Robert Pape

The only policies we really have at our disposal over the next few months are changes here with our leaders.

Our leaders are the only real source we have to diminish the spirals of violence that are now occurring.

I think it would be a very good idea to do something radical, and this would be Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic leader in the House, to reach out to Donald Trump and say, could there be a joint video statement by the two leaders condemning political violence on all sides?

The best evidence that we have that this rhetoric that I'm giving will matter is in the summer of 2024 with the first Trump assassination attempt.

The next day, Joe Biden gave a speech from the Oval Office on a Sunday with exactly these lines in it, this rhetoric that I'm explaining.

And then as we tracked our surveys, the support for political violence, the next time we did the survey a couple months later, actually did come down 20% across the board in the country.

Then in September, you'll remember, there was the second attempt on President Trump at the golf course.

And again, we saw the rhetoric by President Biden, this time joined by candidate Kamala Harris, the very same rhetoric of bringing it down across all sides.

And then what we saw is it went down again a few months later.

I can't say it was the only cause, but it was the effective thing to do.

It certainly didn't make anything worse.

The big message for the country is to understand that even with all these structural determinants, even with all these pressures, the future of political violence is a choice.

We can choose to ignore all these structural pressures, or we can choose to understand them and then to move forward.

And what would it mean to move forward?

Well, we've been focusing on the tens of millions on one side or the other who support political violence, but we need to understand there are 75% of the population in the United States that abhors political violence.

And that comes in every one of our surveys.

75%.

They need to exert some agency.

They need to complain about political violence.

They need to send letters to their senators, their congressmen, their mayors, the president of the United States.