Some of the reaction to the murders of Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark took on a tone of both urgency and weariness.Ellen Schmidt/Reuters
Within hours of the assassination of one Minnesota legislator and her husband, and the attempted assassination of another, Donald Trump condemned the shootings. “Such horrific violence will not be tolerated in the United States of America,” the President declared on Truth Social.
Mr. Trump is well aware of how quickly a politician can come face to face with an attack. During his presidential campaign last year, he was shot in the ear during a rally in Pennsylvania and came within 500 metres of another alleged assassin on a Florida golf course.
Conversely, one of his first acts on returning to the White House was to pardon more than 1,500 people convicted over the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, during which his supporters attempted to hunt down then-vice president Mike Pence and House speaker Nancy Pelosi.
That the sitting President has so much experience with political violence is just one manifestation of how common it has become in the U.S.
In the past two months alone, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro and his family had to flee in the middle of the night after a man set fire to their house; two Israeli embassy staffers in Washington were shot dead in the street; and a man in Boulder, Colo., set fire to people attending a march for Israeli hostages.
The past week, meanwhile, has seen repeated clashes between police and protesters on the streets of Los Angeles. Mr. Trump controversially deployed the National Guard and Marines to the city. When Democratic Senator Alex Padilla tried to interrupt a news conference by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem on the subject, he was restrained and handcuffed on the ground by her bodyguards.
Some of the reaction to the murders of Melissa Hortman, the former speaker of the Minnesota House of Representatives and her husband, Mark, and the woundings of state senator John Hoffman and his wife, Yvette, took on a tone of both urgency and weariness.
“My family and I know the horror of a targeted shooting all too well,” said former Arizona congresswoman Gabby Giffords, who survived a 2007 assassination attempt, in a statement. “Leaders must speak out and condemn the fomenting violent extremism that threatens everything this country stands for.”
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz urged people to avoid No Kings protests for safety reasons, though demonstrators ultimately showed up anyway.Tim Evans/Reuters
The Minnesota attacks, which unfolded in the early morning of Saturday, were characterized as political by Governor Tim Walz. U.S. media, citing law-enforcement sources, said a target list of politicians who support abortion access was found in the vehicle of the suspected gunman, Vance Luther Boelter. He also had papers on which “No Kings” were written, the name of anti-Trump protests across the country on Saturday.
Mr. Walz urged people to avoid No Kings protests in the state for safety reasons, though demonstrators ultimately showed up anyway. In a separate incident in Austin, Tex., authorities evacuated the state capitol and closed down the grounds Saturday after receiving a threat against legislators.
If Mr. Walz’s assertion about Mr. Boelter’s alleged motive proves correct, the incident will join a long history in the U.S.
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Four of the country’s presidents have been assassinated, including at least two whose deaths were motivated explicitly by politics: Abraham Lincoln was shot to death in 1865 by a Confederate sympathizer and William McKinley in 1901 by an anarchist.
In 1856, a pro-slavery congressman named Preston Brooks used a cane to beat anti-slavery senator Charles Sumner on the floor of the Senate. Mr. Sumner’s injuries were so severe, he needed three years to recuperate before returning to work.
More recently, an anti-Trump gunman opened fire on a group of Republican legislators at a baseball practice near Washington in 2017, severely wounding Representative Steve Scalise. In 2020, the FBI thwarted a plot to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer over her COVID-19 restrictions. And in 2022, a conspiracy theorist broke into Ms. Pelosi’s house and beat her husband, Paul, with a hammer.
Each attack has triggered calls for everything from stricter gun laws to tighter security to a turning down of the country’s overheated political rhetoric. But relatively little has changed.
While U.S. presidents and former presidents receive tight security – and the head of the Secret Service resigned after the first assassination attempt on Mr. Trump – most lawmakers have very little. Efforts at reducing the availability of guns, meanwhile, have mostly come to naught.
If Mr. Walz’s assertion about Vance Boelter’s alleged motive proves correct, the incident will join a long history of political violence in the U.S.Stephen Maturen/Getty Images
And politics have only become more polarized. This week, Mr. Trump warned that any protesters who demonstrated against his military parade in Washington on Saturday would be met with “very big force.”
Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, who saw Ms. Hortman at an event hours before the attack, said it was incumbent on politicians themselves to change the country’s political tone.
“People need to call people out,” she said in a Sunday appearance on CNN. “Some people need to look in the mirror and say, ‘Hey, I’ve got to stop this or stop my colleagues from doing this because it makes it much worse.’ ”