The echoes from the gunshots that killed a Western Pennsylvania man, and came inches from slaying Donald Trump, had barely died away before Americans began training their fire on each other.
And before anyone knew the name or the political inclinations, if any, of the shooter, there were efforts to connect him to the broader political debate.
Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance struck a note sounded by many Republicans, arguing that characterizations of Trump as “an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs … led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.”
“We will not tolerate this attack from the left,” said Congressman Mike Kelly, who represents Butler County, a few hours after the shooting.
But it wasn’t just the political right that rushed in.
“The rest of us can so easily get caught up in this,” said Michael Kenney, a University of Pittsburgh professor who directs the Matthew Ridgway Center and studies political violence around the globe. “People like me that specialize in [studying] political violence — some of them are too caught up in the polarization of the moment, making what I would consider to be unwise comments on social media.”
The accused gunman, 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks, was shot and killed by U.S. Secret Service agents Saturday, and as yet it is unclear what drove his attempt on Trump’s life. Early accounts suggest he was quiet, with few friends and little to suggest strong political convictions beyond a $15 donation to a liberal group and his decision to register as a Republican, both made more than two years ago.
Without a clear understanding of Crooks’ motives, it’s easy to end up diagnosing our own maladies — and that can deepen the illness, Kenney warned.
“We're upset. We want to understand what happened,” he said. “But we can do that in a way that doesn’t make the situation worse. Let the investigation unfold, and then when we have a better idea of what actually happened, we can go from there.”
Kenney’s research has taken him from South America to Europe, Northern Africa and the Middle East. And “the United States is not unique, unfortunately,” he said. While our easy access to guns sets us apart, “Many democratic states are also suffering. You can point to any number of countries where we see a growth not only of the far right, but the far left.”
At the bottom of it, he surmises, are “broad trends that have been unfolding over the last several decades having to do with globalization. … There are many people that feel that liberal democracy with the capitalist economy has not worked particularly well for them.”
Those resentments, he said, are being concentrated by social media companies who “have a greater role to play [in] helping to bring the temperature down. … Their algorithms are so powerful and so sensitive that once you start going down a rabbit hole, it ends up creating these online echo chambers in which like-minded people end up radicalizing each other even further.”
And people Crooks’ age may be especially susceptible to believing violence is politics by other means: In an NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll conducted this past March, fully 42 percent of people aged 18 to 29 either strongly or somewhat agreed that “Americans may have to resort to violence in order to get the country back on track.” That was twice the rate of any other age group, and a larger gap than even the one that separates the political parties.
Even if the shooter’s motives had little to do with politics, Kenney said, “We need our political leaders to step up and help us take down the temperature.”
“I would like nothing better than former President Trump and sitting President Biden to issue some kind of a joint statement or press conference,” he said. “Or maybe at the next presidential debate they could actually shake hands. Is that too much to ask for?”
Voters may be about to find out.
Trump on Sunday issued a statement calling for prayers and support for the other casualties of the shooting, and urging that “it is more important than ever that we stand united, and show our true character as Americans, remaining strong and determined.”
Biden, for his part, gave an address from the Oval Office Sunday evening in which he declared “politics must never be a literal battlefield or, God forbid, a killing field.”
“While unity is the most elusive of goals right now, nothing is more important … than standing together,” he said.
But that may not come easily, as rancor continues from the national level down to the most local of offices.
Shortly after the shooting, Democratic Allegheny County Councilor Bethany Hallam tweeted a post that read, “Wow, the crime in Butler County is out of control!”
She deleted it minutes later because, she said, it was “in poor taste” and because “I know I’m an elected official, and people hold me to a higher standard.
“I think it’s stupid that everybody feels the need to say something about everything, and I need to follow my own advice,” she said.
But it had already been noticed by local Republicans, and in a Sunday memo to local members of the Republican Party faithful, GOP Allegheny County chairman Sam DeMarco thundered, “Calling Donald Trump ‘an existential threat’ to our nation produced an act that should surprise no one: a disturbed young man attempted to end the former president’s existence. The connection is undeniable.”
As for Hallam, he cited the tweet as an example of Democratic officials “behaving in ways that make it clear that they don’t appreciate the gravity of their words and conduct.
DeMarco acknowledged to WESA that “You have tough rhetoric on both sides” but said “it’s worse coming from Biden. “Trump says a lot of outrageous things, but he doesn’t talk about how the world is going to end.”
Trump has in fact spoken in such terms, warning that if he doesn’t win this fall, “our country is doomed.” Still, DeMarco said, “it’s fair to link a movement to what a disturbed individual is doing” when “the left has a propensity for violence, whether it’s Black Lives Matter or Antifa. We've seen repeated acts,” including the 2017 shooting of Steve Scalise by a man who described Trump as a “traitor” who “destroyed our democracy.”
Democrats can cite their own litany of violence: an attack on the husband of former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, for example, or a foiled plot to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.
And Hallam said the point she was trying to make with her tweet was that "if this had happened in Allegheny County, people would be blaming the Democratic county executive and the Democratic mayor.” As someone who has publicly discussed her past struggles with drug addiction, she added, she is no stranger to calloused treatment herself: “The people saying, ‘You’re horrible for saying this’ are the same people who say, ‘I hope you overdose and die.’”
It may be hard to see how America escapes a doom loop if partisans on both sides blame each other for the fact that we are on it. But Kenney said history does offer cause for optimism.
“The number of terrorist incidents was actually much higher in the late ’60s and early ’70s than they are today — and in the first half of the 1990s,” he said. “I don’t blame people for being scared. I’m very concerned by some of the things I see. However, I’m also hopeful because we’ve been through worse [and] we didn’t collapse as a society.
“We can't just look at our political leaders and say,’Well, you should do this,’” he added. “We all have a responsibility to build the political culture that we want to live in.”
