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Chapter 1: What recent events have sparked concerns about political violence in America?
If you find yourself bewildered by this moment where there's so much reason for despair and so much reason to hope all at the same time, let me say I hear you. I'm Ezra Klein from New York Times Opinion, host of The Ezra Klein Show. And for me, the best way to beat back that bewildered feeling is to talk it out with the people who have ideas and frameworks for making sense of it.
There is going to be plenty to talk about. You can find The Ezra Klein Show wherever you get your podcasts.
From The New York Times, I'm Natalie Kitro-Eff. This is The Daily. in the midst of a cascade of violent acts against political figures.
It happened in Minnesota, the murder of a state representative and her husband in what's being called a politically motivated attack. This morning, a man is charged in connection with an arson at the Pennsylvania governor's residence while Governor Shapiro and his family slept inside. Charlie Kirk has been shot.
The latest from the White House Correspondents Center, the Secret Service has a person in custody after shots were fired.
And in the wake of what appears to be the third assassination attempt against President Trump.
The New York Times reports the suspected shooter's 1,000-word manifesto says Trump administration figures were his targets.
The question that keeps coming up is how do we get here?
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Chapter 2: What is the concept of violent populism and why is it a risk?
And how much worse could it really get? So last week, I called University of Chicago professor Robert Pape. For decades, he's been one of the country's leading experts on political violence, and he's advised every White House from 2001 to 2024. We talked about why violence from the right and the left is on the rise, and what it would take to stop it. It's Monday, May 4th.
Professor Pape, we started thinking about doing a conversation like this after a series of what felt like extraordinary instances of political violence. The president's two assassination attempts and then Charlie Kirk's assassination. So we at The Daily have been talking to you in the background for some time now.
And then there was another act of violence apparently directed at the Trump administration. And so we thought now is the time. So thanks for being here.
Thank you very much for having me.
I want to start with this theory that you have, which is that we are in an age of what you call violent populism. This is something you have a book coming out on, and you say that this violent populism represents a bigger risk to American democracy than anything else. No terrorist group or foreign country comes close in your eyes.
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Chapter 3: How does social acceptance of political violence influence behavior?
So first of all, what is violent populism, and why is it such a risk?
The most important fact about political violence in America today is this. Tens of millions of Americans on both sides of the aisle see political violence as acceptable. And once you have tens of millions of Americans, not a fringe, not a few militia groups, who see violence as acceptable, this changes everything about the risks of attack.
It makes the individuals who are volatile for their own psychosocial reasons, it pushes those volatile individuals over the edge. Because what they see is the prospect of social approval for their acts. And when you have tens of millions of Americans who support political violence, it makes tips to the FBI very, very difficult to get.
Because the more support there is for political violence, the more people will simply look the other way. They'll discount what they see. And this is what I mean by the era of violent populism, which is once we have tens of millions of Americans supporting political violence for their own causes, this can then create spirals. You can see it on the debate.
Is this a mostly right-wing phenomenon, a left-wing phenomenon? Well, we have all the cases here, and the cases are, let me just go over the last 12 months. So we saw in June 2025, the assassination murder of a Democratic leader in Minnesota. You saw the assassination murder of Charlie Kirk a few months later.
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Chapter 4: What demographic changes are driving political violence today?
We also have Governor Shapiro in Pennsylvania. We, of course, have multiple President Trump assassination attempts. So what you are seeing is clearly the rise of political violence on both sides. But the really important thing to say about this is not just that it's rising on both sides, but it's now starting to spiral.
If I understand what you're saying, it's not just the violent people who are implicated in this. It's the broader social acceptance that they are finding in a significant portion of American society. So it's not just them. It's many of the rest of us. In a way, this acceptance you're saying fuels the violence itself.
That's exactly right. And we have conducted 20 nationally representative surveys of Americans over the last five years. We conduct them at the University of Chicago Project on Security and Threats, and we started doing it in the summer of 2021. And then the most recent one was in the end of January of this year. So we understand quite a bit about the attitudes of Americans on political violence.
And just to say very clearly what that data shows, the social acceptance of political violence is up by how much exactly?
Chapter 5: How does wealth inequality contribute to political violence?
Lay out what we know.
So for most of the years of the Biden administration, so this would be from, say, 2021 to the end of the Biden administration, our surveys found 10% of the body politics supported political violence to restore Donald Trump. to the presidency. And then we did focus groups and we did further survey research. 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.
Oh, wow. So half of that 10% at that point of the body politic endorsed assassination, which is honestly surprising to me. What is that percentage now?
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.
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Chapter 6: What role do political leaders play in escalating or mitigating violence?
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.
Overall, what you're saying is roughly one in five people in America support some kind of political violence now, which is a lot. And it's increasing on both sides of the spectrum. Professor Pape, how does this moment in political violence stack up against other periods where we saw this kind of violence in spades? I'm thinking of the 60s and 70s, for example.
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.
Chapter 7: How does rhetoric from leaders impact public perception of violence?
And we've had previous eras of violent populism that look quite similar to this. In the 1920s, after World War I, you saw the rise of the second Ku Klux Klan, which had been dormant for decades, grew from a few hundred thousand to four to six million members. Those members paid dues. We have records. We know that this was not just simply in the South. This was in many places in the North.
And what you saw was, again, millions of Americans supporting political violence. The 1960s is another example. And in the 1960s, you have a string of political assassinations. You also have collective political violence. You have political riots happening in a number of cities. That's the Chicago Convention in 1968. Right.
And we have opinion poll data from the 60s and similar to today, there is really a striking correspondence of support by tens of millions of Americans for that political violence itself. So what's different about our era today is not just that this is not the first time we've had millions of Americans supporting political violence.
Chapter 8: What actions can the public take to oppose political violence?
It is pretty much the first time it's happened on both sides at the same time. That's another distinctive feature about what's occurring in our current period compared to the 60s, which was mostly from the left, and the early 20s, which was mostly from the right.
OK, can you characterize the rise in political violence that we've seen recently, like with numbers? How do we measure that? What do we know about the extent of it?
We have a variety of databases. We have the FBI databases. And then we did a study at CEPOS, the University of Chicago Project on Security and Threats, of threats to members of Congress over a 25-year period, from 2001 to 2024. And this was important because these were threats that were prosecuted by the Department of Justice.
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.
Right. And I want to get to that because it does seem as though this period of time that you're zeroing in on was a catalyst for a rise in political violence. But interestingly, not a catalyst just exclusively for one side or the other, but for both. So I want to understand that question of why. Generally speaking, why does this kind of violence ramp up?
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?
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