FBI Agents Kill Gunman as He Resists Arrest for Threatening President Joe Biden

Incidents of political violence have increased in the United States in the last five years. The start date of this trend is 2016, around Donald Trump's first candidacy for president, according to the comparison of databases of incidents related to domestic terrorism between 1970 and 2020. But since the storming of the Capitol in January 2021, the rate has multiplied exponentially, with 213 cases recorded by Reuters. The United States is now dealing with the largest and most sustained increase in political violence since the seventies.

This type of violence, correlated with the growing polarization of the country, has cost the lives of 40 people, according to Reuters. The manifestations of this tension are very varied, but few as cinematic as the death on Wednesday of a man by FBI gunfire when a patrol tried to stop him and search his home, after being accused of threats to President Joe Biden. It happened in Provo, Utah, just hours before the president participated in a campaign rally in nearby Salt Lake City. The man, Craig D. Robertson, 75, was armed and had also threatened to shoot other elected officials, including Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who indicted Donald Trump in April in the Stormy Daniels case. The accusation against Robertson had been made the day before in the Salt Lake City court, hence the intervention of the FBI.

The case of Utah illustrates how, specifically since 2020, after Trump lost the elections and denounced a non-existent electoral fraud that culminated in the attack on the Capitol – which has cost him the third indictment in four months – the normalization of violence as a political weapon is a growing reality. In an Ipsos poll for Reuters in May of nearly 4,500 registered voters, about 20 percent of respondents, both Democrats and Republicans, called violence "acceptable" if committed "to achieve my idea of a better society." In another survey conducted between March and April, 65% of the participants nevertheless showed their concern "about acts of violence committed by political beliefs".

Deadly brawls over individual arguments, organized attacks, such as those suffered by numerous election workers after the 2020 presidential elections; shootings, such as two in the city of Portland, one between Trump supporters and supporters of the Black Lives Matter movement and another at the hands of a far-right who injured five protesters calling for social justice... The hydra of violence adapts to places and circumstances, to which the widespread circulation of weapons in the country is by no means alien. Politically motivated mass killings have claimed 24 lives in this period, including the shooting in Buffalo, New York, in which a white supremacist killed 2022 supermarket customers, all of them black, in May 10 after posting a manifesto in favor of the race war.

FBI Director Christopher Wray told Congress in September 2021 that the storming of the Capitol was not an isolated event and that "the problem of domestic terrorism has been spreading across the country for several years." This is confirmed by the records, since 2014, with exponential growth, especially pronounced in 2020 and 2021. After the search of Mar-a-Lago, Trump's mansion in Florida where the classified documents he took from the White House were found, Wray himself denounced an avalanche of threats to the agency.

About two-thirds of the politically violent incidents documented by the Reuters investigation were solitary assaults or clashes between rival groups at public events, called in protest of police action, abortion rights and transgender rights — the hottest topics in the Republican argument to attack Democrats and, By extension, to everything that sounds like woke. The rest of the incidents resulted in material damage often during protests, and generally attributed by the police to left-wing militants.

Since the assassinations of the two Kennedy brothers in the sixties, political violence increased for almost a decade, with almost half a thousand cases during the seventies, mostly attacks by left-wing radicals against government buildings as political pressure. In the eighties it was a relatively rare phenomenon, and a decade later there were serious peaks, such as the 1995 Oklahoma bombing, in which 168 people died, the worst act of domestic terrorism in the country according to the FBI. Trump's leap into the political arena in 2016 marked a new milestone but, unlike the seventies, when the purpose of the attackers was to pressure politicians, the violence in the Trump era comes from the right and has become personal: the target is the rival, the antagonist, the one who thinks differently. Of the 14 deadly political attacks since the Capitol riot that Reuters has documented, 13 of them were right-wing.

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