Boston-area security experts are asking for a deeper look at how Americans address political violence after former President Donald Trump was grazed by a bullet Saturday.
“When you have a president or a former president, you are protecting to protect. You are protecting the office, not the person,” national security expert and GBH contributor Juliette Kayyem told GBH’s Morning Edition Monday. “You are protecting, basically, our constitutional structure.”
Kayyem, who served as a Homeland Security assistant secretary for intergovernmental affairs during the Obama administration, said she sees the shooting as an institutional failing of the Secret Service.
She referenced news reports that the suspected shooter, 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks, had drawn the attention of local police at the rally, as well as a lapse in securing the perimeter.
“I think the Secret Service has essentially one job, and they didn’t do it,” Kayyem said. “The consequences of it, not just for Donald Trump and his family, but of course, for how our democracy would have responded, would have been immeasurable.”
A man who attended the rally, former fire chief Corey Comperatore, was killed in the shooting, and two other people critically injured.
Authorities have not yet said what may have motivated the shooting. Secret Service officials shot and killed Crooks shortly after he opened fire on Saturday.
“The Secret Service, clearly understood they could have a sniper threat. They had counter snipers there,” Kayyem said. “So why would you have the sort of response, a counter sniper, and not secure the buildings? There was clearly also a breakdown in communication.”
The shooting was shocking and scary to Kayyem, she said.
“It led me to think about our democracy and the point that we’re at and violence that has sort of permeated our, I think, election and democratic processes,”
UMass Lowell Professor Arie Perliger, an expert on extremism and political violence, said the U.S. needs to deeply think about how it handles such violence.
“What would have happened if indeed Trump would have been assassinated, that would have actually played into a wider narrative that he’s promoted in the last a few years by far right extremist movements, associations, organizations and so on, which talks about the fact that the federal government, as well as the Democratic Party, is willing to do anything in order to prevent Trump from competing and winning the election,” Perliger said. “These kind of conspiratorial narratives would have been further solidified and intensified … and that would have created a push for a backlash, a violent backlash from far-right extremists.”
Political violence is often a symptom of deep political polarization, he said, and it mostly affects everyday people: He pointed to a substantial increase in hate crime reports in recent years.
“Both political parties are really portraying political adversaries as an existential threat to the republic, to the democratic system, to the democratic process,” Perliger said. “It doesn’t take a lot for some individuals to take that into the next stage.”
But political violence is not a foregone conclusion, he said. The U.S. has weathered assassinations before without a crumbling of the democratic system.
“I think one of the most important things is to demonstrate that these kind of acts are not effective in changing the political status quo,” he said. “I think political assassins believe that assassination is some kind of a shortcut to change the political process, to impact the political dynamics, without the need to engage in political mobilization or gather resources, or even getting organized more broadly. And I think what it’s important to show is that those things are not going to work in the United States.”
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