In a striking sign of how deep violence has become embedded in American politics, several of the political figures who condemned the shooting at Saturday night’s rally for former President Donald J. Trump had experienced political violence themselves.

“Political violence is terrifying. I know,” Gabrielle Giffords said in a statement. Giffords, a former Democratic representative from Arizona, was shot in the head at a political event in 2011, where six people were killed. “I’m holding former President Trump, and all those affected by today’s indefensible act of violence in my heart.”

One spectator was killed in the shooting at Trump’s rally, and the suspected shooter was killed by law enforcement, according to the Secret Service. Trump wrote in a post on his social media platform that he had been “shot with a bullet that pierced the upper part of my right ear”.

Investigators have released few details about the suspect, or his motive. But some politicians who have been the target of politically motivated violence, or attempted violence, offered their condolences to the former President.

Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the former Democratic House Speaker whose husband was attacked at their home in 2022 by an assailant who was looking for her, wrote in a post on X that she knew “firsthand that political violence of any kind has no place in our society”.

“I thank God that former President Trump is safe,” Pelosi added.

Governor Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, a Democrat who was the target of a foiled kidnapping plot, said on X that she was “horrified” to hear the news of the violence at the Trump rally.

Political violence cuts across the nation’s partisan divide, and the attack at the Trump rally comes as threats of such violence are increasing in the US. Judges, members of Congress and local election officials have all
been besieged with threats in recent years.

Those threats often do not result in acts of violence, but some political figures have reported deeply harrowing experiences. A person who had written threatening emails to Representative Pramila Jayapal of Washington, a Democrat, showed up outside her house with a gun. Someone smashed a storm window at the home of Senator Susan Collins of Maine, a Republican.

And in 2017, a gunman opened fire on a group of Republicans practising for a congressional baseball game. Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana was gravely injured.

“There is never any place for political violence,” Scalise wrote on X after the shooting at the Trump rally on Saturday, before criticising in a separate post what he called the “incendiary rhetoric” of Democrats. “We’ve seen far-Left lunatics act on violent rhetoric in the past,” he wrote.

New York Times News Service