Robert Pape

We found that starting in the first year of Trump's presidency in 2017, a five-fold increase in threats to members of Congress.

And we found that increase happened to Democratic targets and Republican targets.

And once you kind of peel down and get inside some of their motives, you see that Trump's rise was a lightning rod on both sides.

Mm-hmm.

There are members of Congress targeted because they support Trump's agenda too much, say Marjorie Taylor Greene.

There are members of Congress who are targeted because they're not supporting President Trump's agenda enough.

So you actually end up with a dramatic spike up, and it stays up at that level year after year after year, about an eight-year period.

During the first Trump presidency and the Biden presidency.

So you might think it would just diminish because we've had a change of president.

No.

And that is indicative of there's more going on than just simply a person, President Trump.

What we are seeing at bottom is not simply the impact of an individual, a president, although President Trump is contributing, not simply the impact of social media, although social media is contributing.

We're seeing the impact of social change.

And social change, major social change, when it happens in a country, is a cause of the radicalization of politics, which can cause political violence.

Now, what is the major social change happening in the United States today?

There are actually two.

The first and most dominant social change is for the first time in our country's 250-year history, we are transitioning from a white majority democracy to a white minority democracy.

That has never happened before.

in our country's 250-year history, in, say, 1960, about 88% of Americans were non-Hispanic whites.

Today, that is 57% of Americans.