Can America step back from violent political rhetoric?

I’d like to just keep you for a little bit after the break, but before we do that, so in Butler itself, can you just give us a quick summary of, or not summary, but just a quick note about what political leaders in Butler have been saying?

DETO: Yeah this is a very red area.

In Butler. So you’ve had, I believe Mike Kelly, the congressman, was pretty, pretty angry after what happened there. And he lives in Butler. And there was some blame on the left that this was like their fault for stoking tensions. I think a lot of the local officials have stayed more neutral.

Part II

CHAKRABARTI: Ryan, I would love to hear more of any reporting that you have around law enforcement’s, multiple law enforcement agencies continuing investigation around what happened in Butler.

DETO: Yeah, they are closed off the entire Butler Fair farm show site, which is this kind of field like farm show with the airport, little private airport on it. And they’re just sweeping the entire area. I think that’s what happened really like instantly after the shooting, they basically just started ushering everybody out and just trying to find every little detail.

And I believe that they have determined that the shooter was on a rooftop, kind of right outside the complex. About, I think it was like 400 yards away and they’re, I think they’re trying to figure out exactly why there wasn’t any kind of Secret Service positioned on that rooftop.

And trying to get to the bottom of that.

CHAKRABARTI: Just to be clear, because of course, as the details matter. Was it 400 yards or was it 400 feet? That’s what I’m not clear on.

DETO: I believe. Oh, you know what? You know what? I can’t say it.

CHAKRABARTI: We’ll get the right fact, because I’ve been hearing that it was sufficiently close, that that’s one of the reasons why there was major concern that there was no Secret Service there on that rooftop.

Do you know more about what local law enforcement has been saying, Ryan? Because we’re seeing reports here, for example, from AP that Butler County Sheriff Michael Sloop said that in fact, because people had seen the shooter on the roof in the minutes before the attempted assassination, that a local officer may have climbed up to the roof and seen the shooter, and then climbed back down and then the shooting happened just moments later. Do we know, do you know more about that?

DETO: Yeah, there were reports that one of the officers had actually climbed up and seen the shooter. And then the gun was pointed at him from Crooks, was pointing the gun at him and then he climbed back down.

So he potentially had a chance to maybe fire on Crooks and didn’t, but also he didn’t. He was, I believe, on a ladder. So it’s a tough situation where, what do you do in that situation? But there were most, is that allegedly saw Crooks before the shooting took place and told police and so their response is really coming into question.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. Oh, and by the way, so the distance here, AP is saying that it was 164 yards. So about that 400-foot mark just to be clear.

DETO: Sorry about that.

CHAKRABARTI: No problem. You’ve been having to do a lot of reporting over the past few days. It’s our job to help each other with the details. So one last thing Ryan, Pennsylvania, obviously a critical swing state.

It’s been the focus of a lot of intense political divisions, court cases, et cetera, over time, just to throw in more complexity, correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe it’s an open carry state in terms of firearms.

DETO: It is.

CHAKRABARTI: I’m just wondering, from your reporting and your time there, just what you, the thoughts that you come away with regarding how Pennsylvanians are going to try and move forward from this moment.

DETO: Yeah. Pennsylvania, especially Southwestern Pennsylvania, is probably the most important region for Trump in the country. There are the most Republicans of any part of the state. Here in PA, that live here in southwestern Pennsylvania.

DETO: So it’s just, I think maybe everybody realizes that it’s such a key crucial part for the presidential election and that’s why we get so many visits.

That’s why we get so many rallies. And I think western Pennsylvanians are just, I think they understand that, and the tension is high. I think that’s why we’re all confused and trying to figure things out. But I think a lot of us are anxious that more things, more intense environment will continue to happen.

And we still have, what, four months left of the campaign.

CHAKRABARTI: Ryan Deto, reporter for the Pittsburgh Tribune Review, joining us from Pittsburgh. Ryan, thank you so much.

DETO: Thanks for having me.

CHAKRABARTI: Let’s hear a little bit more from what Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro said yesterday in Butler. He called the assassination attempt on former President Trump absolutely unacceptable and tragic.

SHAPIRO: Political disagreements can never, ever be addressed through violence. Disagreements are okay, but we need to use a peaceful political process to settle those differences. This is a moment where all leaders have a responsibility to speak and act with moral clarity, where all leaders need to take down the temperature and rise above the hateful rhetoric that exists, and search for a better, brighter future for this nation.

CHAKRABARTI: Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro just yesterday. Frank Figliuzzi joins us now. He’s in Houston, Texas. He’s the former assistant director for counterintelligence at the FBI. Frank, welcome back to the show.

FRANK FIGLIUZZI: Thank you, Meghna.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So let’s just keep our focus on Pennsylvania and Butler here for just another few minutes.

There’s been already a lot of criticism of the Secret Service, of potential failures in oversight, of sweeps, et cetera. Where would you be looking right now to find out if there were holes in security for that Trump rally on Saturday?

FIGLIUZZI: I don’t often arrive at conclusions early, but Meghna, I can do that here.

It’s clear to me from 25 years in the FBI, working alongside Secret Service and seeing all the data that we’ve been able to take in, that this was indeed a failure on multiple levels. Look, the Secret Service uses the following phrase to describe their mission. Zero fail. It failed. It failed.

And they operate on a theory of multiple levels of security, so that if one fails, the other one will come in and take over. That did not happen. And I think we’re going to see here, based on all known reporting, that the Secret Service knew that this particular building, this particular roof indeed was high ground.

That could be used by a sniper close enough in distance, within range of a rifle and identified, yet somehow considered to be outside their perimeter of responsibility. And I think we’re going to find Meghna that they were delegating this spot to local or state police. And clearly somehow that broke down and here we are.

CHAKRABARTI: No, that’s a really important point. I just wanted to ask you more about that, Frank, because there are, of course, there’s cooperation between multiple law enforcement agencies at any event like this. It scales up for a convention, for example, in Milwaukee.

But so how is it determined? Can you give us a little bit of insight how it’s determined, where those perimeters of responsibility end and a new law enforcement agency would take over?

FIGLIUZZI: Yeah. So it’s a couple of things here. One, I think the American public is going to learn from this investigation once it takes place, that there’s an uncomfortable reliance.

On local and state police for secret service deployments like these very common rallies. Why is that? It is because the Secret Service has been stretched very thinly in the last few years with way too many protectees, way too many responsibilities. And so they’ve surely, but quietly, gone about assigning important tasks to local law enforcement.

And by the way, we’re going to see that at the RNC. Which starts today in Milwaukee. Many people don’t realize that over 100 local police departments are sending from out of state, their officers to Milwaukee. So we will see badges and patches on uniforms from Florida. From Tennessee, from Ohio, all on the streets of Milwaukee.

So the dirty little secret is that this tiny agency, the Secret Service has something like no more than 4,000 special agents to cover the world, financial crimes, bad checks, mortgage fraud and comma, by the way, when they can squeeze it in, protect the president and the candidates.

CHAKRABARTI: To your point about Milwaukee, I’m seeing here the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel has reported that if there’s the hard perimeter right around a convention where guns are not at all allowed, but I believe Wisconsin is also an open carry state.

So guns will be permitted by state law outside that hard perimeter. And the Wisconsin governor Tony Evers has been saying that he’s requested that decision to allow firearms be reconsidered,  cause we’re talking about the soft perimeter area. And there, I guess they’re still trying to work that out.

Your thoughts on that?

FIGLIUZZI: My thoughts on that are not pleasant. Look, the state of Wisconsin has a law on the books that says you cannot tell a citizen they can’t carry a weapon. Even designated soft security zones. What does that mean? It means the designated free speech zones, the parade route that’s scheduled, the protest areas and speakers’ platforms outside the venue, you’ll be permitted to carry.

And this seems absolutely antithetical to a safe and secure environment, and the fact that one state’s interpretation of the constitution somehow overrides the need to secure a national security special event. I’m sure astounds many, and I’m sure particularly those outside the country looking at us.

Like we’re crazy.

CHAKRABARTI: So taking us back to Butler for a second, again, just really leaning hard on your law enforcement experience here, Frank, another thing regarding the Secret Service response that I’m curious about is, of course, the second, the first shot was fired. Everyone saw from the video, Secret Service agents immediately leaping to the former president’s aid, covering him with their bodies. That was an almost instantaneous response. It seemed textbook to me. Thereafter, though, it’s hard for me to understand what happened, because a couple of seconds later, after more shots had been fired and maybe, a minute or so later, everyone stands up, they’re still surrounding Donald Trump, protecting him with their bodies.

But there’s that moment where in the audio we hear Trump say wait, and he then pumps his fist to tell the crowd that he’s okay. Is that protocol?

FIGLIUZZI: Yeah, you’ve got this right. Look, the banner, the so called red, white and blue bunting on the floor beneath the podium.

You can see it clearly is not wood or fabric. It’s actually heavy steel. So first order of business, Trump has been trained by the Service to get down, hit the deck and get behind that steel. That happened correctly. They piled on top of him. That happened correctly. There was a quick check for other injuries.

And then you can hear a Secret Service or agent or more saying shooter is down. That’s the signal that they’re okay to get up. But that’s a problem, because we then have a protectee while shielded from gunfire, Secret Service not knowing if there’s another shooter out there who is now popping up, head exposed, pounding his fist in the air and asking for his shoes.

We also saw a great deal of effort being made to retrieve the red MAGA hat on top of the president and try to bring that with them. All while there’s very much a shooting concern ongoing. So I think it took way too long to get them into what they call the tank, the armored limousine. I don’t understand that.

In fact, agents are trained to pick up and carry and drag their protectee if necessary, to safety. So I’m sure this will all be a part of the investigation. Joe Biden, President Biden has ordered an independent investigation of what happened that day, and all of this will be covered.

CHAKRABARTI: So Frank hang on here for a second, because of course, all of this is happening in the larger context of the very polarized and heated political rhetoric that we’ve been hearing in this country for the past decade. In fact, the last time I believe we had you on the show was in the wake of January 6th, when we talked about how that rhetoric is inflaming the possibility for sharp rise in domestic terrorism.

So just yesterday, President Joe Biden addressed Americans from the Oval Office talking about the kind of heated rhetoric. And he says, in his words, that it’s time to, quote, cool down.

JOE BIDEN: We cannot, we must not go down this road in America. We’ve traveled before throughout our history. Violence has never been the answer.

Whether it’s with members of Congress of both parties being targeted in the shot, or a violent mob attacking the Capitol on January 6th, or brutal attack on the spouse of former Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, or information and intimidation on election officials, or an attempted assassination on Donald Trump.

There is no place in America for this kind of violence, for any violence, ever. Period. No exceptions. We can’t allow this violence to be normalized.

CHAKRABARTI: Joining us now is Robert Pape. He’s a professor of political science at the University of Chicago and director of the Chicago Project on Security and Threats.

His current work focuses on political violence, political terrorism, and the politics of unipolarity. Professor Pape, welcome to On Point.

ROBERT PAPE: Thanks for having me.

CHAKRABARTI: You’ve been researching this for quite some time, and particularly American attitudes towards politically violent rhetoric and political violence.

We’ll talk about what lawmakers are saying in a moment, but what have your findings been on how much political violence has been normalized in this country?

PAPE: For the past 3 years, I’ve been conducting nationally representative surveys of support for political violence in the United States.

These are conducted, fielded by NORC at the University of Chicago, one of the most respected polling agencies on the planet, highly reliable surveys, margins of error well under 3% and over a dozen. Started doing this in the spring of 2021 and what we see, particularly in the last year, is rising support for political violence on both sides of the aisle.

So our most recent survey was fielded, just the end of June. So literally just two and a half weeks ago, and it found that 10% of American adults, that’s the equivalent of $26 million Americans, support the use of force to prevent Donald Trump from becoming president. Now that had obvious implications to me right away about the possible assassination attempts against Donald Trump.

I was briefing law enforcement literally last week about this. I wish that we could have gone faster in terms of those briefings, but what we saw on Saturday, I’m sorry to say, was simply the manifestation of what we found in our most recent survey. Let me just stop there and there’s more to tell you.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. So we have a break that we have taken in a minute and a half. I definitely want to hear more, but about that 10% that you talked about that supported using violence to prevent Trump from becoming president. I think you also had a fact on how many of those Americans may be gun owning Americans.

PAPE: Yeah. We asked lots of questions. So these are not coming from other surveys. So it’s directly related to our survey. A third of those, who 26 million already are gun owners, obviously more could buy guns. 24% think that when police are attacked, they deserve it. So these are folks who are highly aggressive toward police.

They’re highly, they’re dangerous. 40% have already been involved in protests in the last 12 months. So these are active, dangerous, they’re a minority, so I don’t want to paint the picture that this is a majority of Americans, but nonetheless 26 million is a rather sizable minority, and unfortunately, we’re seeing the results of what happens when political violence becomes supported in the mainstream of our public.

Part III

CHAKRABARTI: Let me just play a moment here from Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, who spoke to NBC’s Meet the Press with Kristen Welker just yesterday.

BERNIE SANDERS: A couple of months ago, my office right here in Burlington, Vermont with seven, I was not there at the moment, but there was seven staff members, that was almost burned down by somebody who was in jail right now.

Seven people could have been burned alive. So yeah, I am familiar with political violence in all its forms. The bottom line is what we need as a nation, what a democracy is about, is not radical rhetoric. What it is about is a serious discussion of where we are as a nation and how we go forward. And in a certain way, Kristen, politics should be boring.

CHAKRABARTI: Professor Pape, before the break, you talked about that 10% of Americans that you’ve surveyed who said they would support using violence to stop Donald Trump from becoming president again. Is there a mirror image on the other side in terms of the percentage of Americans who would support using violence to stop Joe Biden or Democrats?

PAPE: Yes, there is. So we also found again, this survey was done at the end of June, just a few weeks ago, that 7% of American adults, that’s the equivalent of 18 million American adults, support the use of force to restore Donald Trump to the presidency, half of that group already owns guns. A large fraction of that group won’t ask the question about whether those who stormed the Capitol, using that phrase stormed the Capitol, were patriots, said they were Patriots.

So this is also a very dangerous group. A group that has been involved in protest events here in the last short period of time. And so we have a situation in the country where increasingly, we are a tinderbox, and although each side wants to blame the other, it’s really important to see that this is happening on both sides of the aisle.

The attacks, as you’ve heard, we’ve also done a big study at my center on attacks against members of Congress, both Republican and Democrats are being attacked. It’s not just simply happening to one side of the aisle or the other. And this is happening increasingly in the last few years. We are in an era of political violence in the United States, the likes of which we have not seen since the 1960s. And it’s getting worse. And this is really important that we now take this seriously.

CHAKRABARTI: Frank Figliuzzi as both of we’ve been hearing since Saturday, a near unanimous bipartisan call to cool extreme political rhetoric. I want to talk with both of you about that for quite some time, because as I mentioned, I think the last time we had you on the show was after January 6h, when we were talking about the potential sharp rise in domestic terrorism, and whether, back then we were talking about whether then President Trump’s incitement or rallying of that crowd on January 6th, his words he used, contributed to the attack on Congress that happened thereafter.

So now that we’re hearing this bipartisan call for a cooling of rhetoric, what are your thoughts, Frank, now about whether we can really say that heated political rhetoric, does it direct, excuse me, does it contribute directly to this rise in the tinderbox that Professor Pape is talking about?

FIGLIUZZI: So I’m going to make a distinction here between what we don’t know about the Saturday incident and any motivation of this young man who may be very mentally disturbed. That still has played out. FBI, of course, saying no sign of motive yet. And by the way, I caution people to not jump to any political motive conclusions here.

I asked people to remember the horrible mass shooting in Las Vegas at a country music, open air concert, where we never determined the motive of the shooter. So that’s number one. Number two, is there a clear trail between violent rhetoric from Republican leadership and a violent in violent events.

You bet, and we probably run out of time, but they include everything from the man in Cincinnati, Ohio, who believed in the MAGA cause and tried to breach security at an FBI field office and wound up dead. … Pointed a weapon at arresting FBI agents who was a MAGA proponent threatening to kill President Biden.

He died that day. We could go on and on. The El Paso shooter at the Walmart who believed the Brown invader rhetoric coming from President Trump, the Buffalo grocery store shooter. So of course, yes, there is a documented trail. I think that Joe Biden’s, President Biden’s speech has indeed taken the right step.

He was toning it down, but also subtly reminding his audience that there is violent rhetoric and inciting rhetoric coming from the far right, and we’ve all got to stop it. I’m a realist here. So having studied terrorism groups and even cults, I can tell you it’s the leader that has to make the change, that is it.

It won’t happen without candidate Trump totally denouncing violence and everybody will be watching him. I can tell you, I was on a call with the FBI and the attorney general. For the media over the weekend and the FBI said to us they have seen a sharp spike in violent rhetoric online and it’s troubling them deeply.

CHAKRABARTI: Professor Pape, with that in mind, I definitely take your point that in terms of who is being attacked, we have members of Congress, of both parties, judges, who’ve been nominated by various presidents. The list goes on and on. This is a very troubling and delicate moment in this country.

But in terms of the political rhetoric that might feed into that, members of the GOP over the weekend were pointing to a meeting in which President Biden said it’s time to get past the debate and put a bullseye on Donald Trump’s back, perhaps the president’s regretting his choice of words right now.

But is the intensity of the violent rhetoric between Republicans and Democrats that we’ve been hearing over the past years, truly symmetrical or not?

PAPE: It’s hard to draw direct equivalence, but what, let me tell you that for almost 2 years now, I’ve been pushing very hard the idea of bipartisan opposition to political violence, your listeners can go to the Boston Globe and find an op-ed by me in the Boston Globe laying out in detail the need for bipartisan opposition by Republicans and Democrats together. And I’ve also conducted at our center, the Chicago Project on Security and Threats, messaging studies about what that message should be.

I have been briefing lawmakers on this for long period of time. And in fact, many people have been, I have to tell you, dismissing it in the media, saying you’re never going to get the Republicans and Democrats to come together. You’re starting to see that now. And it’s important because there really is hard evidence, that just as rhetoric can escalate, violent rhetoric and incendiary rhetoric can escalate support for political violence. Calming rhetoric can deescalate.

Now, maybe not go all the way to zero, but it is something that can really happen. Now, the reason politicians don’t do it is because they have to speak to their own supporters. It’s not, it’s easy for a Democrat to criticize violence from Republican side and vice versa. The really hard thing is for people, politicians, to criticize people who they want votes from.

Because those things are intention. However, you are seeing it now. You’re seeing it just in the last few days. You’re even seeing Donald Trump talking about rewriting his speech at the RNC to stress unity. Now, this is a moment. Maybe this moment can’t hold together very long. We don’t have a crystal ball, but this is very important.

Because we don’t have that many tools to really diminish political violence once it’s in the mainstream. As you just heard from Frank, we don’t have enough security to put a SWAT team on every corner. And there are five, there are 535 members of Congress now who are potential targets, and they don’t have all Secret Service security and so forth.

So we really have a situation in the country where we can’t get out of this by simply having security in that personal sense. We really need to appeal to political solutions as difficult as they may be.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. And to that point, I just want to play an example of why it is going to be such a challenge.

And both of you are saying we’ll have to see, right? We’ll see what happens with former president Trump’s speech at the RNC later this week, who knows what might happen a week or two from now. At this moment, we’re hearing those calls for unity. For example, here’s Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton, the Republican from Arkansas, who is condemning violence on CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday.

TOM COTTON: It has no place in America or in the American political tradition. Robust, strong campaigns, contrasting ideas between candidates and parties, of course, is central to American democracy. But we settle those differences through political debates and through elections. We don’t settle them through violence.

CHAKRABARTI: So Senator Cotton there saying Americans can have different beliefs. We settle them through debate. But just a couple of months ago, same senator, Senator Cotton in April was on Fox News. He was asked about pro-Palestinian protesters who had blocked San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge that day.

And here’s what Cotton recommended that people do to those protesters.

COTTON: If something like this happened in Arkansas on a bridge there, let’s just say I think there’d be a lot of very wet criminals that have been tossed overboard, not by law enforcement, but by the people whose road they’re blocking. They glued their hands to a car or the pavement.

Probably pretty painful to have their skin ripped off. But I think that’s the way we’d handle in Arkansas. And I’ve encouraged most people, take matters in their own hands.

CHAKRABARTI: So I offer that just as to how casual and normalized political rhetoric does rely on violent imagery. And it’s been so profoundly normalized in this country that I have one more example.

This is from June 30th. Lieutenant Governor and current GOP gubernatorial nominee Mark Robinson. From North Carolina, he was a guest at Lake Church’s Sunday morning worship in White Lake, North Carolina. He spoke at length about how, quote, socialists and communists and quote, people who want to cancel you and close down your businesses are trying to take away the audience’s freedoms.

And here’s how Robinson recommended that be dealt with.

MARK ROBINSON: Some liberal somewhere is going to say that sounds awful. Too bad. Get mad at me if you want to. Some folks need killing. It’s time for somebody to say it. It’s not a matter of vengeance. It’s not a matter of being mean or spiteful. It’s a matter of necessity.

We have wicked people doing wicked things, torturing and murdering and raping, time to call out those guys in green or those boys in blue and have them go handle it. And you start handling our business again, because guys, what I said at the beginning about you getting in your cars, listening to your radio, putting on what you want to put on and saying what you want to put on.

Keep thinking about it. Don’t you feel it slipping away?

CHAKRABARTI: That’s Mark Robinson, Lieutenant Governor and current nominee from the Republican Party for the governorship of North Carolina. Professor Pape, I offer those as an example because of the one reason why I am a little concerned or a lot concerned that this moment may not last, is because violent political rhetoric we’ve seen over the past decade has been so effective for lawmakers in getting elected.

That we’ve gotten to the point where we have a Republican GOP gubernatorial nominee saying someone has to say it, but people need, some people need killing. It seems very dubious that folks would walk away from that.

PAPE: Let me give you a reason why they might, which is our surveys also find that between 75% and 80% of all Americans, that’s 75% of Republicans, 75% of Democrats abhor political violence.

That is, there’s true. There are radical wings. And when we do focus groups, when we actually ask text boxes, they really are pretty adamant about supporting political violence. It’s not just false box checking, but there is a middle here that’s huge. That’s 75% to 80%. Now at the moment, that’s cut up.

It’s cut up politically. It’s also cut up in the media. But what that means is there is a hunger in the country for condemning political violence. Now the media plays a role. I’ve been on the media here a hundred times in the last year. So I do this a lot. And the media is extremely skittish.

I have to tell you, about playing the clips that you just played, but when they do, there is an amazing pushback from that 75% or 80%. I think the media is basically not so much complicit, but getting the calculation wrong, they’re trying to say we don’t want to scare the public and so forth.

I’m sorry, but this is happening and happening for years. And by pointing out to the public here the 80% to the 75% and 80%, the part that they may not want to hear exactly, that helps them to know they need to push back. And not just on politicians, when they’re sitting and having coffee and watching and somebody says gee, I wish something bad would happen to so and here, and then there’s a snicker and so forth.

That’s not acceptable. That’s not okay in our current environment. This, what you just played is extremely helpful to that 75%, 80% of the public that truly abhors political violence. They simply need to know that this is more of an issue today than at any time in their lifetimes.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. And it does not have to be normalized.

APE: Absolutely. The 75% or 80% are the normal. They need to know, they’ve got to step up too.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah, so Frank, we’ve got about 30 seconds left, I’m going to give you the last thought, but I think what Professor Pape is saying needs to be highlighted and underscored. We still have 75%, 80% of Americans who don’t want this in their politics.

They don’t want violence to become a normal part of everyday life in terms of how we just live with each other. That has to be meaningful, and I just want to give you the last thought here in the last 15 seconds, Frank.

FIGLIUZZI: Yes, indeed. Look we are allowing the extreme fringes on both sides of our political polarization to take the reins and drive the discussion and even the action.

We’ve got to stop that. The middle needs to come forward. The answer is not FBI, law enforcement. The answer is us. And there’s an opportunity to do that.