It’s not a good sign when you’re getting used to assassination attempts on your president. Yet here we are: in under two years, Donald Trump has cheated death three times, most recently during the White House Correspondents’ Dinner last Saturday. Corey Comperatore, who took the bullet intended for him back in July 2024, was not so fortunate. Nor, of course, was Charlie Kirk — or Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare.

These attacks follow a broader trend in American life. In the aftermath of last weekend’s shooting, the White House lamented the rise of ideological attacks, while others noted that political violence appears to be increasing. According to a report last year from the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), domestic attacks and plots are at their highest levels in over 30 years and more than doubled in 2025. Not only that, but the extreme Left overtook the extreme Right in terms of the quantity of attacks perpetrated.

Given the great lengths that American institutions will go to in order to downplay violence from the Left, this is a significant admission. And yet nobody should be surprised. After almost a decade of hysterical rhetoric from the academic, political and media establishments, why wouldn’t you expect the occasional outraged citizen to take a shot at rapist pedophile Russian agent Hitler?

The US is a country with a long tradition of shooting at presidents. No fewer than four have been assassinated while in office, and several others have had near-misses. In 1912, Theodore Roosevelt was shot in the chest by a deranged saloonkeeper and only survived because his metal glasses case and the 50-page speech in his pocket blocked the bullet. In 1933, an unemployed bricklayer called Giuseppe Zangara yelled, “too many people are starving!” and fired six rounds at Franklin D. Roosevelt. In 1975, Gerald Ford survived two assassination attempts in a single month. Six years later, Ronald Reagan was almost murdered by a Jodie Foster superfan.

Meanwhile, between the late Sixties and early Eighties, America experienced a plague of political violence that makes today’s febrile climate look positively sedate in comparison. In Days of Rage, his study of the period, Bryan Burrough states that the FBI recorded 2,500 bombings in an 18-month period between 1971 and 1972. Indeed, bombings were so commonplace that the media stopped reporting on them.

These bombings were carried out by attackers from a range of ideologies. Of the numerous radical groups responsible for this wave of terror, the Weather Underground is the most celebrated. Emerging in the late Sixties, these upper-middle-class white boys and girls hated racism and fought the system by planting bombs in toilets in government buildings. FALN, the Puerto Rican independence group, was more lethal, killing six people and wounding many more. According to Burrough, fewer than 1% of these attacks ended in somebody’s death, although this is no consolation to those who died or were maimed in the bombings (or their relatives).

Eventually, the wave of violence burned itself out. Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, the leaders of the Weather Underground, yearned to return to their middle-class lives and eventually did. They were rewarded with jobs at prestigious institutions of higher learning after their decade-long LARP. Will today’s violence die out in the same way? That depends on whether the revolutionary cell or the lone gunman represents the true American tradition of political violence.

Although Ayers, Dohrn and their ilk had a good run, the barriers to running a revolutionary cell are high. You need to recruit and dominate like-minded people, forge documents, evade the police, and find a way to fund your bombs and your lifestyle. America, however, offers far from revolutionary conditions, so disappointment is constant.

On the other hand, self-radicalization has never been easier. You can boil your own brain online and, as the Left has a habit of lionizing its terrorists by rewarding them with sinecures, book deals or even sex-symbol status, the temptation to become a hero or martyr is clearly overwhelming. Thus, for as long as Trump is in charge at least, we can be assured the violence will continue.

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Daniel Kalder is an author based in Texas. Previously, he spent ten years living in the former Soviet bloc. His latest book, Dictator Literature, is published by Oneworld. He also writes on Substack: Thus Spake Daniel Kalder.

DanielKalder

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