“In light of this evening’s events, I ask that all Americans recommit with their hearts in resolving our differences peacefully,” posted President Trump shortly after Cole Tomas Allen opened fire on Secret Service personnel at the Washington Hilton as the annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner was in progress. Hearty endorsements came from leaders in both major political parties, but only one party has a violence problem.

Three assassination attempts within the last 22 months involving gunmen with an avowed intention to murder President Trump should be enough to convince any sane person that political violence in our country is a left-wing phenomenon that targets the right. As long ago as 2015, when Trump first declared his presidential candidacy, Rick Wilson, a founder of the ethically troubled anti-Trump Lincoln Project, said the president’s opponents should “put a bullet in Donald Trump.” The bullets have been flying in only one direction ever since.

Democrats have incited violence against the president by routinely calling him a “threat to our democracy,” a “fascist,” a “Nazi,” “Hitler,” and a “traitor,” often with calls that have suggested specific harm. Many of those terms appear in Cole Allen’s purported manifesto, which he sent to friends and family members about 10 minutes before he tried to storm the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.

As long ago as 2018, former New York Times opinion writer Charles Blow pronounced Trump a “treasonous traitor.” In 2023, House Democrat Stacey Plaskett, delegate from the Virgin Islands, said, “Trump needs to be shot.” During the 2024 election campaign, New York Congressman Daniel Goldman said Trump, “has to be eliminated.” Kamala Harris’s campaign advisor, David Plouffe, said that year, “it is not enough to simply beat Trump. He must be destroyed thoroughly.”

During his term, President Joe Biden infamously labeled Trump and all of his supporters a “threat” to “this nation,” to “the very soul of this country,” to “the very foundations of our republic,” and to “everything America stands for.” In a widely publicized donor call leaked just five days before would-be Thomas Matthew Crooks shot and wounded President Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, in July 2024, Biden, who was at that point still running for reelection, declared, “it’s time to put Trump in a bullseye.” Few were mistaken about his apparent intent. Only days after the assassination attempt, Biden’s own former White House communications director Kate Bedingfield, then a CNN news analyst, said Democrats should “turn their fire on Trump.”

Just two months later, Biden/Harris supporter and 19-time ActBlue donor Ryan Wesley Routh obliged by taking aim with a semiautomatic rifle as President Trump’s party approached his position at the Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, Florida.

Trump supporters are also frequently targeted for death by leftists. In June 2017, Bernie Sanders supporter James Thomas Hodgkinson, who had publicly called Trump a “traitor” who “has destroyed our democracy,” fired 43 rounds at the Republican congressional baseball team as it practiced on a field in Alexandria, Virginia. He wounded four people, including House Majority Whip Steve Scalise, while two others were injured fleeing his bullets. In June 2022, Nicholas John Roske, who now claims to be a woman named “Sophie,” was arrested near Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s house in Chevy Chase, Maryland, during an attempt to assassinate the justice over the Court’s leaked ruling that overturned Roe v. Wade. Two years earlier, New York senator and current Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said Kavanaugh would “pay the price” if he ruled against abortion rights.

Of course, in September 2025, conservative Turning Point USA activist Charlie Kirk was shot to death while on stage at an event in Utah. His alleged murderer, Tyler James Robinson, is said to have been motivated by leftist ideology and concern over LGBTQ+ rights and Kirk’s supposed “hate.” In the days that followed, numerous leftist professionals made public statements celebrating his death.

Just three days before this third assassination attempt against Trump, leftist media personality Hasan Piker appeared on a New York Times podcast to defend Luigi Mangione’s alleged December 2024 murder of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson as a morally justified “social murder.” In a skit mocking the White House Correspondents’ dinner last week (before the shooting), late-night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel described First Lady Melania Trump as “an expectant widow.”

If any Democrats are sincere about wanting to end the violence, polling shows they have a big job ahead of them. A survey published in April 2025 by Rutgers University’s Network Contagion Research Institute found that over 55 percent of left-of-center respondents believed there was “justification” for murdering President Trump. A YouGov survey released two days after Charlie Kirk’s murder showed that one in four people who identify as “very liberal” believe generic political violence is “justified” at least “sometimes.” For those who say they are “very conservative,” however, the figure was just one in 25, with only eight percent of Americans thinking so overall. They are not like us.