In northern Michigan, an assailant enraged by hatred for Donald Trump used an all-terrain vehicle to run over and injure an 81-year-old man who was putting up a yard sign in support of the former president’s re-election bid. .
The latest attack is one of at least 300 incidents of political violence identified by Reuters since President Trump’s supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, including At least 51 cases are included. With just two weeks until the November 5 presidential election, the incident is part of the largest and most sustained increase in political violence in the United States since the 1970s.
Some of the violence has been widely reported, most notably the two assassination attempts against Republican President Trump. Other high-profile incidents included three shootings at Harris’ Democratic campaign office in Arizona in recent weeks.
But Reuters has documented numerous other cases related to controversial political issues, from election disputes to LGBTQ+ rights and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Incidents range from small-scale fights over political signs to more violent brawls and destruction of property at rallies. Most of this year’s violence has been non-fatal, with the exception of two people killed during an attempt on President Trump’s life in July: a spectator and a gunman.
The pace of infections has been remarkably consistent since they began rising in 2016, when Trump first ran for president. There were 93 incidents of political violence in 2021, including the chaos surrounding President Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election, followed by 79 in 2022 and 76 in 2023. . Experts on political extremism are sounding the alarm over the tense atmosphere surrounding the 2024 presidential election. It created a very unstable situation. President Trump, in particular, has frequently used inflammatory rhetoric, taken political opponents to court, called the “radical left” the “enemy within” and threatened to send in the military. Neelin Parker, president of Common Ground USA, a nonprofit that studies ways to bridge America’s political and cultural divides, said Americans are beginning to see violence as “part of the fabric of how politics happens.” In the current climate of mistrust, “incidents of violence can spill over into larger incidents,” she added.
Robert Pape, a professor at the University of Chicago who studies political violence, expressed concern about the potential for post-election violence in battleground states where the margin of victory could be just a few thousand votes. He likened this time of year to “wildfire season” with a lot of “dry combustible material” and “the potential for lightning strikes.”
Trump himself has refused to rule out violence if he loses in November. “If we don’t win, it depends,” he told Time magazine in April when asked if he expected violence after the election.
He told supporters that losses in this year’s race were due to fraud.
Harris’ campaign did not respond to requests for comment. Asked about the steady rise in political violence and recent attacks on Harris and Trump supporters, the Trump campaign issued a statement attacking Harris on immigration and criminal justice reform.
“Do your part”
The most high-profile recent incident of political violence was the first assassination attempt on President Trump at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania on July 13th. The gunman, Thomas Crooks, died at the scene. He had no “defining ideology,” federal investigators concluded.
Law enforcement was wary of possible retaliatory violence by Trump supporters. Several alarming incidents, including a Florida man who told his wife he was “preparing for war” and left home with multiple guns after a mass shooting, according to police reports. there were. He was found with a full box of ammunition buried in a public park. Police confiscated seven rifles and handguns and hospitalized the man for mental health evaluation.
But anger wasn’t limited to Trump’s supporters.
On the day of the assassination attempt, Joshua Kemppainen, an avowed Trump hater from northern Michigan, was enraged in a private chat with friends on the messaging app Discord. “Good shot you idiot,” Kemppainen wrote over a photo of a bleeding Trump. A member of the chat group shared the message with Reuters.
Eight days later, Kemppainen, 22 and unemployed, committed the vandalism in Hancock, his town of 4,500 people that largely supported Trump in the 2020 election.
On July 21, after President Joe Biden withdrew from the presidential race and endorsed Harris, Kemppainen drove through the streets in an all-terrain vehicle and targeted Trump supporters, said Tami Sleeman of the Hancock Police Department. the chief said in an interview.
Reuters pieced together what happened from police reports obtained through records requests, copies of chat messages provided by Kemppainen’s colleagues and police, and videos Kemppainen posted on Discord.
They vandalized a pickup truck with Trump stickers, deflated the tires, tore off the side mirrors and smashed the windows. They also damaged a truck with pro-police decals. He posted a video of one attack on Discord with the comment, “Doing my part.” He then tore up President Trump’s yard sign and threw it into the street.
When onlooker Carl Nelson, 81, replanted the sign, Kemppainen ran him over with his ATV and fled, leaving the Vietnam veteran hospitalized.
The next day, Kemppainen called Hancock police and said in a message explaining his rampage, “I’m calling to confess to a crime,” according to a police recording shared with Reuters. That’s what it means. “Then I would appreciate it if someone could come and get me. Thank you.”
When police heard the voicemail two hours later, Sleeman said, they dispatched six officers because they were concerned that the caller’s voice was unbalanced. By the time they arrived, Kemppainen had fatally shot himself with an assault rifle, according to a police report. Kemppainen’s father said he was taking antidepressants and had been diagnosed with autism. Family members acknowledged in interviews that Kemppainen suffered from mental health issues.
Nelson, who was attacked by Kemppainen, told Reuters he spent several days in hospital with knee and upper body injuries. “This was a very peaceful area,” Nelson said. He added that he had decided to vote for Trump.
On September 15, a second assassination attempt against President Trump occurred, again drawing attention to the risk of political violence in this year’s election. Ryan Routh waited for hours with an assault rifle near Trump’s West Palm Beach golf course before agents spotted him in the shrubbery and opened fire. Routh fled but was quickly arrested.
Eleven days later, in the battleground state of Pennsylvania, Alan Vandersloot, a 74-year-old local councilman, joined about a dozen supporters to vote for Harris at a rally in York, a city of about 45,000 people. I stood there holding up a sign. In 2020, it widely supported Trump.
Vandersloot told Reuters that as the rally was ending, a man grabbed him from behind and slammed him to the pavement, inflicting a two-inch cut on his forehead. Two witnesses said in interviews that the gunman, Robert Trotta, punched Vandersloot repeatedly before fleeing.
When another rally participant, Dan Almony, chased after him, Trotta called him a “non-supporter,” Almony said. Almony said he interpreted the slur as a reference to Harris and her supporters. Trotta, Vandersloot, and Almoney are white.
Trotta is unable to post bail and has not yet entered pleas to assault and harassment charges, according to court records. His lawyer declined to comment. Trotta is a registered Republican, according to state records. His social media posts, from an account that was last active in 2020, supported Trump and criticized Democrats.
York Police Department spokesman Lt. Daniel Lentz said Trotta’s attacks were “politically motivated” because he previously pleaded guilty to two counts of harassment in which he randomly punched people. He said he did not think it was due to this. However, the police report did not include statements by Mr. Vandersloot and Mr. Almaney that they believed the attack was political. Lentz said he doesn’t know why police didn’t record their accounts.
New problems, new violence
There is no government data on political violence, but several universities and private research groups track it in a variety of ways, usually using databases built on news accounts. This includes random hate crimes. Other companies, including Reuters, do not.
Most companies have not released comprehensive data since 2020.
The 300 cases identified by Reuters were culled from thousands of violent crime records since the 2021 attack on the Capitol. Most of that data was first collected by the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project, a global violence tracking project run by a bipartisan research group in Wisconsin. Reporters identified additional incidents using news databases, court filings, and police reports obtained through public records requests.
Some cases do not fall along traditional partisan lines, such as those related to the conflict over the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza.
Such was the case last month when Caleb Gannon, a pro-Palestinian critic of the U.S. government’s support for Israel, began heckling at a pro-Israel rally in Newton, Massachusetts. Cellphone video shows Gannon yelling, “I support genocide!” before charging into the crowd and tackling Israel stalwart supporter Scott Hayes.
Earlier this year, Mr. Hayes, an Iraq War veteran, posted on social media a photo of a handgun with a Star of David pendant and the message, “I hate Jews, bring it to me.” As they struggled on the ground, Hayes shot Gannon in the abdomen.
Hayes, 47, has pleaded not guilty to assault and battery with a dangerous weapon and is awaiting trial. County prosecutors announced they will also pursue assault and battery charges against Gannon, 31, who remains hospitalized. Hayes’ attorney said he intended to claim self-defense, but declined further comment.
Some cases are directly related to elections.
On September 26, a Michigan man was arrested for assaulting a U.S. Postal Service employee who delivered Harris’ election mail to his home. According to police records and a statement from the Oakland County Prosecutor’s Office, the postal worker was in his truck when Russell Vallow, 61, approached on his bicycle and said, “I don’t want that ‘nigger bitch’ in my mailbox.” He is said to have shouted.
When the postal worker, who is black, told Vallow to back up, he called her a “negro bitch” and lunged at her with a knife, according to her testimony to the Farmington Hills Police Department. She sprayed him with dog spray and he backed away. “A man came up to me with a knife and tried to stab me,” she said in a phone call to police shortly after, according to a recording obtained through a records request. “I sprayed him.”
Police reported finding Vallow lying in a nearby garden, apparently intoxicated and under the influence of a chemical repellent. He has pleaded not guilty to charges of assault, battery and ethnic intimidation. His attorney did not respond to requests for comment.
In another incident this summer, four white men in a pickup truck drove into a rural home in coastal North Carolina and grabbed a black teenager who was in the yard, according to a Pasquotank County Sheriff’s Office report. Three young people were asked if they liked Donald Trump. office. When the youths said no, the men opened fire with a BB gun, hitting one youth in the leg and the other in the buttocks, according to the report. The gunfire also broke windows in the house, a shed and a car in front of the house.
The truck drove away. Police are investigating the incident as an assault with a deadly weapon, but there are no suspects. The children suffered minor injuries but refused medical treatment.
Christian Gilliard, the young men’s father, said he did not expect any problems in his area, although political tensions have become more pronounced since the contested 2020 elections. he said. “It’s shocking that something like this can happen here,” he said.
