Robert Pape

What do people think they mean by the use of force?

And what we found is 55% of the people who say the use of force is justified think that use of force means assassination.

It's roughly double.

It's now between 14 and 21 percent.

Wow.

So what you saw is almost immediately after the election of President Trump is that doubled and it has stayed that high.

It has not gone down.

Another example of this is we asked a key question in September 2025.

Do you find it acceptable that Charlie Kirk was assassinated?

Do you find it acceptable that Nancy Pelosi had the attempted

assassination.

And what was the result?

It was 10% for each, 10% for each, which means 20 million American adults found that acceptable on each side.

We have had other periods of violent populism in America.

I call this the period of violent populism because it's not civil war where we don't have organized armies going at each other.

That's not the era we're living in.

And it's also not the era of just nasty politics as usual, which we've had in our country for decades and decades.

This era of violent populism

can be documented starting about 10 years ago.

And we've had previous eras of violent populism that look quite similar to this.