention being paid to those who have crossed the line from political disagreement to demonization. Nor should the narrative about this near-tragedy be altered to distract us from this terrible reality to placate or rationalize those who want to continue dragging the country down this path. Turning back toward sanity would require an end to the sort of apocalyptic political pronouncements about the president and his supporters that have brought America to this moment.