Threats against public officials persist in year after Trump assassination attempt

Threats against public officials have persisted in the year since the first assassination attempt of President Trump, as experts in political violence warn the upward trend shows no sign of fizzling out. 

The failed attack — one of two attempts on Trump’s life as he sought a second term in the White House — yielded sharp condemnations of violence and ample calls to turn down the heat on political rhetoric.  

But since then, high-profile attacks have continued to mount, from the assassination of a Democratic lawmaker in Minnesota to Monday's shootout at a U.S. Border Patrol facility in Texas. 

“We continue to see a normalizing of political violence, a very casual acceptance that some elected officials may be legitimate targets for violence — based on conspiracies, based on disinformation — and unfortunately and tragically, we've seen that that has real world consequences,” said Jon Lewis, a research fellow at the Program on Extremism at the George Washington University. 

"When there is so much rhetoric...it's only a matter of time before someone with a grievance and a gun finds that justification,” he said. 

In 2024, there were 180 federal arrests for threatening a public official — the highest number in the last 12 years, said Seamus Hughes, a researcher at University of Nebraska Omaha’s National Counterterrorism Innovation, Technology, and Education Center (NCITE). 

Hughes said toward the end of the Biden administration, several incidents that would typically go to a local district attorney or be met with a warning from the FBI resulted in federal arrests. It’s clear, he said, that law enforcement and prosecutors want to “put their finger on the scale” on such threats, taking cases that they wouldn’t have five years ago.

Despite those efforts, it’s particularly challenging to disrupt lone actor plots, Lewis said, “even if you are doing everything else perfectly.” 

“They're taking it seriously, without a doubt, but how much can they do?” Lewis said.  

Threats against the judiciary have also rocketed, especially as adverse rulings to Trump’s far-reaching agenda have put targets on the backs of individual judges. 

U.S. District Judge Esther Salas, whose son was killed in 2020 by a misogynistic lawyer who had once appeared before her, spurring her advocacy for better protections for judges, said at a legal forum last month that she’s tracked 408 threats against judges this year. 

"We're going to break records, people, and not in a good way," the judge said. 

High-profile attacks have put a spotlight on the warming threat climate in the U.S., but local officials have also faced rising threats and harassment, often without the greater protection of heavy security or a national profile. 

“I'm more concerned about the city council member who gets a threat and doesn't have that apparatus behind them,” Hughes said. “They don't know who to call...they don't know if they need to move their family out in the middle of the night to a hotel, they don't know what to do when they're doxxed, and maybe they don't raise their hand next time to run for office, because it's not worth the hassle and trouble and threats.  

“That has a chilling effect on democracy,” he said. 

More than 200 reported threat and harassment incidents against local officials have occurred this year, according to Princeton University’s Bridging Divides Initiative (BDI). Those incidents were largely driven by community-specific disputes and national issues like immigration policy and LGBTQ rights.

Last year, roughly 600 incidents were recorded around the country — about a 14% increase from 2023 and an even larger jump from 2022, said Shannon Hiller, BDI’s executive director. 

Hiller said a third of surveyed local officials fear experiencing hostility in the future, and two-thirds say they’re less likely to engage in activities “essential for a healthy democracy,” such as running for re-election or participating in public events.  

Additionally, three-quarters of those surveyed said they believe the hostility is connected somehow to their policy positions, leaving many more wary of taking on complex or controversial issues in their work, she said.  

“This ‘all-at-once' dynamic is part of what we hear local officials describing as this... ‘fire hose’ or ‘the worst it's ever been,’” Hiller said.  

Threats against public officials were already on the rise when the attempt on Trump’s life occurred.  

The U.S. Capitol Police said in February that threats against members of Congress more than doubled from 2017 to 2024. Last year, USCP’s threat assessment team investigated more than 9,400 “concerning statements and direct threats” against lawmakers, their families and staff.  

In its annual assessment of threats, published in October, the Department of Homeland Security named politically motivated violence among its top concerns for 2025.  

The report noted that online users in forums frequented by some domestic violent extremists were increasingly calling for violence linked to the 2024 election and “socially divisive topics,” including immigration, abortion rights and LGBTQ issues. It predicted that extremists would continue to rely on those issues to “justify violence and promote their causes” into 2025.

The motive for Trump’s first attempted assassin in Butler, Pa., has still not been revealed a year later. But his second alleged would-be-assassin's federal criminal case in Florida is ongoing and could yield new answers soon.  

The defendant, Ryan Routh, faces five counts including attempted assassination of a major presidential candidate over allegations he pushed the muzzle of a rifle through the perimeter of Trump’s West Palm Beach golf course while the former president was a hole away, prompting a Secret Service agent to fire.  

“Dear world, this was an assassination attempt on Donald Trump but I am so sorry I failed you,” he allegedly wrote in a letter detailing his plans months before the attempted attack. “I tried my best and gave it all the gumption I could muster."  

He’s set to go to trial on Sept. 8, but this week, asked a federal judge to let him terminate his public defender and represent himself. 

U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, who also oversaw Trump’s criminal case in Florida before it was dismissed, said she’ll hold arguments on the matter later this month.  

The experts agreed that, without intervention, it’s unlikely threats against public officials will taper off. However, it shouldn’t be seen as destiny.  

“We don’t have to accept this climate of hostility as inevitable or a new normal that we just have to live with now," Hiller said. "Whether it's the assassination attempts on the current president when he was campaigning, or the assassination in Minnesota, these can be inflection points where we decide to say this is unacceptable.”