The numbers on US political violence

President Donald Trump has now faced so many assassination attempts that some people suspect they aren’t real. 

The truth is less salacious, more alarming…and more straightforward. (If you wanted to stage 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 generally speaking, across multiple sources, the trendline is consistent.

In the past year alone, one gunman assassinated the 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 Gov. 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 a security checkpoint armed with a shotgun, a handgun, and several knives, intending to target multiple members of the Trump administration.

In a press conference on Monday afternoon, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt 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 squishy, and researchers differ on 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. 

Still, the measures we do have point in the same direction. The US Capitol Police — who track threats made against members of Congress, their families, and their staff — have observed a marked increase since they began collecting data nine years ago. 

Princeton University’s Bridging Divides Initiative also 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 began ticking up around the world in the mid-2010s, after a sharp decrease in the 1990s. 

And new data from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, reported by the Wall Street Journal on Monday, shows that antigovernment 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 the extremists on the left than extremists on the right.

But why?

It doesn’t take a Ph.D. in poli sci to guess at the forces driving this trend. Last year, when the Pew Research Center asked American adults to explain, in 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 “evil.” That environment extends outside of the traditional left/right divide to include many people who are 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 do not see a path to resolve issues through normal means, now believe that violence might be a solution,” she wrote in a Monday post. 

Conspiracy theories and other types of online disinformation also play a role. Unlike the extremists of decades past, 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 if Cole Tomas Allen, the suspect in last weekend’s shooting, fits that mold. An investigation into his motives is ongoing. But a document that Allen reportedly drafted before the attack, published on Sunday by the New York Post, does say that he felt a moral imperative to resort to violence.