Transcript of What Drives Political Violence in America New

The Opinions Podcast from New York Times Opinion, bringing you a mix of conversations and new ideas featuring the voices of our writers and columnists.

To me, the single most underestimated force in international relations is actually stupidity.

Including Jamelle Bouie, Tracie McMillan Cottom, Michelle Goldberg, Thomas Friedman, and many more.

Find The Opinions wherever you get your podcasts.

From The New York Times, I'm Natalie Kitroeff. This is The Daily. In the midst of a cascade of violent acts against political figures— It happened in Minnesota, the murder of a state representative and her husband in what's being called a politically motivated attack. This morning, a man is charged in connection with an arson at the Pennsylvania governor's residence while Governor Shapiro and his family —slept inside. Charlie Kirk has been shot. The latest from the White House Correspondents Center: the Secret Service has a person in custody after shots were fired. And in the wake of what appears to be the third assassination attempt against President Trump— Times reports the suspected shooter's 1,000-word manifesto says Trump administration figures were his targets. The question that keeps coming up is, how did we get here? And how much worse could it really get? So last week, I called University of Chicago professor Robert Pape. For decades, he's been one of the country's leading experts on political violence, and he's advised every White House from 2001 to 2024. We talked about why violence from the right and the left is on the rise, and what it would take to stop it.

It's Monday. May 4th. Professor Pape, we started thinking about doing a conversation like this after a series of what felt like extraordinary instances of political violence: the president's two assassination attempts and then Charlie Kirk's assassination. So we at The Daily have been talking to you in the background for some time now. And then there was another act of violence apparently directed at the Trump administration, and so we thought Now is the time. So thanks for being here. Thank you very much for having me. I wanna start with this theory that you have, which is that we are in an age of what you call violent populism. This is something you have a book coming out on, and you say that this violent populism represents a bigger risk to American democracy than anything else. No terrorist group or foreign country comes close in your eyes. So first of all, What is violent populism and why is it such a risk?

The most important fact about political violence in America today is this: tens of millions of Americans on both sides of the aisle see political violence as acceptable. And once you have tens of millions of Americans, not a fringe, not a few militia groups who see violence as acceptable, this changes everything about the risks of attack. It makes the individuals who are volatile for their own psychosocial reasons, it pushes those volatile individuals over the edge because what they see is the prospect of social approval for their acts. And when you have tens of millions of Americans who support political violence, it makes tips to the FBI very, very difficult to get because the more support there is for political violence, the more people will simply look the other way. They'll discount what they see. And this is what I mean by the era of violent populism, which is once we have tens of millions of Americans supporting political violence for their own causes, this can then create spirals. You can see it on the debate. Is this a mostly right-wing phenomenon, a left-wing phenomenon? Well, we have all the cases here, and the cases are— let me just go over the last 12 months.

So we saw in June 2025 the assassination murder of a Democratic leader in Minnesota. You saw the assassination murder of Charlie Kirk a few months later. We also have Governor Shapiro in Pennsylvania. We of course have multiple President Trump assassination attempts. So what you are seeing is clearly the rise of political violence on both sides. But the really important thing to say about this is not just that it's rising on both sides, but it's now starting to spiral.

If I understand what you're saying, it's not just the violent people who are implicated in this, it's the broader social acceptance that they are finding in a significant portion of American society. So it's not just them, it's many of the rest of us. In a way, this acceptance, you're saying, fuels the violence itself.

That's exactly right. And we have conducted 20 nationally represented surveys of Americans over the last 5 years. We conduct them at the University of Chicago Project on Security and Threats, and we started doing it in the summer of 2021. And then, uh, the most recent one was in the end of January of this year. So we understand quite a bit about the the attitudes of Americans on political violence.

And just to say very clearly what that data shows, the social acceptance of political violence is up by how much exactly? Lay out what we know.

So for most of the years of the Biden administration, so this would be from say 2021 to the end of the Biden administration, our surveys found 10% of the body politics supported political violence to restore Donald Trump. To the presidency. And then we did focus groups and we did further survey research. What do people think they mean by the use of force? And what we found is 55% of the people who say the use of force is justified think that use of force means assassination. Oh, wow.

So half of that 10% at that point of the body politic endorsed assassination, which is honestly surprising to me. What is that percentage now?

It's roughly double. It's now between 14% and 21%. Wow. So what you saw is almost immediately after the election of President Trump is that doubled, and it has stayed that high. It has not gone down. Another example of this is we asked a key question in September 2025. Do you find it acceptable that Charlie Kirk was assassinated? Do you find it acceptable that Nancy Pelosi had the attempted assassination?

And what was the result?

It was 10% for each, 10% for each, which means 20 million American adults found that acceptable on each side.

Overall, what you're saying is roughly 1 in 5 people in America support some kind of political violence now, which is a lot, and it's increasing on both sides of the spectrum. Professor Pape, how does this moment in political violence stack up against other periods where we saw this kind of violence in spades? I'm thinking of the '60s and '70s, for example.

We have had other periods of violent populism in America. I call this the period of violent populism because it's not civil war where we don't have organized armies going at each other. That's not the era we're living in. And it's also not the era of just nasty politics as usual, which we've had in our country for decades and decades. This era of violent populism can be documented starting about 10 years ago, and we've had previous eras of violent populism. That look quite similar to this. Mm. In the 1920s, after World War I, you saw the rise of the second Ku Klux Klan, which had been dormant for decades, grew from a few hundred thousand to 4 to 6 million members. Those members paid dues. We have records. We know that this was not just simply in the South. This was in many places in the North. And what you saw was again, millions of Americans supporting political violence. The 1960s is another example. And in the 1960s, you have a string of political assassinations. You also have collective political violence. You have political riots happening in a number of cities. That's the Chicago convention in 1968.

Right. And we have opinion poll data from the '60s and similar to today, there is really a striking correspondence of support by tens of millions of Americans for that political violence itself. So what's different about our era today is not just that this is not the first time we've had millions of Americans supporting political violence, it is pretty much the first time it's happened on both sides at the same time. Okay. That's another distinctive feature about what's occurring in our current period compared to the '60s '60s, which was mostly from the left, and the early '20s, which was mostly from the right.

Okay. Can you characterize the rise in political violence that we've seen recently, like with numbers? How do we measure that? What do we know about the extent of it?

We have a variety of databases. We have the FBI databases. And then we did a study at CPOST, the University of Chicago Project on Security and Threats, of threats to members of Congress over a 25-year period. Okay. 2001 to 2024. And this was important because these were threats that were prosecuted by the Department of Justice. We found that starting in the first year of Trump's presidency in 2017, a fivefold increase in threats to members of Congress. Wow. And we found that increase happened to Democratic targets and Republican targets. And once you kind of peel down and get inside some of their motives, you see that Trump's rise was a lightning rod on both sides. There are members of Congress targeted because they support Trump's agenda too much, say Marjorie Taylor Greene. There are members of Congress who are targeted because they're not supporting President Trump's agenda enough. So you actually end up with a dramatic spike up and it stays up at that level year after year after year, about an 8-year period during the first Trump presidency and the Biden presidency. So you might think it would just diminish because we've had a change of president.

No. And that is indicative of there's more going on than just simply a person, President Trump. Right.

And I want to get to that because it does seem as though this period of time that you're zeroing in on was a catalyst a catalyst for a rise in political violence, but interestingly, not a catalyst just exclusively for one side or the other, but for both. So I want to understand that question of why, generally speaking, why does this kind of violence ramp up?

What we are seeing at bottom is not simply the impact of an individual, a president, although President Trump is contributing, not simply the impact of social media, although social media is contributing. We're seeing the impact of social change. And social change, major social change, when it happens in a country, is a cause of the radicalization of politics, which can cause political violence. Now, what is the major social change happening in the United States today? Exactly. There are actually two. The first and most dominant social change is, for the first time in our country's 250-year history, we are transitioning from a white-majority democracy to a white-minority democracy. Mm-hmm. That has never happened in our country's 250-year history. In, say, 1960, about 88% of Americans were non-Hispanic whites. Today, that is 57% of Americans. A big change. In about 20 years, it'll be 49%. And what has been one of the big reasons for this is, of course, immigration. So no surprise that as we are now in what I call the tipping point generation for transitioning from the white majority to the white minority democracy, the 20-year period where that's going to happen, immigration is probably the number one lightning rod issue in America today.

And that's true on both the right and the left. And let me just explain on the right. When you have this major social change, you are going to see essentially the established group wanting to stop or reverse that change because as that change happens, they will lose political power. That will mean declining economic prospects that will have lots of impact going forward for generations. Now, on the other side, lots of the new group very much wants to keep this change going. They're in fact going to benefit from this change and they want, if anything, not to stop it, but to accelerate it. So you have the lightning rod issue of demographic change directly fueling the support for political violence. And you see this in our surveys.

Right. Basically, this huge upheaval on this level of demographic change that we're seeing, it scrambles things on all sides. It's just too big of a shift to not have an impact. What's the secondary big change that you were saying matters?

Side by side with the demographic shift is a shift of wealth to the top 1%, which starts in the mid-1980s. It doesn't matter which party is in power. Wealth is being shifted from the bottom 90% to the top 1%. So if you're in the 91st to 99th%, you don't see much of a change. But if you're in the top 1%, you are gaining enormous wealth from the country, and it's coming out of the entire bottom 90% pretty much evenly at the different quintiles. And so what that means is as political power is changing with the changing demographics, both the Republican side and the Democratic side, because they're the bottom 90%, they really see their economic prospects could be clobbered even more. And part of the big reason for this is nobody's solving the shift of wealth to the top 1%. Neither party has taken that on. And that is an additional fuel to the bipartisan nature of the rise of political violence.

What you're really talking about is a shift in power and influence for certain people and, and for many people on a really large scale, seeing their future prospects change and a sense that they're losing power.

That's exactly right, Natalie. Another way to put it is we often think of the support for political violence among the losers of society, those marginal people that have little to lose, so they take a fling at political violence somehow. This is not the case in our surveys. What you're seeing is large numbers of educated people, large numbers of middle-class people, large numbers of upper middle class on both sides are supporting political violence because they're the haves and they're worried they're going to lose even more in the future.

That's interesting. You're saying basically that the people who are committing some of these acts are not necessarily the people who are in the worst position, but the people who might have the most to lose, who could see their stature decline the most, the fastest. That's right. Here's what may seem like a naive question, Professor. Why would those people, the people who might live in a suburb next to you, who have a lot to lose, who might be educated, who have means, why would they resort to violence? Wouldn't they have all kinds of other ways to influence things? Like, I think we think of violence as a last resort for people who have no other options. So why is this kind of a profile looking and turning to means that you might associate with someone who has absolutely nothing left?

00:17:55

The key fear that we found was the fear of political exclusion. Where as they became a minority, they couldn't get their grievances, they couldn't get their interests through politics. And by the way, this is happening on both sides. And you see that there is real concern that with President Trump as now the president, and he himself is talking about seizing voting machines now, what that is, is creating the fear of lockout among Democrats. Once you're in the transitional 10, 20-year period, Both sides can fear political lockout, and then they're gonna fight even harder because this means this may be their last chance before it's irreversible.

It does seem like this is a commentary on the political system as it exists right now, and the reality that both parties aren't making people feel like change through politics is actually possible, or at least a lot of people feel that way, and that, that fear for certain people is existential. They feel that they'll be, you said, locked out, that there soon will be no other way for them to be heard. That's right.

Again, I want to be careful and not paint all Republicans in this picture and all Democrats, but again, it's tens of millions of Republicans and tens of millions of Democrats, so it's not a tiny number. What you are seeing here is an existential concern. They are treating politics now not as a policy dispute, not as a minor dispute here about whether Social Security should be taxed at 6%, 7%, 8%. We're way beyond that. And this is why it's not just simply polarization. What we are seeing is the rise of true existential politics. And what that is doing is it's occurring on both sides. And it's because of this generational period we're going through. This 20-year tipping point. And this is really the danger zone of violent populism. And we are now coming up to a pivotal midterm election. And this election, I believe, in the midterms in November, will probably be the most dangerous election in our lifetime.

We'll be right back.

00:20:33

My name's Hannah Dreier. I'm an investigative reporter at The New York Times. So much of my process is challenging my own assumptions and trying to uncover new information that often goes against what I thought I would find. All of my The best reporting comes from going out, seeing something, and realizing, "Oh, that's actually the story." And that reporting helps readers challenge their own assumptions and come to new conclusions for themselves. This kind of journalism takes resources. It takes a lot of time. It takes a lot of reporting trips. If you believe that that kind of work is important, you can support it by subscribing to The New York Times.

00:21:21

Okay, so I get that there's a lot of people in this country that don't like what's happening. They feel profoundly powerless. But obviously that feeling doesn't automatically translate into going out and killing people. The vast majority of pissed-off people do not go out and commit acts of violence against politicians, and never would. So how does it get there? How do you go from feeling powerless to getting to the point where you would commit an act like this?

Well, we need to understand we've left out that it does matter what our leaders say. When political leaders talk about literally punching people out— and Donald Trump has famously done this—

laughing, like to punch him in the face, I'll tell you.

And I'm not really trying to pick on folks, but if you will just go back to last August and see some of the videos of Beto O'Rourke— instead of awaiting the other side to punch us in the face, we throw that punch first. And we throw it harder. I think Democrats— and Gavin Newsom— I'm putting a mirror up to President Trump and I'm fighting fire with fire and I'm punching a bully back in the mouth. It's not quite exactly the same as Donald Trump, but you'll see that as they're trying to demonstrate to their constituencies they will fight, they are coming quite close to President Trump's images of actually hitting people. And this is very important because Our leaders really are authority figures. And so if those authority figures start to find violence acceptable, and again, they may not even fully understand that they're doing that, others are going to, are going to hear that and they're going to move in that direction as well.

Okay. I want to dig deeper into that rhetoric question and how that actually translates. You know, how do you get from rhetoric to violence? It sounds like you're saying there are certain people who can be nudged into violence by the environment and the words, the messages that they're receiving.

Now, I want to be very careful here. Don't think of these as iron laws. Think of these as risk factors and the tendencies in the data. But what you see is that there are individuals, and you can actually see them in the survey research, who are predisposed to be angry and predisposed to act out impulsively. And then it is disproportionately that portion of those folks who are already angry, already impulsive, who are far more likely to be activated.

You're focusing here on top-down rhetoric as something that can cause, can push an already predisposed person toward violence. Isn't there also a kind of bottom-up rhetoric? Rhetoric that plays a role here? I mean, you've heard about these attackers living in these online communities where some of these acts are cheered on. You don't even have to go that deep on the internet to see some of this stuff. I mean, after the UnitedHealthcare CEO, for example, was killed, people were openly celebrating and lionizing the shooter on X. So I'm wondering what you make of that, what role that bottom-up language and discussion has in all this.

So social media is making things worse. It's adding gasoline to a fire, but it's not the fire itself. Okay. But it is important because what you see is social media is the immediate manifestation of those tens of millions of Americans who are supporting political violence because many of them are on social media and you can then see in the different ways they react. And a good example of how this works is it can interact with a top-down. So just pick The Pelosi attack is just one to give you the example. So with the Pelosi attack, shortly thereafter, Donald Trump Jr. made fun of the attack. It was near Halloween. And so he made a social media post about how he was going to have the costume here. And it was basically the hammer and so forth that the attacker used on Paul Pelosi. And that generated enormous social media support, lots of laughter. And what you saw is an interaction demonstration effect here. And so then future would-be attackers can see that, and that is how you end up with this confidence in social approval. Now, just also to be clear, in the 1960s, we didn't have any social media, and we had plenty of political violence and tens of millions of people supporting it.

In the 1920s, we didn't have social media, and we barely had radio and television, and nonetheless, We got enormous support for political violence. So I don't want to overread this as if it's everything is just about the internet. We tend to dodge the actual core issues of the social change, and then we tend to focus on things that we are just a little more comfortable, I guess I would say, to focus on, as if, if we simply solve that one problem, everything would be okay. No. You're pointing to the accelerants, but they are not the absolute fire itself.

You talked about a relatively small group of volatile people who commit this kind of violence. I guess I'm curious if you think this broad support for political violence means that that pool of volatile people may be growing. Like, are more of us vulnerable to violence than before? Is there a vicious cycle thing happening here.

I do believe that's true. It's a little more difficult to document with great precision, but I do believe that we see that as the pool of supporters for political violence grows, the individuals who are the volatile individuals are coming from that pool as well. And what you are seeing is a wider range of biographical backgrounds, and that matches then the wider range of supporters of political violence in general in the body politic. Where we really drilled into this was we analyzed the early profile of the January 6th attackers, those who broke into the Capitol, compared to who committed political violence on the right from FBI data going back the previous several decades. And what we found is a markedly different profile. Huh. What we found is that the old profile of those who would commit lethal right-wing violence was people who were unemployed, members of militia groups. They were basically the French. And what we found was in the first hundreds of people who were arrested after January 6th, that profile looked nothing like that. Fascinating. The profile was very different. They were unemployed only to the average of the country as a whole, 7%.

They were business owners, doctors, lawyers, CEOs. That's the profile. Think of it as insurrectionists in a business suit living in a nice suburb right next to you. And only about 10% were members of militia groups, not 50% as we had found before. So what we saw was a completely different profile. And the more we added to the database, the more it went from a few hundred to 1,575, the more the profile stayed the same. It did not shift as more people were arrested. And it's important to understand because otherwise you're going to look for the shooters in the wrong place. So this is why it's so important to get the profile. Profile's right. Yeah.

You're pointing to what's been a persistent misunderstanding of who these violent people actually are now, and the idea that we have trouble seeing that this profile has actually changed. I wonder how you explain that change. Why has it changed?

Here's how I explain it, Natalie. We like our monsters to be villains that are far away from us. It's comforting to think that the monsters among us who might actually commit these awful acts of political assassination and murder, we like to imagine they're not very close to us. They're far away. They're distant. Human beings want comfort. They want the idea that what happened today will never happen again and will surely never happen to them. It's just very far away from them. And so that's why these these false narratives of who the profile is. They emerge and they're popular because they want to have that assurance. And so that's really the, the taproot of this.

It sounds like at the heart of what you're saying is we shouldn't be surprised that political violence is up on all sides of the political spectrum and from a different kind of profile of an attacker, just given the environment, the rhetoric, from both the top and from the bottom. So what do you think is the best way of reaching these people who might commit violent acts or changing their calculus? Are you saying the best way of dealing with this is that as a culture and political leaders in particular, we just need to tone down the rhetoric?

00:30:51

Uh, no, I'm saying that we need to address this in two stages. And that is in the longer term after the midterms, we need to really address these social changes. We don't want to stop the social change of demographic change occurring in the country, but it would be a wise thing to slow it down so our political institutions can catch up. And that would mean, just to be very clear, that would mean essentially adopting Obama-era immigration policies. The second thing is I think we should be reducing the wealth shift and not just stopping it and not just certainly continuing it to the top 1%. And that's just not happening by either party. Both parties are essentially giving money to their donors, and that's just going on and on, and it's not changing. And we need to be upfront about that. Now, those are longer-term changes though. Between now and the midterms, you're not changing either of those two policies. So what do we do between now and the midterms? The only policies we really have at our disposal over the next few months are changes here with our leaders. Our leaders are the only real source we have to diminish the spirals of violence that are now occurring.

I think it would be a very good idea to do something radical, and this would be Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic leader in the House, to reach out to Donald Trump and say, could there be a joint video, uh, statement by the two leaders condemning political violence on all sides?

Can I just push and ask if that really works? Like, if it's worked in the past? Because, I mean, if Hakeem Jeffries and Mike Johnson come out and say, "Look, this is bad on all sides," I just wonder if that would really change the calculus for a very online person who is, you know, watching the outpouring of support for a shooter who kills the CEO of UnitedHealthcare. I mean, if you feel like the elected leaders in this country don't address it, address your concerns or really care what you say, does it matter the message they give you?

The best evidence that we have that this rhetoric that I'm giving will matter is in the summer of 2024 with the first Trump assassination attempt. The next day, Joe Biden gave a speech from the Oval Office on a Sunday with exactly these lines in it, this rhetoric that I'm explaining. And then as we tracked our surveys, The support for political violence, the next time we did the survey a couple months later, actually did come down 20% across the board in the country. Hmm. Then in September, you'll remember there was the second attempt on President Trump at the golf course. And again, we saw the rhetoric by President Biden, this time joined by candidate Kamala Harris, the very same rhetoric of bringing it down across all sides. And then what we saw is it went down again a few months later. I can't say it was I don't know if it was the only cause, but it was the effective thing to do. It certainly didn't make anything worse.

00:34:04

Given that the political leaders in this country at this moment are not actually solving the structural issues that you've pointed to as drivers of this violence, I wonder if when you think of these people who are committing these acts, it seems as though they feel they have no recourse. At this moment, that these issues, they're existential, some of them, and that this is the only thing they have left to do. And I wonder how we should interpret that impulse right now, given everything you've told us.

The big message for the country is to understand that even with all these structural determinants, even with all these pressures, The future of political violence is a choice. Hmm. We can choose to ignore all these structural pressures, or we can choose to understand them and then to move forward. And what would it mean to move forward? Well, we've been focusing on the tens of millions on one side or the other who support political violence, but we need to understand there are 75% of the population in the United States that abhors political violence. And that comes in every one of our surveys, right? 75%. They need to exert some agency. They need to complain about political violence. They need to send letters to their senators, their congressmen, their mayors, the president of the United States. They need to send letters to It is high time that we have Democratic and Republican leaders jointly condemning political violence. That is a voice that's not been heard. Hmm. So for the last period of this interview, we've focused on so much of the problem, but there is a core anchor that we need to lean into that we're simply not we're not leaning into.

We can have a better future. It is a choice, but it's a choice that we the people have to make, and it's we the 75% have to make, because that is the country and that is our future, right?

I think people may think the only way to participate in public discourse is to be firmly on one side or the other, and what you're saying is Aversion of participation is to just go out and assert that you oppose violence for any reason, and that that is the majority of Americans.

That is exactly right. Leaders listen to their constituents. So if all they're getting is emails from their constituents, go hit the other side harder and harder, that's literally all that's in their inbox. No surprise, that's what they say. Hey, but if they hear from their constituents, and I'm saying 75% of the constituents of Republicans, of Democrats, they abhor political violence. Those constituents need to step up to the moment as well. They need to make a choice. Is it worth it to take the time to send those emails and make those phone calls to their representatives because that actually is what gets the representatives to move.

Well, Professor Pape, thank you so much for coming on the show. We really appreciate it. Thank you very much for having me. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. [Speaker:REPORTER] On Sunday, President Trump said that the U.S. would launch a new effort to help guide stranded ships through the Strait of Hormuz in what was essentially a direct challenge to Iran. The president didn't offer any details about how exactly that initiative would work, but he said any interference in it would be dealt with forcefully. The announcement came after the president suggested that he would likely reduce reject Iran's latest proposal in the negotiations aimed at ending the war, which are at an impasse. Earlier in the weekend, Trump told reporters that military strikes on Iran could possibly resume, and a senior Iranian general said there could be renewed confrontation between the two countries. Asta Chaturvedi, Jack DeSidero, Nina Feldman, and Rachelle Bonja, with help from Carlos Peredo and Shannon Lin. It was edited by MJ Davis Lin and Paige Cowett, with help from Brendan Klinkenberg. Research help by Susan Lee. And contains music by Dan Powell, Rowan Nimisto, and Marian Lozano.

Our theme music is by Wonderly. This episode was engineered by Alyssa Moxley. That's it for The Daily. I'm Natalie Kitroeff. See you tomorrow.