A cluster of high-profile political attacks in the U.S. spotlight the nation's extreme divisions—but they don't necessarily signal a broader uptick in politically inspired brutality, experts say.
Politicians, pundits and ordinary Americans are increasingly worried about political violence. The latest round of concern was sparked on April 25, when a 31-year-old man stormed the Washington Hilton hotel in Washington, D.C., during the annual White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, where President Donald Trump was in attendance. Secret Service agents arrested the armed man before he could get to the ballroom where the event was being held. He has since been charged with attempted assassination of the president—which would represent the third serious attempt on Trump’s life since 2024. The man has pled not guilty to this and related charges.
The alleged assassination attempt follows a string of other political attacks in 2025: an arson attack on Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro; the murder of Minnesota legislator Melissa Hortman and her husband; and the assassination of Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk. This spree has created a shared sense that political violence is on the rise.
On supporting science journalism
If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.
In a 2025 Pew Research Center poll conducted after Kirk’s assassination, 85 percent of respondents said they believed political violence was increasing in the U.S.—largely because of partisan rhetoric, polarization and an “unwillingness” to engage with others who hold different views. Yet according to some researchers studying political violence, it’s unclear whether recent attacks constitute a new era of political violence. And understanding the motivations for these attacks can be challenging—which makes studying these trends difficult, experts say.
The attacks are “troubling” and may warrant a review of how to best protect the president, says Joseph Young, a professor at the University of Kentucky, who studies political violence. “But it doesn't suggest this bigger issue that we’re descending into civil conflict or something.”
“It’s certainly discomforting to see the assassination attempts that have occurred in the past 18 months, but it is also the case that this is a relatively calm part of American history,” adds Sean Westwood, an associate professor of government at Dartmouth College. “We have a bit of myopia when we look at political violence in this country.”
U.S. history is marked by political conflict
The history of the U.S. is littered with acts of political violence. For example, during the late 1800s and early 1900s, multiple presidents—Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield and William McKinley—were assassinated. The 1960s and 1970s saw the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., Robert F. Kennedy, Harvey Milk and others, as well as hundreds of bombings by radical political groups such as the Weather Underground.
In 1970 alone, there were more than 120 “incidents” of political violence—such as assaults, assassinations and bombings—according to Dartmouth’s Polarization Research Lab, which tracks political violence in the U.S. Last year there were 10 such incidents.
“We should have concerns about how politics is practiced in the U.S., but it would be a profound mistake to say, based on a limited number of incidents, that we are now in a new violent era,” Westwood says. “We just can’t say definitively.”
And while there are ebbs and flows of political violence over the course of American history, he adds, it’s difficult to say for sure what caused them.
The challenges of studying political violence
Part of the difficulty in tracking political violence is that it’s not always clear what motivated the perpetrators. For example, some of the individuals who were involved in political attacks in recent years were not registered to vote and gave scant reasoning for their behavior, Westwood says. In the case of the Correspondents’ Association dinner, the attacker allegedly left a note that laid out a plan to target Trump administration officials, “but that's the exception, not the rule,” Westwood says.
There are known “risk factors” that influence violent actors’ behavior, but “there’s not a unique profile or pathway of people into political violence,” says Thomas Zeitzoff, a professor in the School of Public Affairs at American University and author of the book, Nasty Politics: The Logic of Insults, Threats, and Incitement. “There are a lot of people who hold maybe radical beliefs, but very few people actually act on them.”
After a violent incident, researchers may attempt to map an attacker’s path toward radicalization. “But from a methods standpoint, that’s not ideal,” Zeitzoff says, because it limits research to people who’ve already committed a crime—a form of selection bias. “It’s like, ‘Well, they all drank water. So they must have been involved in some water conspiracy, right?’” Without a control group, a study is unlikely to reveal which factors in someone’s life led them to act.
Political violence is also relatively rare, meaning small sample sizes, Zeitzoff says. People involved in extremist groups or ideology may also be hesitant to talk to researchers or might lie about their motivations.
Why the recent cluster of political attacks may feel different
A key difference between today’s attacks and violent periods of the past is visibility, in large part thanks to social media. In the aftermath of Kirk’s killing, for instance, high-resolution footage of the assassination collected millions of views online, alarming public health experts.
Political rhetoric is also “a lot more heated” now than it was in the recent past, Zeitzoff says, reaching a fervor not seen since perhaps since the lead-up to the Civil War. “Republicans and Democrats definitely have more antipathy toward the other party, and there’s stronger partisan identification. But the idea that this has increased support for violence—I haven't seen compelling data that has shown that that’s the case,” he says.
Recent polling on Americans’ support for politically motivated violence is mixed. One 2024 survey, for instance, found that 22 percent of Democrats said they found the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson to be at least “somewhat acceptable.” But in a 2022 analysis of a series of surveys that involved a total of nearly 5,000 people, Westwood and his colleagues found that only a small portion of respondents, about 3 percent, supported partisan violence, with “nearly all respondents” saying perpetrators should be criminally charged for their actions.
In the days after the first Trump assassination attempt in 2024, a study by Westwood and his colleagues showed, Republicans became less supportive of political attacks on Democrats. “Despite the ills of modern political conflict, extreme partisan violence did not cause an immediate upsurge in support for violence,” Westwood and his co-authors wrote.
Ultimately, Westwood is still optimistic about the U.S.’s future. “We’ve gone through very tumultuous periods in our past. It would be a mistake to say that an isolated event or series of events is the end of the Republic,” he says. “America is surprisingly resilient. We’ve weathered far worse, and I think that we’ll survive this, too.”
