This is the second of two episodes this week dealing with the aftermath of the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump. Part one featured an interview with historian Jeremi Suri delving into the long history of political violence in the United States.
The motive behind the near-fatal shooting of former President Donald Trump remains a mystery. The 20-year-old gunman, Thomas Matthew Crooks, left behind no political manifesto to explain his behavior. His social media history reveals next to nothing. But this kind of “apolitical” political violence is not unusual. For instance, John Hinckley Jr. shot President Reagan in 1981 to impress actress Jodie Foster.
Lone assassins acting out of personal motives are far from the only examples of political violence in U.S. history. The Ku Klux Klan terrorized Black Americans with the explicit aim of subverting their participation in civic life. Mobs break out in reaction to real or perceived injustices. In 2020, for instance, Black Lives Matter protests turned riotous in some cities, destroying and defacing public and private property.
In this episode of History As It Happens, Oxford Brookes historian Roger Griffin delves into the complex factors that produce violent outbursts in societies as different as the late Weimar Republic (where mass unemployment and national defeat in World War I fomented wide-scale anger) and the present-day United States. He also discusses the varying (and partisan) responses to the attempted assassination of Mr. Trump.
“There’s been an attempt to politicize it and use it as ammunition in the presidential race without any real knowledge of the motivation of the attempted assassin,” said Mr. Griffin, who is an expert on socio-political movements, fascism and terrorism. “Certain types of violence which seem to have a political motive shade into a psychological dynamic and into the same sort of violence that you get against famous people like the assassination of John Lennon … and you get explosions of violence which are purely those of frustration.”
History As It Happens is available at washingtontimes.com or wherever you find your podcasts.
