Gosh, if only Trump and his Secretary of “War” Pete Kegsbreath and Pete’s Crusader tattoo had known somebody like this might be around to talk to before attacking Iran and incurring a rapid strategic setback that is likely to get much worse before it gets better.
Pape also has a book about political violence scheduled for August publication Our Own Worst Enemy: The Assault from Within on Modern Democracy. (1)
The news hook on this interview is, of course, the shooting incident in the hotel where the White House Correspondents Dinner was taking place. We don’t know a lot of details about it yet. Ken Klippenstein has an early report on the suspect charged, Cole Allen. (2) The only thing that seems really clear is that Allen has a far more sophisticated understanding of Christian theology than Donald Trump ever has or will. And, yes, that a bar so low its underground. And we don’t know at this point if his intention to shoot at Trump, although that seems a likely assumption, and he has been charged with intending to do so. Caution is in order on the early reports. (3)
Charlie Pierce, as usual, has some sensible comments on the Allen shooting incident incident:
Where do you go with this kind of thing? If you’re the MAGA robot army, or if you’re Dana Bash, you lay the events at the feet of dangerous extremists like ... Jamie Raskin? If you’re the Democrats, and you have even the ghosts of coglioni, you go on criticizing this president and his renegade band of misfits and lickspittles, and you train yourself not to care about the civility police. Cole Allen did what he did for his own mad reasons. The crimes and insanity of the past decade turned his mind into a furnace in which all those things melted together and then congealed into an immovable obsession. And then he went and got his guns. (4)One thing to keep in mind about the inevitable and understandable speculation over the incident is that Trump has staffed senior posts with fools, sychophants, grifters, drunks, fanatics, and incompetents. And they have been shifting personnel to Stephen Miller’s priorities of deporting gardeners, house cleaners and Home Depot shoppers who happen to look Latino, and generally territorizing Democratic-run cities like Minneapolis and Los Angeles.
So an when incident like that at the Correspondents Dinner makes federal law-enfocement look ill-prepared (“How could this happen?”), sheer incompentence may be a big part of the reason. The TechBro mantra of “move fast and break things” can have its downsides when applied to vital public services.
What do we mean when we say, “political violence”?
Pape is the author of Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism (2005). He “wrote the book” on the subject, we might say. In an article of the same title, he sketches out his argument. (5)
Given that another alleged Presidential assassination attempt is in the news, it’s worth remembering that “political violence” is a very broad subject including the following.
War: The most famous comment of the Prussian general and military theorist Carl von Clausewitz (1780-1831) is, "War is merely the continuation of politics by other means." And that theory is still widely used and cited by military strategists. In that sense, war is far and away the most significant and most destructive form of political violence.
But when we talk about “political violence,” we’re usually talking about the practice of violence in internal domestic politics.
Civil War: Civil war could be considered as covering both the “war” version of political violence and internal political violence. In the case of the US, we did have a big, bloody civil war in 1861-1865. There was a preliminary version of it in “Bleeding Kansas,” where pro- and anti-slavery settlers fought a guerilla war over whether Kansas should become a slave state or a free one. Civil wars vary in time and intensity. The Austrian Civil War of 1934 lasted all of four days – but is still a touchy political memory.
Guerilla warfare: This has taken place in many countries over a long period of time. The name itself came from the Spanish resistance to the Napoleonic occupation of Spain in 1808-1814. Guerrilla warfare can be a supplemental part of regular warfare, of a revolutionary uprising, or of a protracted campaign by an internal dissident group.
Assassinations: This one is well known. This can be an act of a political opposition group, an act of war by a foreign power, or the attempted murder of a political or government official by the proverbial Lone Gunman, like Arthur Bremer’s crippling attack on George Wallace in 1972 or John Hinckley, Jr.’s attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan in 1981.
Riots: The widescale riots in major cities (and not-so-major ones) after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968 certainly had a political component to them. But they were spontaneous expressions of outrage. For US rightwingers, black and brown people rioting is still their nightmare version of political violence. We hear echoes of that when Trump talks about Black Lives Matter protesters burning down cities, which didn’t happen.
Disruptive mass protests and coup attempts: These would include incidents like the January 6, 2021 invasion of the US Capitol by a traitorous cop-killing mob directly incited by Donald Trump himself to attempt a coup, overturning the results of the 2020 Presidential election. The 1999 protests in Seattle against the World Trade Organization and its neoliberal economic policies were the result of a broad-based “anti-globalization” movement. The protesters included AFL-CIO members. There were also “black block” anarchist protesters who damaged property at businesses like Starbucks and Nordstrom. There was a lot of property damage but no deaths. (By using those two examples, I don’t mean to equate them. The Seattle people were protesting over real issues. The January 6 mob were a bunch of traitors trying to overthrow the government on behalf of the loser Donald Trump who were chanting “Hang Mike Pence!”
Terrorism: “Terrorism” is an evolving term which is normally used to describe acts of violence or intimidation by the Other Side. It is currently generally used to refer to illegitimate acts of violence committed against civilians as well as guerilla attacks in actual wars. “Terrorism” was once used to refer to state terror against its own population, as in the Terror during the French Revolution. Trump’s ICE Gestapo has been practicing state terrorism of that kind in 2025-2026.
Violence against property: There is always a lot of whining and gnashing of teeth over violence against property that might have any kind of political context. This is not really that hard. Breaking a store window or spray-painting insults on a Tesla are crimes against property. That may be political vandalism, but it’s a real stretch to call that political violence. If Klansmen burn down a bunch of houses where black people or immigrants live, yeah, that’s political violence. This really isn’t that difficult a distinction to make.
Note to Palantir snoops (or any other kind) scanning social media: Not everything that annoys Elon Musk or Peter Thiel is violence. Even though they claim to be able to define the world according to their whims.
Note to Trumpista trolls of any kind: If you aren’t unequivocally condemning the ICE/CPB murders of Renee Good and Alex Pritti and the deaths from abusive practices in the ICE concentration camps, don’t bother trying to explain to anyone why breaking a store window at a Tesla dealership is “terrorism” or “political violence.”
Notes:
(1) Latest Shooting Attempt Foreshadows 'Most Dangerous Midterms'. Times News YouTube channel 04/26/2026. <https://youtu.be/9QqWgwqoLjU?si=T-1mxynjrIgkw8dc> (Accessed: 2026-27-04).
(2) Klippenstein, Ken (2026): Assassin Wasn’t on FBI’s Radar, Sources Say. Ken Klippenstein Substack 04/27/2026. <https://www.kenklippenstein.com/p/assassin-wasnt-on-fbis-radar-sources> (Accessed: 2026-27-04).
(3) Calitri, Lydia et al (2026): What we know about Cole Allen, suspected White House Correspondents' dinner shooter. NPR/Alaska Public Media 04/27/2026. <https://alaskapublic.org/news/politics/washington-d-c/2026-04-27/what-we-know-about-cole-allen-suspected-white-house-correspondents-dinner-shooter> (Accessed: 2026-27-04).
Hernandez, Joe (2026): Alleged correspondents' dinner shooter is charged with trying to assassinate Trump. NPR 04/27/2026. <https://www.npr.org/2026/04/27/nx-s1-5800175/white-house-correspondents-dinner-cole-allen-federal-court> (Accessed: 2026-27-04).
(4) Pierce, Charles (2026): This Is the Wrong Time for the Predictable Democrat Response to the Correspondents’ Dinner Shooting. Esquire 08/27/2026. <https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a71138108/correspondents-dinner-shooting/> (Accessed: 2026-27-04).
(5) Pape, Robert (2003). Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism. Australian Army Journal 3:3. <https://researchcentre.army.gov.au/library/australian-army-journal-aaj/volume-3-number-3/dying-win-strategic-logic-suicide-terrorism> (Accessed: 2026-27-04).
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