The Escalating Political Violence Didn’t Come From Nowhere

A“manhunt” in Minnesota has concluded after the suspect in the horrific, targeted shootings of Democratic lawmakers Melissa Hortman and John Hoffman was arrested on Sunday evening. In the wake of this latest tragedy involving deadly political violence—Hortman and her husband were killed in their home, while Hoffman and his wife were injured—undeniable realities must be confronted, including the brazen amplifications of violence from the highest offices of government, the Supreme Court’s dubious obliviousness to its look-the-other-way approach to defending the rule of law, and a long-standing disregard for the safety and lives of those who support reproductive freedom.

Even as politicians condemned this tragedy in Minnesota, efforts to stem political violence from the White House ring hollow. Donald Trump issued a statement after the shootings, noting that this “will not be tolerated” and that the attorney general and FBI “are investigating the situation.” But just last week, the president was instigating violence against elected officials. He stated that it would be a “great thing” if California Governor Gavin Newsom—a Democrat—were arrested. When asked why, Trump said Newsom’s “primary crime is running for governor because he’s done such a bad job.” In other words, as Governor Newsom put it on social media, “Donald Trump admits he will arrest a sitting governor simply because he ran for office.” (This followed Trump’s Department of Justice indicting a sitting congresswoman from New Jersey, LaMonica McIver, for allegedly assaulting federal officers who were moving to arrest Newark Mayor Ras Baraka outside of an ICE jail in his district.)

It isn’t only the president’s disparaging remarks or rhetoric on Truth Social, where he has referred to the governor as “Gavin Newscum”; it’s also the weaponization of the Capitol rioters (all of whom he pardoned), white supremacists, and now the National Guard to carry out political agendas. In the same Truth Social post, Trump threatened, “IF THEY SPIT, WE WILL HIT.” Trump promised, “They will be hit harder than they have ever been hit before.”

Days later, California Senator Alex Padilla, the senior ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Immigration Subcommittee, was pushed to the ground, handcuffed, and shoved out of a room as Trump’s secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, held a press conference. According to Padilla, he was “exercising his duty to perform Congressional oversight…[and]…tried to ask the Secretary a question, and was forcibly removed by federal agents.” Noem responded that she didn’t know who he was.

To whatever extent it was true in the past that the United States is a nation devoted to freedom of expression in public affairs and government, press, and academia, it is now an open question. In an atmosphere that encourages political retribution and violence, seeks to silence disagreement and opposition at levels that reach the highest ranks in government, we should all be concerned.

In October 2024, Isabel Fattal and Stephanie Bai offered “A Brief History of Trump’s Violent Remarks” in The Atlantic. Among the comments they chronicled, “Trump said of former US representative Liz Cheney, ‘She’s a radical war hawk. Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, okay? Let’s see how she feels about it…when the guns are trained on her face.’” Months before losing the 2020 presidential election, perturbed by protests outside the White House, he queried, “Can’t you just shoot them? Just shoot them in the legs or something.” There has also been the disregard of others’ safety—most glaringly witnessed with the January 6 attack on the United States Capitol when, despite lawmakers inside, he failed to activate the National Guard.

As Fattal and Bai note, “according to testimony from Cassidy Hutchinson (who served as assistant to White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows during the Trump administration),” Trump showed utter disregard for the foreseeable consequences of allowing a massive crowd of armed rioters to storm the building and engage in violence. According to Hutchinson, Trump declared, “I don’t fucking care that they have weapons. They’re not here to hurt me.”

And, even before being elected to his first term in office, Donald Trump expressed wanting to punish women who have abortions. Later, he applauded and took credit for the Supreme Court justices that stripped away abortion rights—despite the cases of women who have died or are having to flee antiabortion states in order to preserve their health.

Americans are now socialized to this tone of violence from the White House, whether finding fault with victims of murder: After the killing of Heather Heyer and the injuring of many others in Charlottesville, Virginia, by white nationalists, Trump remarked that “you also had people that were very fine people on both sides.” Or suggesting that Gen. Mark Milley, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, should be executed for resisting Trump’s calls for violence against protesters, when he posted on Truth Social, “This is an act so egregious that, in times gone by, the punishment would have been DEATH.”

Clearly while political violence is not new, rarely have the flames been so irresponsibly stoked, fires carelessly lit, or accelerants mindlessly doused from within government—and from the highest office, no less. In fact, violent rhetoric has been so deeply socialized in American political consciousness that President Trump’s lawyers suggested before judicial bodies, including the United States Supreme Court, that he possessed the unencumbered legal authority to direct Navy Seals to assassinate political rivals.

Yet it’s not the amplification of political violence alone that must be acknowledged in the wake of this Minnesota tragedy but also the myriad ways in which the Supreme Court’s fingerprints are on the glass and seal of the broken window. The Supreme Court’s rulings dismantling abortion rights in Dobbs, and in the Trump criminal immunity case, Donald Trump v. United States, will prove to be a chronic blight on American democracy—a lingering, infected wound in the social, political, legal, and cultural fabric of the United States.

As Justice Sonia Sotomayor explained in her dissent in the Trump immunity case, the majority’s “decision…makes a mockery of the principle, foundational to our Constitution and system of Government, that no man is above the law” even when he is “desperate to stay in power.” Even more troubling, according to Sotomayor, is the court’s ruling that “a President’s use of any official power for any purpose, even the most corrupt, is immune from prosecution.” Justice Sotomayor warns, “That is just as bad as it sounds.”

But, it isn’t simply the court’s ruling in the immunity case; it’s also the court’s animosity toward abortion that has unleashed violence in the lives of women and girls, providing no safe harbor even for victims of rape and incest. Just as Plessy v. Ferguson inflamed racial animus and sparked “separate but equal” policies, so too has Dobbs opened the door to hostilities aimed at medical providers, clinics, politicians, and sadly patients. The Dobbs ruling meant that state lawmakers could—and did—enact the most barbaric laws stripping lifesaving health protections away from pregnant patients.

By stripping away federal protections for abortion, the court opened the door to a new “Jane Crow”—criminal punishments for miscarriages, deceased women’s wombs literally repurposed for involuntary reproductive servitude, women fleeing states with the support of new abortion networks, civilians serving as bounty hunters to track those that aid and abet in abortion, and a constant threat of terror.

The National Abortion Federation, which tracks incidents of violence against abortion clinics and providers, found in an April report that “there has been sustained and consistent harassment and violence…even as clinics closed and abortion became harder to access in some regions.” Rather than strengthen the protections of the federal Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, Trump moved to limit its enforcement while pardoning nearly two dozen people who had been convicted under the law.

In the days to come, the Minnesota murders may be obscured by other threats of political violence. It will likely be treated as the isolated cruelty of a lone, unstable Minnesota man. Buried will be the violence he targeted at lawmakers “outspoken in favor of abortion rights” and a climate in American politics that increasingly places a target on the backs of those that care about reproductive freedom and women’s equality.