That means 2024 could become a new, politically watershed 1968, marked by a bad actor attacking an iconic political leader.
That’s the fear shared by a whopping 67% of Americans in a poll conducted following the shooting of former President Donald Trump at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania on Saturday evening.
Two in three of the 4,339 Americans surveyed by YouGov Political violence is more probably The shooting at the presumptive Republican presidential nominee at his final campaign stint before the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee suggests it could be a harbinger of further violence.
Just 8% of respondents thought it was unlikely that attacks on political leaders would increase, while 10% expected no change and 14% were unsure.
Importantly, both Republicans and Democrats are more likely to believe there will be more violence: 70% of registered Republicans and 69% of registered Democrats expect Trump to be the first target, but not the last.
In 1968, America was shocked by the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in April while supporting a sanitation workers’ strike in Memphis, followed by the assassination of the Rev. Robert F. Kennedy Sr. in June.
These murders came just five years after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and four years before the attempted assassination of Democratic presidential candidate George Wallace by a gunman whose only aim was fame, leaving the Alabama governor confined to a wheelchair.
While President Trump was fortunately only injured and appears to be making a full recovery, another man at the rally was killed by sniper Thomas Matthew Crooks, a 20-year-old from Bethel Park, Pennsylvania, about whom not much is known other than that he is a registered Republican and made a small donation to the Democratic Party’s political coffers in January 2021.
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Not only do they expect more political violence in the country, but 82 percent of poll respondents said political violence is already Persistent problems Fifty percent think it’s a “very big” problem, while 32% say it’s “somewhat” of a problem. Here again, party affiliation drives the numbers, with 87% of Republicans and 84% of Democrats sounding the alarm, compared to 76% of independents.
In contrast, just 10% of all respondents downplayed the issue, and 8% were unsure of their views.
The US Secret Service has come under political scrutiny, with Republican Senators Rick Scott and Josh Hawley calling for hearings in the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. Senator Scott wants to grill the Secret Service and the Department of Homeland Security, while Senator Hawley is calling for a full public investigation into the assassination attempt and the “failure to protect a former president.”
The pollsters asked the public, Secret Service In response to a survey asking people about their government’s ability to “protect presidential candidates from harm” in the wake of the assassination attempt on the former president, only one in five respondents said they were “very confident,” while an additional 45% said they were “somewhat confident.”
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Additionally, 70% of Democrats, 65% of Republicans and just 61% of independents have at least some confidence in the police tasked with protecting presidents, past and present.
However, 29% of Republicans said they were “not very confident” or “not at all confident.”
This figure is likely to rise once a legislative investigation uncovers the truth behind the incident in which a man under the drinking age climbed onto a rooftop with no punishment and fired multiple shots into a crowd, wounding a national political leader and two of his supporters and taking the life of another innocent man.
Saturday’s attack may finally fix long-neglected security gaps amid growing calls for increased Secret Service protection for major presidential candidates and finally for Robert Kennedy Jr., whose uncle and father were murdered for political reasons decades ago.
But that is little comfort to those affected by the failures of those guarding the president on that fateful day in Butler, Pennsylvania.
