The 2024 US presidential election has moved into its final seven weeks, with absentee voting beginning in a half dozen states, but both the election process itself and the campaigns of the two major capitalist candidates, Democrat Kamala Harris and Republican Donald Trump, have been almost entirely overshadowed by violence and threats of violence.
While Trump has been the target of at least two assassination attempts, a July 13 sniper attack in Pennsylvania and a September 15 ambush at his Florida golf course, the threats of violence have been largely aimed at his Democratic opponents, and at election officials in the seven states most critical to victory in the Electoral College.
The first would-be Trump assassin, Thomas Matthew Crooks, was shot to death at the scene by a Secret Service sniper. The second potential attacker, Ryan W. Routh, was arrested, arraigned on gun charges and jailed pending the expected filing of further state and federal charges. What information has been made public about Routh demonstrates that he holds far-right political views, linked to violent anti-communism, and advocates official and unofficial military aid to both the Ukraine government against Russia and the Taiwan government against China.
This did not stop Trump and his running mate, Senator J. D. Vance, from claiming that criticism from Harris and the Democrats was responsible for triggering the attempt on Trump’s life. Trump wrote on social media Monday, “Because of this Communist Left Rhetoric, the bullets are flying, and it will only get worse!”
Speaking to Fox News Digital the same day, Trump said of Routh, “He believed the rhetoric of Biden and Harris, and he acted on it … Their rhetoric is causing me to be shot at, when I am the one who is going to save the country, and they are the ones that are destroying the country—both from the inside and out.”
Elon Musk, the multi-billionaire owner of X (formerly Twitter) and a major financial backer of Trump’s presidential campaign, sent a comment to his 197 million followers complaining that while Trump has been targeted twice for violent death, “no one is even trying to assassinate Biden/Kamala.” He added an emoji suggesting this was a serious question. Musk later deleted the post after widespread criticism that he was directly inciting violence.
J. D. Vance went even further in a series of comments posted Monday night, in which he claimed that conservative Republicans were engaged in a struggle against “censorship” by a liberal elite. “The logic of censorship leads directly to one place, for there is only one way to permanently silence a human being: put a bullet in his brain,” he wrote.
Vance has played the lead role in whipping up racist and xenophobic attacks on Haitian immigrants living and working in Springfield, Ohio. The bogus claims that Haitians are eating the pets of Springfield residents, echoed by Trump during his September 10 debate with Vice President Harris, have touched off an unprecedented wave of bomb threats against schools and city offices.
Ohio Governor Mike DeWine ordered the state police into Springfield to conduct daily bomb sweeps of schools and public buildings. Asked about the bomb threats, Trump did not condemn them. “I don’t know what happened with the bomb threats,” he said. “I know that it’s been taken over by illegal migrants, and that’s a terrible thing that happened.”
Neo-Nazi groups, as well as the Ku Klux Klan, have sent thugs to Springfield to act as brownshirts for the Trump-Vance slander campaign, which is creating the political climate for violent attacks on immigrants in the community.
Despite the suggestions by Vance and Musk that only the Republicans have faced violent attack, there have been multiple arrests for violent threats against Harris and the Democrats, including one man who was charged last week in Maryland.
According to the New York Times, “The New Hampshire Libertarian Party deleted a widely criticized message it posted on social media Sunday saying, ‘Anyone who murders Kamala Harris would be an American hero.’ The Secret Service is investigating the post as a threat against Harris, agency spokesman Nathan Herring said Monday.”
Furthermore, the election process is itself the target of violence and threats. The FBI and the US Postal Service issued a joint statement Tuesday saying they are investigating suspicious packages that were sent to election officials in six states: Nebraska, Iowa, Kansas, Tennessee, Wyoming and Oklahoma. Some of the letters contained an unknown substance now being examined for toxicity.
The senders of the letters identified themselves as the “US Traitor Elimination Army,” suggesting they were aligned with the fascist campaign instigated by Trump against US election workers.
Speaking at a tech summit on Artificial Intelligence Tuesday, Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco said, “We are seeing an unprecedented and extremely disturbing level of threats of violence and violence against public officials.” US Attorney’s offices were receiving reports of threats against prosecutors, judges, election officials, even volunteers who run polling places, “almost every day,” she said.
“It’s a particularly difficult time these days to be an election official, whether you’re an elected secretary of state, you know, who is experiencing hostile threats on the phone, on Twitter or X or whatever, to being a volunteer trying to help the rest of us vote,” Monaco added.
While the Biden administration and the Harris campaign condemn the violent attacks on Trump and the threats of violence against election workers, their claims that violence is alien to American political life are entirely false. The Biden-Harris administration is itself the greatest purveyor of violence in the world, funneling tens of billions into the US-NATO war against Russia in Ukraine and the Israeli genocide in Gaza, while continuing a record military buildup directed ultimately against China.
Within the United States, the Democratic administration fully supports the daily violence of the police against working people, which takes a toll of more than a thousand every year, and it has directed a crackdown against anti-genocide protests that has led to widespread violence by police and Zionist thugs against students and youth opposed to Israel’s genocide in Gaza.