People keep trying to kill the president. The closest call came in Butler, Pennsylvania, in 2024, when Donald Trump (then a candidate) had his head grazed by a bullet. Other apparent attempts include an incident at the Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, and possibly another that resulted in a Secret Service shooting at Mar-a-Lago in 2026. The latest would-be executioner, at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, was stopped long before he got anywhere near Trump. Nevertheless, these repeated incidents are disturbing symptoms of an obsession with vigilante violence that has infected the country.
No figure on the left in a position of power comparable to that of the president has called for violence the way that Trump has—but the sentiment that he deserves to be killed is easy to find online. Imagining that assassinating a president would solve any kind of problem is delusional. Presidents are chosen by the electorate; their supporters and their politics do not disappear when they die.
Thinking that you live in an action movie is also delusional. The wannabe assassin at the dinner showed up, allegedly, to kill the most protected man in the world with, The New York Times reported, “a shotgun, a handgun and knives.” In real life, violence is not like in a video game. You do not have a health bar you can refill with pixelated roast turkeys. The man is lucky to be alive, and his chances of success were always near nonexistent.
Thinking that an assassination would advance a political cause is likewise delusional. The only cause these attempted assaults have benefited is Trump’s. His main preoccupation since the dinner has been justifying the illegal construction of his lavish ballroom. But on Thursday, he tried to leverage the horror with which Americans react to political violence to criminalize a political opponent—demanding that House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries be prosecuted for “inciting violence.” Trump posted on Truth Social a photo of Jeffries with a sign reading maximum warfare that was meant to promote Democrats’ redistricting success in Virginia. The phrase—certainly extreme—had nothing to do with the assassination attempt, Jeffries said; he chose it because it had originally been used by an anonymous Trump associate who told The New York Times that the White House political strategy was “maximum warfare, everywhere, all the time.” The charge was absurd, but Trump wasn’t going to miss the opportunity.
The greatest delusion of all—one shared by both the would-be shooter and the president he targeted—is that violence is an expression of strength, and nonviolence a symptom of weakness. Now, I am not a pacifist. I do not believe that violence is always wrong. And I am not arguing that it is always ineffective. But the Trump administration’s greatest failures have been connected to its obsession with violence, and its opponents’ most dramatic victories have resulted from the organized and courageous use of nonviolence.
The Trump administration scrapped an already existing diplomatic accord with Iran in favor of war, and now finds itself desperately trying to reach an inferior agreement to end that war before the conflict crashes the global economy. Its immigration crackdown, which has killed at least four Americans and produced scenes of brutality associated with dictatorships, has contributed to the president’s plummeting approval ratings and Republicans’ diminishing chances in the midterms. The entire world watched as Trump tried to crush the Twin Cities with an army of masked officers, only to be defeated by ordinary people who loved their neighbors enough to risk their own lives to defend them.
The success of that kind of nonviolent civic resistance is not an anomaly. Around the world and across history, nonviolent campaigns have triumphed against even the most brutal regimes. As the researchers Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan write in their book, Why Civil Resistance Works, nonviolent campaigns are more successful than violent ones, and, “once they have succeeded, more likely to establish democratic regimes with a lower probability of a relapse into civil war.” This has proved true in starkly different settings: the Philippines, Ukraine, Brazil.
Even setting aside the obvious moral considerations, sustained political violence requires people with a relatively rare set of traits—the willingness and ability to kill among them—that limit participation. Nonviolent campaigns, by contrast, can draw from all sectors of society: Think of the protesters in Minneapolis, the moms and dads ferrying food to immigrant families in hiding, the observers and “commuters” who tracked ICE officers and tried to draw attention to their actions. Nonviolent methods are also more likely to build broad coalitions and foster high-level defections, because officials do not fear being killed by the opposition. Perhaps more important, the skills and social bonds built through nonviolent struggle are more conducive to the kind of society Trump opponents want to build—a multiracial democracy where people of all backgrounds can thrive.
The Trump administration would have loved to validate its misadventure in Minnesota with scenes of violent protesters. It knew that a violent response would alienate the broader public and consolidate its own power. Trump had already justified deployments of federal agents to cities such as Portland by falsely portraying them as postapocalyptic war zones. Both Trump-administration officials and their allies in the right-wing media attempted again and again, against all evidence, to portray Minnesotans as violent. Fox News insisted that Minnesota was home to “revolutionaries” filled with “bloodlust,” while the administration smeared Renee Good and Alex Pretti, two observers killed by immigration agents, as “terrorists.”
Instead, the nonviolent resistance of the Twin Cities forced the Trump administration to back down from an operation that advertised only its own barbarism. Although advocates for nonviolence are often caricatured online (by people on both the left and the right) as cowardly, Good and Pretti were braver than their killers; and resorting to violence is often an expression of the purest cowardice. The resistance imposed political costs that the administration was unwilling to sustain, and two prominent figures associated with the crackdown, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and the Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino, were forced to step down.
Seeking to provoke violent confrontations to justify greater crackdowns and seizures of power is a long-standing tactic of authoritarian regimes. During the Cold War, supposed Communist plots were used as pretext for the establishment of military dictatorships (which were backed by the United States) all over Latin America. During the Years of Lead in Italy, fascist groups pursued a “strategy of tension” by executing terrorist attacks that they then blamed on the left. The theory was that chaos and the fear of chaos would increase support for an authoritarian government led by the former fascists. As my colleague Adrienne LaFrance has written, far-left groups engaged in their own campaign of terrorism in the name of ushering in a communist utopia—including the Red Brigades’ assassination of the center-left former Prime Minister Aldo Moro—that shocked Italian society into cracking down on extremists.
The debate over the efficacy of violent and nonviolent tactics is an old one, as alive during the past century as it is today. The story is not quite as neat as we’re often told. Lawmakers who feared that the civil-rights movement might abandon nonviolence, particularly after the “long hot summers” of the 1960s, were willing to deal with Martin Luther King Jr. because they believed that if they didn’t, more radical leaders such as Malcolm X would take his place. King, to be clear, was largely sympathetic to the Black Power movement’s motives, if not its theories. He was also not opposed to using violence in self-defense—his entourage carried firearms—even as he argued for disciplined nonviolence during protests and other public events.
Those arguments ring as true now as they did then. “The problem with hatred and violence is that they intensify the fears of the white majority, and leave them less ashamed of their prejudices toward Negroes. In the guilt and confusion confronting our society, violence only adds to the chaos. It deepens the brutality of the oppressor and increases the bitterness of the oppressed. Violence is the antithesis of creativity and wholeness. It destroys community and makes brotherhood impossible,” King wrote in Where Do We Go From Here. “To succeed in a pluralistic society, and an often hostile one at that,” he wrote, Black people would need to form “constructive alliances with the majority group.”
One might object that demanding that activists and protesters remain peaceful in the face of violence wielded by state officials and right-wing groups is a double standard. Well, that’s true. But it’s always been true. That double standard is written into both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, documents whose references to “insurrections” included slave revolts. Americans have always been more tolerant of state and right-wing-vigilante violence—lynchings, soldiers firing at striking workers, the New York City police riot of 1992, the January 6 insurrection—than of violence from the left. That double standard is part of America’s political topography and cannot be wished or argued away. It can only be outmaneuvered.
Writing of the Black Power movement, King asked: What kind of nation “applauds nonviolence whenever Negroes face white people in the streets of the United States but then applauds violence and burning and death when these same Negroes are sent to the fields of Vietnam”?
Yet that hypocrisy does not change the political landscape. As King noted, “The Negro’s struggle in America is quite different from and more difficult than the struggle for independence. The American Negro will be living tomorrow with the very people against whom he is struggling today. The American Negro is not in a Congo where the Belgians will go back to Belgium after the battle is over, or in an India where the British will go back to England after independence is won.”
Americans are going to have to figure out a way to live with one another. Nonviolence is the only way to create political change without the kind of generational wounds that make tolerance impossible. The alternative offers little more than a lonely and ridiculous death.