The White House Correspondents’ Dinner Shooting and Political Violence

President Donald Trump has now faced so many assassination attempts that some people suspect they are not genuine.

The truth is less nasty, more alarming… and simpler. (If you wanted to carry out a colossal false flag attack, would you do it under the noses of a thousand reporters?!)

Simply put, political violence is on the rise in the US. There are some caveats and asterisks to that claim, which we’ll get to in a minute — but overall, across multiple sources, the trend line is consistent.

In the last year alone, one gunman killed conservative activist Charlie Kirk; another shot and killed a Democratic lawmaker and her husband and attempted to kill others, in Minnesota; and a man set fire to the home of Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro.

Trump himself has now survived three attacks, most recently at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner this past weekend. A California man rushed to a security checkpoint armed with a shotgun, a handgun and several knives, intending to target several members of the Trump administration.

in at press conference White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt on Monday afternoon blamed Democratic lawmakers and “some in the media” for the latest attack, claiming — in a now-familiar refrain — that “hateful and violent rhetoric directed at President Trump … helped legitimize this violence.”

But while there is some truth to the broad idea that violent rhetoric can normalize attacks, the reality is far more complex (and far less one-sided) than that.

The numbers on political violence

Political violence is notoriously difficult to track over time. (There’s that asterisk I promised.) The term itself is funny, and researchers disagree about which acts belong under its umbrella. Many datasets also rely on media reports to identify relevant incidents, which is a shaky method in an era of declining local news coverage. And sample sizes are sometimes so small that it’s hard to draw any broad conclusions from them.

Yet the measures we do have point in the same direction. The US Capitol Police – which track threats made against members of Congress, their families and their staff – observed a noticeable increase since they started collecting data nine years ago.

Princeton University’s Bridging Divides Initiative too found a sharp increase in threats at the local level following recent high-profile political events, including the 2024 presidential election and the death of Charlie Kirk.

Meanwhile, the University of Maryland’s Global Terrorism Database, which includes incidents of political violence from 1970 to 2020, finds that assassinations and attempted assassinations started typing around the world in the mid-2010s, after a sharp decline in the 1990s.

And new data from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Monday by the Wall Street Journal reportedshows that anti-government violence in the US reached a more than 30-year high in 2025. For the first time in 20 years, the Journal reported, more of those attacks came from extremists on the left than extremists on the right.

It does not take a Ph.D. in poly science to guess at the forces driving this trend. Last year, when the Pew Research Center American adults asked to explainin their own words, why political violence is getting worse, respondents landed on some of the same factors that researchers do: partisan polarization, a growing acceptance of violence, and the role of social media.

In particular, researchers say, the level of political division in the US — and the degree to which that division has taken on a moral tone — has created an environment where many Americans view their opponents as fundamentally “angry.” That environment extends beyond the traditional left/right divide to include many people angry at the system as a whole, according to Rachel Kleinfeld, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a leading political violence researcher.

“It seems that those who are angry about our politics but don’t see a way to solve issues through normal means now believe that violence can be a solution,” she wrote in a Monday post.

Conspiracy theories and other forms of online disinformation also play a role. Unlike the extremists of past decades, who may have operated as part of a formal organization, many of today’s perpetrators have self-radicalized on social media.

It’s too early to say whether Cole Tomas Allen, the suspect in last weekend’s shooting, fits that mold. An investigation into his motives continues. But a document believed to have been drawn up by Allen before the attack was published on Sunday by the New York Postdoes say that he felt a moral imperative to resort to violence.