The numbers on US political violence

Today, Explained newsletterThe numbers on US political violenceAmerica has a political violence problem, and it’s getting worse.by Caitlin DeweyApr 28, 2026, 11:00 AM UTCShareGiftAn FBI tactical team prepares to enter a house associated with the suspected White House Correspondents’ Dinner shooter in Torrance, California. Patrick T. Fallon/AFP via Getty ImagesCaitlin Dewey is a senior writer and editor at Vox, where she helms the Today, Explained newsletter.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 violencePolitical 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…

This excerpt is published under fair use for community discussion. Read the full article at Vox.