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When a young man took a shot at Donald Trump in July it was the first time political assassination, attempted or otherwise, had intruded into presidential politics in more than 40 years. Now it appears to have happened a second time in two months. What’s going on here? It comes almost a week after Donald Trump and JD Vance began a campaign of racist anti-immigrant incitement focused on Springfield, Ohio, an effort so destructive and reckless that the Republican mayor and at least two of the three Republican County supervisors have either begged Trump to stop or publicly questioned whether they will even vote for him because they’re so upset about it. The city has been rocked over the last week by repeated bomb threats, school evacuations, the shuttering of one local college which has moved to remote study. This isn’t even counting the experience of Haitian migrants who are being terrorized by the pro-Trump extremists Trump and Vance have incited against them.
And yet, it’s Trump who seems to have been targeted by an almost belief-defying two assassination attempts in little more than two months. We’ve already discussed the case of Thomas Crooks, the shooter in the first attempt in July, who was himself killed by a Secret Service sharpshooter moments after opening fire. Crooks had a negligible political footprint — registered as a Republican, apparently making a single small-dollar donation to a Democrat-aligned get-out-the-vote group a few years earlier. The clearest through-line in Crooks’ life story is that he was into guns. Very into guns. The best theory of his crime — the one apparently adopted by FBI investigators — is that he was planning a “typical” mass shooting incident and then decided to make the Trump rally his venue when he found out Trump was coming to town. Whatever the specifics, it seems clear that Crooks’ motivation was that of a “typical” mass shooter, an angry and isolated young man’s desire to make his mark in a final, apocalyptic explosion of violence. Tying it to Donald Trump and presumably killing Donald Trump as part of it was simply a way to up the ante as opposed to achieve any specific political or ideological goal.
Now we have Ryan Routh, who current reporting suggests is what you might call a swing extremist. He apparently voted for Trump in 2016, then voted for Biden in 2020 and had been supporting Vivek Ramawamy in 2024. The biggest through-line in Routh’s story is one of mental instability and a tendency toward violence. In 2002 he was arrested after barricading himself in a building with a weapon in a standoff with police.
Republicans are now predictably demanding that Democrats in essence stop campaigning against Trump because they’re inciting their supporters to try to assassinate Trump. That’s absurd. Neither of these men is in any sense a supporter of Democrats or even of more marginal groups that could in any sense be identified with “the left.” But two men have seemingly tried to kill Trump in two months. In the first, that was clearly the intent. In the second, it seems highly likely to be the case, though it’s possible further investigation could complicate the picture. So what is happening? I think there are two levels on which to answer this.
Assassination attempts, like school shootings, mass shootings, even suicides in a small towns, are contagious. People already on the brink get the idea and then take the plunge themselves. One detail from the rapid review of Routh’s social media trail has him saying that Biden and Harris should visit the people who had been wounded in the Butler, PA assassination attempt since Trump never would. Unsurprisingly but clearly he was aware of that incident. And it focused his attention. I suspect yesterday’s incident never would have happened absent the shooting in Butler.
There’s precedent for this. On September 5th, 1975 a Charles Manson follower named Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme tried to shoot President Ford. She pointed a gun directly at Ford’s face when he was out in public before a Secret Service agent grabbed her arm and disarmed her. Two weeks later on September 22nd, 1975, Sara Jane Moore, an accountant and a divorced mother of four fired a .38 pistol at Ford but missed. Moore was on the radar of San Francisco police as a possible threat to Ford and had a history of psychiatric issues.
The Trump and Ford cases have an uncanny similarity. Moore seems to have been the more considered attempted assassin. (Fromme was a deranged cultist.) But whatever predisposition Moore may have had, it seems highly unlikely she would have taken the decisive step had Fromme not done so first. So political violence and attempted assassinations are in this sense contagious.
But on a broader level, Donald Trump is simply himself a source of unrest and conflagration. He’s a vortex of violence. His rhetoric is violent. He has friendly paramilitaries like the Proud Boys that he encourages to come to his aid. He was the one who incited a violent mob to storm the U.S. Capitol. He’s provoked numerous supporters to acts of mass violence, from Pittsburgh to El Paso. The mix of bomb threats and marches in Springfield over the last week are only the latest example.
His partisans now claim that Joe Biden’s or Kamala Harris’ rhetoric is inciting violence against him. And gullible reporters will no doubt go in for some of this. But it’s an argument that simply collapses under the weight of its own ridiculousness. The man is talking about himself. The most generous read of what Republicans are saying is that simply identifying what Trump either has done (tried to overturn the results of an election with violence) or says he will do (govern in a second term with quasi-dictatorial means) are too dangerous to say publicly. In other words, Trump’s own extremism, violence and anti-constitutional actions paradoxically and absurdly make it too dangerous to criticize him.
But we shouldn’t run too deep into the rabbit holes of Trump’s supporters’ logic. He is himself a vortex of instability and violence. As his supporters like to put it, he likes to “stir the pot.” And he does. Attention, in his vision, is the only real currency in business or politics or media. So he keeps upping the ante and pushing new limits to get it, like a heroin addict he has to keep upping the dose to get the same fix. The externalities of that behavior have been lapping up, splashing onto countless other people for almost a decade. Now they’re also splashing up onto him. Trump’s supporters ask rhetorically, if it’s not Biden and Harris who are doing it, are you really saying that Trump is inciting people against himself? The answer is actually yes. He’s now twice almost been consumed by the fires he himself is lighting.