by Brian C. Joondeph
When political opponents become existential threats, violence can begin to look like virtue.
America traditionally has had a rather simple method for dealing with politicians we don’t like.
We vote against them.
We argue, campaign, write letters, give speeches, hold rallies, donate money, put obnoxious signs in our yards, and ultimately go to the ballot box.
What we don’t do is shoot them.
Or at least that used to be the understanding.
Some disturbing new polling suggests that boundary is eroding. The Overton Window on political disagreement is shifting.
Image generated by ChatGPT
University of Chicago political scientist Robert Pape, director of the Chicago Project on Security and Threats, recently described new survey results indicating that 25 percent of American adults support “the use of force to prevent President Trump from being president.” Among self-identified Democrats, the share was an astonishing 44 percent.me tiny collection of basement-dwelling extremists.
It is nearly half of Democrats surveyed.
And what exactly does “force” mean?
Pape says his research group has explored that question through focus groups and survey experiments. Among those endorsing force against Trump, he says 55 percent understood it to include assassinating the president with a rifle, as in the attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania.
We are a long way from disagreeing about marginal tax rates or military budgets.
Political violence should be unacceptable regardless of whose fist, rifle, Molotov cocktail, or government bayonet is involved.
But the extraordinary growth in support for force specifically to remove Donald Trump raises another question.
How did we get here?
Perhaps part of the answer is hiding in plain sight.
For years Americans have been told that Donald Trump isn’t merely a bad president or a politician with bad ideas. He has been compared repeatedly to Adolf Hitler and his rhetoric to that of Nazi Germany, as in this example from The Atlantic.
The Biden campaign even published a 2023 graphic titled “TRUMP PARROTS HITLER.” Democratic politicians and political organizations have made similar comparisons, and Kamala Harris publicly agreed during the 2024 campaign that Trump could be described as a fascist.
Those are not ordinary political insults.
Hitler isn’t remembered as a German politician with whom reasonable people merely disagreed over fiscal policy. He represents one of history’s great embodiments of evil, responsible for a regime that murdered millions.
That distinction matters.
There is a well-known historical thought experiment: If you could travel back in time and kill Hitler before he came to power, would you do it?
Most people recognize it as an interesting moral conundrum, complete with all the problems inherent in rewriting history. Kill Hitler, and perhaps Joseph Goebbels, Heinrich Himmler, or someone else takes his place.
But what happens when the hypothetical becomes part of contemporary politics?
If someone genuinely accepts the proposition that Donald Trump is another Hitler, the next logical question is uncomfortable.
If killing Hitler would have been justified, why wouldn’t killing the next Hitler be as well?
Most Americans who hear Trump compared to Hitler recognize political hyperbole when they hear it. But not everyone thinks abstractly or recognizes rhetorical exaggeration.
Among hundreds of millions of Americans, there will be unstable, obsessive, angry, or simply fanatical individuals who take the comparison literally.
Political rhetoric doesn’t pull a trigger.
But rhetoric can help create a moral framework in which someone decides that pulling the trigger is righteous and necessary.
And America has already had a glimpse of where that road leads.
In 2024, Trump survived an assassin’s bullet in Butler by millimeters. Another man was subsequently arrested after positioning himself with a rifle near Trump’s golf course.
Then Charlie Kirk was assassinated.
What followed his murder was almost as disturbing as the murder itself. People celebrated it online, sharing jokes and memes about his death, and even events were advertised around the first anniversary that mocked his assassination.
Think about what that means.
A husband and father was murdered because someone apparently hated what he represented politically, and for some Americans, the appropriate response was amusement.
Then there is Luigi Mangione, who is accused of murdering UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.
One needn’t defend the American health insurance industry to recognize that assassinating insurance executives is not legitimate consumer advocacy.
Yet Mangione became something of a folk hero. A Generation Lab survey of college students found that 45 percent sympathized more with Mangione than with Thompson, while 48 percent considered Thompson’s killing totally or somewhat justified.
That is not normal.
Or at least it shouldn’t be.
Modern culture has also cheapened life.
Canadian euthanasia, euphemistically known as Medical Assistance in Dying, now accounts for one in twenty deaths in Canada.
Full-term abortion is now legal in nine U.S. states.
Then there is Lindsay Clancy, who demonstrates that killing your children is O.K. under the right circumstances.
Once murder becomes acceptable because the victim represents something we despise or is a burden, we have crossed an important line. Today it is an insurance executive. Tomorrow, it is a conservative activist. The day after, it is a president.
And where exactly does the principle stop?
If force is justified to prevent Trump from governing, what about his cabinet secretaries?
Members of Congress who vote for his agenda?
Judges who uphold administration policies?
Political appointees?
People serving on federal advisory committees?
Trump voters themselves?
That last possibility isn’t entirely theoretical. In 2024, Democratic congressional candidate Paula Collins spoke about the need to “re-educate” Trump supporters and acknowledged that what she described sounded like “a re-education camp.”
She later said she was referring to civic education, but perhaps the terminology itself should have raised alarm bells. We have heard such euphemisms before.
Nazi concentration camps were called “protective custody camps” intended to usher in the "final solution."
History has ample experience with governments “reeducating” people whose political beliefs were deemed unacceptable.
None of it ended particularly well.
There is also an important distinction between political assassination and the government's deployment of military forces or the National Guard during civil unrest.
Presidents of both parties have used federal forces or federalized the National Guard during periods of severe disorder. Whether any particular deployment is constitutional, necessary, or excessive is a legitimate subject of debate.
It is categorically different from a private citizen deciding that a political opponent should die.
Democracy provides a remarkably effective pressure-release valve for political disagreement.
It is called an election.
You organize. You persuade. You nominate candidates. You make arguments. Your opponents make theirs.
Then voters decide.
Sometimes your side wins. Sometimes it loses.
The losing side doesn’t get to substitute a rifle for a ballot.
This is why casually equating political opponents with Nazis is so dangerous. Nazi and Hitler comparisons don’t merely say, “These people are wrong.”
They say something more profound: These people are evil, democracy may be incapable of stopping them, and therefore extraordinary measures may be justified.
Once that premise is accepted, political violence no longer appears as political violence.
It begins to look like heroism.
That may help explain the troubling numbers Pape is finding.
There is plenty of hypocrisy surrounding this issue. Each political tribe tends to notice violence committed by the other while finding elaborate explanations for violence associated with its own side.
Republicans should condemn political violence from their side without qualification. Democrats should do precisely the same.
But 44 percent is not a fringe.
It is a warning.
America has survived bitter elections, terrible presidents, unpopular wars, riots, assassinations, economic depressions, and a civil war. Our political system survives only because enough people continue to accept one basic bargain:
We resolve our political differences through persuasion and elections rather than by violence.
Break that bargain, and there is no obvious stopping point.
If an assassin gets to decide that the voters made the wrong choice, elections become meaningless.
And if we ever reach the point where killing political opponents is deemed an acceptable form of political expression, the question will no longer be whether American democracy is in danger.
It will be what replaces it.
Follow Brian: Twitter @retinaldoctor
Brian C. Joondeph, M.D., is a Colorado-based ophthalmologist who writes frequently about medicine, science, and public policy.
Source: https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2026/10/when-political-violence-becomes-acceptable/
Follow Middle East and Terrorism on Twitter
