Government shouldn’t be important enough to motivate people to kill others to gain control. Moreover, people willing to engage in violence to seize the means of governance have no business exercising political power. These are points we should be drumming home after the latest in a series of assassination attempts against President Donald Trump and other administration officials at a time of surging political violence in the United States.
A Violent Mission Amidst a Rising Tide
Cole Tomas Allen’s apparent attack at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner was almost unremarkable for the banality of his manifesto and because, thankfully, injuries were limited to a Secret Service agent whose vest stopped the round. Allen’s grievances were the bog-standard political verbiage seen these days at political protests. He complained that he was “no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes,” clarifying that he himself is “not the person raped in a detention camp. I’m not the fisherman executed without trial. I’m not a schoolkid blown up or a child starved or a teenage girl abused by the many criminals in this administration.” He could have been at a “No Kings” demonstration—instead, he armed himself to attack attendees at a dinner. Unfortunately, while still a small minority, too many people are making similar choices.
Quantifying political violence and terrorist incidents depends on how incidents are categorized and counted. That said, there’s no doubt that such violence is on the rise. The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) finds that “domestic attacks and plots against the U.S. government are at their highest levels since at least 1994,” according to The Wall Street Journal. The University of Maryland’s National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START) believes that political violence peaked in 2020 and early 2021 but that it surged by 34.5 percent in the first eight months of 2025, relative to the same period a year earlier.
Young, Liberal, and Violent
Allen’s relative youth, at 31, and left-of-center political views have become representative of contemporary political violence. While the assumption, for decades, was that violent attacks were more likely to originate on the extreme right, that has changed. “2025 marks the first time in more than 30 years that left-wing terrorist attacks outnumber those from the violent far right,” CSIS’s Daniel Byman and Riley McCabe noted last September after the assassination of Charlie Kirk.
Last year, crunching data from the American Political Perspectives Survey, the Skeptic Research Center reported that “around 1 in 3 younger adults (GenZ and Millennials) expressed support for political violence” and “support for political violence was highest among those identifying as politically ‘very liberal.'” Zoomers voiced greater support than Millennials for political violence; Millennials were more violence-prone than Gen X; and Gen X was more violent than Boomers.
For each age cohort, liberals supported violence to a greater degree than did moderates or conservatives. For all generations combined, the greatest support for the statement “violence is often necessary to create social change” came from self-described “very liberal” respondents (44 percent), followed by “liberal” respondents (28 percent), “very conservative” respondents (27 percent), “moderate” respondents (22 percent), and “conservative” respondents (20 percent).
It’s not surprising that younger people with less life experience and at the peak of physical strength are more violence-prone than those who are older and have done more and seen consequences play out. It also shouldn’t be surprising that the pendulum swings over time and no political faction is inherently more violent than the competition. There’s plenty of crazy to go around when people are out of power and feel besieged by and alienated from a hostile government.
Government vs. Anybody Out of Power
That’s the lesson to take away from the rise in political violence. Modern politicians don’t even pretend to represent people who aren’t their fervent supporters. In Virginia, where congressional votes split 51.4 percent for Democrats in 2024 and 47.6 percent for Republicans, resulting in six seats held by Democrats and five by the GOP, voters just approved a measure overtly intended to gerrymander districts in favor of the donkey party. The new map could give Democrats 10 of the state’s 11 seats.
The Virginia vote follows on a similar effort in Texas to favor Republicans.
After anti-administration “No Kings” rallies across the country last October of the sort attended by alleged would-be assassin Allen, Trump shared an AI-generated video of him shit-bombing protesters. He said of attendees, “they’re not representative of this country.”
His rivals are equally dismissive of opposition. In 2022, Democratic New York Gov. Kathy Hochul directed Republicans to “just jump on a bus and head down to Florida where you belong….Because you don’t represent our values. You are not New Yorkers.” That was about the time then-President Joe Biden lectured the country that “MAGA Republicans do not respect the Constitution.”
American politicians now treat government as a weapon to be used against opponents. Many members of the public perceive—correctly—that they’re despised by those who wield the power of the state.
“Democrats and Republicans are increasingly likely to dislike each other and to feel hostile toward members of the other political party,” YouGov’s Eli McKown-Dawson wrote of results of the firm’s polls.
Politicians and partisans have turned up the heat on American politics, and it’s boiling over. Perhaps, inevitably, the more violence-prone among us take that as license to literally attack their opponents.
Violence Will Continue So Long as Government Is a Threat
The usual call, at this point, is for people to turn down the rhetoric. But that’s pointless when Americans perceive that they’re at risk from opponents who wield the vast power of government and plan to use it against them. That’s not an irrational fear, and words aren’t the danger here—the danger is government that reaches into all areas of life and which really is perilous in the hands of those motivated by malice.
“If in this country law has always been king, its empire has never been so expansive. More than ever, we turn to the law to address any problem we perceive. More than ever, we are inclined to use national authorities to dictate a single answer for the whole country,” Supreme Court Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch and co-author Jane Nitze warned in a 2024 essay adapted by The Atlantic from their book Over Ruled: The Human Toll of Too Much Law.
At a time when Americans agree on so little—other than that they dislike each other—there are no “right” people to hold office and control the instruments of power. We’ve turned elections into existential threats to those who lose. We emphasized the “all” in “winner takes all,” and we’re paying the price.
Understandably fearful of government in the hands of enemies, Americans are literally fighting over political power. The violence won’t stop, and will probably escalate, until there’s no political danger worth fighting over.
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