Analysis: Dinner shooting brings reminders of past era of political violence
For historians, the 1960s and 1970s provide particularly eerie parallels to the present. Both eras were marked by bitter political divides and the unsettling feeling that America's social fabric was being ripped apart.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was amiably chatting with guests at the annual White House Correspondents' Association dinner when shots rang out . Amid the ensuing chaos as dinner attendees took cover, Kennedy's security detail rushed his table. One agent shielded Kennedy with his body while others hustled the secretary of health and human services out of the Washington Hilton ballroom and through a maze of service corridors to safety.
Kennedy's father, Robert F. Kennedy, was assassinated in 1968 in a hotel ballroom in Los Angeles. The echoes of another period of political violence were unmistakable. For a country already on edge, the harrowing scene served as a bridge back to another volatile era when political assassinations and violence regularly shattered the American sense of order – the late 1960s and '70s.
There's much we still don't know about the motives of alleged shooter Cole Tomas Allen , who traveled across the country by train, like some 19th century conspirator in an alleged plot to assassinate President Trump and other members of his Cabinet . Court documents suggest that Allen may fall into a pattern of disaffected men with political grievances, acting as lone wolves and looking to strike out against the very foundation of the state.
Trump has now been the target of three would-be assassins – a number believed to exceed the attempts on any previous president's life. That fact alone should inspire at least a degree of national soul searching about the current spree of political violence. It raises the uncomfortable question of what happens when violence becomes normalized – and unstable people act out during unsettled times.
"Violence and politics have been central to the American experience since the birth of the republic," said Steven Hahn, a New York University history professor whose latest book "Illiberal America" examines extremist impulses in U.S. history.