DARKNESS RISING

An attack on former President Trump punctuates the alarming surge of political violence

- Vera Bergengruen

ONE NIGHT IN JANUARY, 15 PEOPLE TRUDGED INTO AN ARTS CENTER in Nazareth, Pa., for a political focus group. Democrats and Republicans, grandmothers and high school teachers, they gathered in a room still decorated with Christmas lights to discuss their concerns about the democratic process with a group called Keep Our Republic, a nonpartisan civic organization that focuses on threats to the election system. Ari Mittleman, the organization's executive director, has observed similar events across the battleground states of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, so he expected the participants in Nazareth to express negative views about the 2024 elections, the candidates, and even the voting process itself. What Mittleman was not prepared for was a dark prediction that the panelists shared.

"The one thing that unified Democrats and Republicans," says Mittleman, was the strong sense that "this election will see political violence." In a recording of the Nazareth session shared with TIME, many participants said they believed it was a matter of when, not if, someone would be seriously injured or killed during the 2024 election cycle.

"It was beyond unsettling," Mittleman recalls. "Almost to a person, they were saying that political violence was going to happen." When it did happen on July 13 in Butler, Pa., the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump shocked the nation. But to many, it did not come as a surprise. The harrowing scene was surreal yet predictable, and not only because the U.S. has an ugly history of attacks against Presidents and presidential candidates. The gunshots fired by a skinny 20-year-old perched on a roof overlooking the Butler Farm Show grounds were a reminder of America's political reality in 2024, which has been warped by increasingly violent rhetoric, threats, and attacks.