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Where Did All This Political Violence Come From?

ON SATURDAY, THE Republican presidential nominee told a crowd of his supporters in Wisconsin that deporting undocumented immigrants, as he has promised to do by the millions if elected, "will be a bloody story." The next day, the New York Times opinion section published a piece by staff writer and editor Katherine Miller, under the headline "The Normalization of American Politics’ Rapid Descent Into Violence." The first six paragraphs were about Donald Trump—not as a promoter of violence, but as its target, in the assassination attempt in July in Butler, Pennsylvania. 

Trump's storytelling about how he turned his head just in time for a bullet to graze his ear, rather than killing him, was, Miller wrote, "actually a striking description of what happened: to be looking at and unable to see a source of imminent danger." The piece then went through a litany of stories of political violence or near violence: the hammer attack on then–Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi's husband, Paul; the arrest of a man with a gun near Supreme Court justice Brett Kavanaugh's house; arson at Sen. Bernie Sanders Vermont headquarters with people inside; the shooting of Rep. Steve Scalise at the Congressional baseball game. 

Someone was definitely looking at danger without seeing it. Miller managed to survey political violence while removing the politics of violence, even as she directly described the relevant events: