It's not just the rhetoric — apathy and jokes could be fueling a spiral of retaliatory political violence, expert warns

• Former President Donald Trump has survived two assassination attempts in as many months.
• Political threats and violence are surging, and an expert on terrorism thinks it will get worse.

Amid a contentious race for president, the nation has seen a surge in brutal rhetoric online, increasing threats, and two attempts to assassinate a major party's candidate. And an expert in political violence and terrorism is worried the worst is yet to come.

Faith in our election systems is abysmal: A June poll by the World Justice Project found that 46% of Republicans would not accept the 2024 election results as legitimate if the Democratic nominee wins, and 27% of Democrats felt the same about a GOP victory.

An alarming 14% of Republican respondents in the WJP poll said they would take action to overturn the outcome if a Democrat won, in addition to 11% of Democrats if a Republican did.

And 20% of those surveyed — across partisan divides — believe the "action" that needs to be taken to get the country back on track is violence, according to a March Marist/NPR/PBS NewsHour poll.

If those survey numbers reflect the country as a whole, that's more than 51 million people who think bloodshed is the way forward.

"This is an extraordinary period of American political violence," Robert Pape, the director of the Chicago Project on Security and Threats at the University of Chicago, told Business Insider.

While the country saw similar surges in political upheaval and unrest in the 1920s and 1960s, if you feel like these unprecedented times are a little too unprecedented, you're not alone.

"It's much more than a gut feeling," Pape said — the numbers bear it out.

Assassination attempts against political figures are up, Pape noted, pointing to an attack on Rep. Nancy Pelosi's husband in October 2022, a would-be assailant casing former President Barack Obama's home last June, and back-to-back attempts on former President Donald Trump's life in the last two months.

"You have to go back to the 1970s to find anything close to this, so it's about a 50-year period before we have anything like what we're seeing," he said.

Political violence is up across the board

Pape and his research team have studied every case brought by the Department of Justice regarding threats to a member of Congress going back over 20 years.

"And we discovered that on an annual basis, threats to members of Congress spiked up fivefold in 2017 and have stayed that high through the end of 2023," Pape said.

Rep. Steve Scalise of Louisiana was wounded in 2017 when a gunman opened fire at a practice for the annual Congressional Baseball Game. Lawmakers and security experts at the time pointed to the widespread adoption of social media as a cause of the uptick in threats, PBS reported.

While researchers have found the advent of social media has contributed to some benefits for democratic systems — by making communication more accessible and people more informed — numerous studies have found it can fuel extreme political polarization, increase cynicism, and drive a rise in populism.

The justification of political violence online is getting worse, too, with increasingly high-profile people laughing off violent incidents. Elon Musk, in the wake of Sunday's attempted assassination of Trump, deleted a post on X in which he questioned why there haven't been any assassination attempts against President Joe Biden or Vice President Kamala Harris.

Musk claimed in subsequent posts that he was joking.

Trump, for his part, has pointed to Democrats' rhetoric as the cause of the threats on his life, which Pape said is likely a contributing factor despite a lack of hard data about politically violent rhetoric among Democrats. Plenty of such data exists about Trump's rhetoric, Pape noted, and he said there is no doubt that "incendiary political rhetoric increases support for political violence."

Apathy and jokes fuel the violence

Jokes like Musk's — or Democrats snickering at the attacks on Trump — serve as a form of social permission for the violence to continue, Pape said.

"What you're seeing is real-world violence reflecting this significant rhetorical support for political violence on both the right and the left," Pape said. "So fundamentally, what you see is that there are radical, determined minorities on both the right and the left that are truly radical, who support violence for their goals. And that's a significant number — one that's measured in tens of millions on both the right and the left — which is why we are seeing this serious rise."

In the aftermath of the second assassination attempt against Trump, Pape said he's most concerned about a spiral of retaliatory violence potentially spinning out of control. Trump-supporting Republicans were already angry after the former president was shot at during a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, in July — but now they're furious.

"Given the radicalization that we have, the risk of consequences around the election is extremely concerning," Pape said, adding that it's not like November 5th will be a magical cure to walk the country back from the ledge. "It's going to be for months, extremely intense."

The only way forward, Pape said, is for everyone — Republicans and Democrats alike — to launch a full-throated condemnation of political violence across the board, like the statements Biden has made in response to the attacks on Trump. But he's not holding his breath.

"There is an incentive to do what we know stokes support for political violence. That's the problem," Pape said. "Rhetoric that supports political violence pays. It pays politically, and it pays financially, and it pays in fame. And those three drivers of human behavior are really powerful."