Donald Trump: Recording of 911 calls even show residents are reporting that the migrants are walking off with the town's geese.

Brooke Gladstone: Except they're not. From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger. On this week's show, the Trump campaign's vicious lies about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, are having real-world consequences.

Male Reporter 1: They are living in fear here. The threats of bombings and shootings have forced the closure of schools and city buildings for days.

Brooke Gladstone: Plus, while President Biden says that the assassination attempt on Donald Trump isn't who we are as a country, the numbers say otherwise.

Matthew Dallek: It's hard to argue that assassination is not part of America's political heritage when we see at least a quarter of all American presidents either having been killed or nearly assassinated.

Micah Loewinger: It's all coming up after this.

[music]

Micah Loewinger: From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I'm Micah Loewinger.

Brooke Gladstone: I'm Brooke Gladstone. Now, two attempts have been made on Donald Trump's life, leading to accusations from across the MAGA universe that it is Democratic rhetoric, specifically, the charge that Trump threatens democracy, that is putting his life at stake. Here's a recent exchange between White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre and Fox News White House reporter Peter Doocy.

Karine Jean-Pierre: The President has always been very clear-eyed about the threat the former president represents to our democracy. Just think about January 6. January 6, we have to be honest with the American people when we see those types of threats.

Peter Doocy: How many more assassination attempts on Donald Trump until the President and the Vice President and you pick a different word to describe Trump other than "threat"?

JD Vance: No one has tried to kill Kamala Harris in the last couple of months.

Brooke Gladstone: Here's JD Vance.

JD Vance: Two people now have tried to kill Donald Trump in the last couple of months. I'd say that's pretty strong evidence that the left needs to tone down the rhetoric and needs to cut this crap out.

Brooke Gladstone: Show a little restraint like they do.

Donald Trump: Kamala Harris is a radical California liberal. She destroys everything she touches. If she wins, your finances and your country will never recover. You're never going to recover.

Brooke Gladstone: Both Harris and President Biden have been forthright in condemning the assassination attempts, actual political violence of any kind, while the Trump team, especially Trump, who has been treated very badly, has been forthright in condemning violence against himself. In recent weeks, I've been pondering Biden's frequent exhortation that-

President Joe Biden: -an assassination attempt is contrary to everything we stand for as a nation. Everything. It's not who we are as a nation.

Brooke Gladstone: When it comes to the surge of politically-inflicted violence over the last, I don't know, eight years or so, I think maybe it is.

Female Reporter 1: Two brothers beat a sleeping homeless man in Boston. One of them telling police, "Donald Trump was right. All these illegals need to be deported." The victim was in the country legally.

Female Reporter 2: Election officials across this country have been under attack since 2020, falsely accused of conspiring to steal or rig the last presidential election.

Male Reporter 2: With elections officials in five states receiving letters containing a white powder that, in some cases, was found to be the deadly drug fentanyl.

Micah Loewinger: I'll add to that list the judges and judicial aides working on the various Trump trials, libraries and hospitals targeted by prominent far-right activists, and, of course, children who happen to live in a city smeared by the former president and his running mate.

Female Reporter 3: Tonight, Springfield experiencing even more bomb threats after a week of being in the national spotlight.

Micah Loewinger: At time of recording, at least 35 bogus threats against elementary and middle schools, a university, a community center, government buildings, and private homes in Springfield. It all started when a resident of Springfield posted in a Facebook group that she had heard that her friend's daughter's cat had been slaughtered by a Haitian neighbor, a false claim amplified by neo-Nazi groups, JD Vance, and Donald Trump before the Facebook poster walked it back.

Female Reporter 4: Now saying she had no firsthand knowledge of any such incident, Lee telling me, "I messed up royally."

Micah Loewinger: A Wall Street Journal investigation this week found that on September 9th, hours before the presidential debate, a campaign staffer working for JD Vance called Springfield's city manager to ask point blank if the Haitian pet rumors were true. He said, "No, there's no evidence," but the campaign pushed the lie anyway.

Donald Trump: They're eating the pets.

Micah Loewinger: Since then, Trump, Vance, and their supporters continue to fan the flames.

Female Reporter 5: Now, people are sharing this video that appears to show police body camera footage of a woman being arrested for eating a cat as proof that the Haitian immigrants are actually doing this, but is that true?

Micah Loewinger: No, the woman in that video was neither Haitian nor living in Springfield.

Donald Trump: A recording of 911 calls even show residents are reporting that the migrants are walking off with the town's geese. They take in the geese.

Micah Loewinger: That lie was based on viral photos of a Black man carrying roadkill in Columbus, Ohio, which is completely legal.

Male Reporter 3: A Springfield resident who claimed her cat, Miss Sassy, was taken by her Haitian neighbors now acknowledges the cat was hiding in her basement.

Micah Loewinger: Again, Vance knows he's lying. He told CNN as much this week.

JD Vance: If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that's what I'm going to do.

Micah Loewinger: Macollvie Neel is a special projects editor at The Haitian Times, an online publication aimed at documenting the Haitian diaspora. She said that she and her colleagues had felt trouble brewing long before these recent events.

Macollvie Neel: As we watch the new waves of Haitian immigrants come in through Latin America, in the course of covering that movement of Haitians across the US, we came upon stories about racism and discrimination. We knew there was definitely tension boiling in many of these towns.

Micah Loewinger: Tell me about what you've been hearing from Haitian immigrants in Springfield. What kinds of stories have they been telling you?

Macollvie Neel: The story that sticks out the most for me. This particular woman had been living in Springfield for some time over the past year or so. She's not sure if it was tied to the unfortunate death and killing of Aiden Clark, who's the little boy who was unfortunately killed in a bus accident. After that, she started feeling like she wasn't safe because, at least twice, she caught on camera folks who came in and broke her windows. Once, they threw acid on her car. Meanwhile, her next-door neighbor, who's also Haitian, his home had the smoke bomb thrown into it twice to the point where he can't live there anymore.

Micah Loewinger: On September 11th, shortly after the presidential debate where we heard candidate Donald Trump amplify these bogus cats and dogs claims, you published a piece called Haitian Families in Ohio Under Attack as Racist Claims Spread. Your piece went viral on the conservative web, across social media. It was cited in mainstream news. Tell me about that piece and the response that it provoked.

Macollvie Neel: Early that morning, I spoke with a couple of people there who told me that after that night, things had really escalated even beyond what I had described earlier. The parents were saying, "I don't think I should send my kids to school based on what I'm seeing people are saying on these websites." Because our mission is to tell the story of Haitians and Haitian Americans, that's the story that I went with. I wanted to show the contrast of the real consequences of words like the one the former president was using, what impact that had on regular people who were being targeted.

Micah Loewinger: What kind of response did you get from that story?

Macollvie Neel: This is one if not the most viral stories we've ever had at The Haitian Times. Since that first story, the white supremacist issues warning story, I started getting hate mail. Within a few days, I had an email greeting me in my inbox as N-word. That was just the subject of the email. We thought that would be the end of it. Little did we know, though, that they were really trying to intimidate us. They somehow got my information. I was swatted just this past Monday. They sent police to my house, saying that someone had been murdered there.

Micah Loewinger: To be clear, when you say you were swatted, you mean that police showed up at your home thinking that you had committed a crime, putting you in a potentially very dangerous situation?

Macollvie Neel: Not potentially, Micah. They put me in a dangerous situation. You know the history of police and Black people in this country as are Black women in this country. Any interaction that is not planned with the police gives me anxiety. To have them actually come up into my house, ring the doorbell multiple times, and say, "We're looking for someone who had been murdered in your house," this one shook me because I didn't anticipate that the story would follow me from Springfield to my home in this way. Then I found out, it wasn't just me that this was done to.

Someone else we were working with had also been swatted where the police came to her house in the middle of the night, scaring her entire family. That is just not okay. That is the type of real-world, real-life consequence I'm talking about of these words and rhetoric. These are not harmless, victimless crimes where people's feelings might be hurt. This is a situation where I could have been shot and killed by the police because they weren't expecting me to be at home or they might have been on high alert because they thought a crime had been committed there. They put my life in danger.

Micah Loewinger: I'm so sorry you had to go through that. One consequence of hateful lies about an immigrant community going so viral is that it might be the first thing that Americans think of when they think of the Haitian diaspora. Can you just give me a sense of the types of headlines and stories that were important to your readers before all of this started?

Macollvie Neel: A lot of the headlines that our people reacted to the most have to do with Haiti. At the end of the day, that's the ancestral homeland. That's what brings us all together. Our audience loves seeing stories about Haitians building the canal at the river shared with the Dominican Republic to irrigate their farmland. People love the secrets to longevity from a Haitian centenarian. They love stories about the Haitian food trucks that you can find all over the Midwest, in Detroit, in Minnesota, in different places. Stories that help people stay connected to Haiti because so many of us can't travel there safely right now are the types of stories our audience really enjoyed.

Micah Loewinger: Since you reported these stories on Springfield, it seems like people out there really want to make it harder for you to do your job? Is it working? Have these threats made you think twice about the work that you do?

Macollvie Neel: It's made me think twice about how I protect myself and my family, but not about the need for the work that I do. In fact, I think it's even more important for more people to do the type of work that we're doing in covering ethnic immigrant communities across America. Because the thing is, we've seen the numbers. By 2050, the United States will be majority minority.

That means there are going to be more ethnic and immigrant communities than we've ever seen before. That means there are going to be more space and opportunity for more Haitian Times organizations, if you will. You can just replace Haitian with any other nationality or ethnicity to tell the stories of their people from their own lens instead of relying on nation media to do it for them. This shows me more of why we exist.

Micah Loewinger: Macollvie, thank you very much.

Macollvie Neel: You're welcome. Thank you, Micah.

Micah Loewinger: Macollvie Neel is the special projects editor at The Haitian Times and author of the recent article, Haitian Families in Ohio Under Attack as Racist Claims Spread.

[music]

Brooke Gladstone: Coming up, the normalization of political violence in America.

Micah Loewinger: This is On the Media.

[music]

Micah Loewinger: This is On the Media. I'm Micah Loewinger.

Brooke Gladstone: I'm Brooke Gladstone. Currently, candidate Trump seems to be trolling for new scapegoats in preparation for what he most fears. Thursday, before the American-Israeli Council, he creepily chose this hardy perennial.

Donald Trump: If I don't win this election, and the Jewish people would really have a lot to do with that if that happens, because at 40%, that means 60% of the people are voting for the enemy.

Brooke Gladstone: Quick fact-check. He said only 40% of American Jews support him. Pew Research Center found it's actually only 34%, but who's counting? The point is, here and everywhere, the wheels have come off. What passes for political speech and threatening marginalized groups is just another tool. No, though we hear hatred emanating from both sides, it isn't really a bipartisan issue, and there's no point pretending it is.

Donald Trump: Well, I certainly don't incite violence. I don't condone violence and I don't talk about violence. If you see somebody getting ready to throw a tomato, knock the crap out of them, would you? Seriously.

[crowd cheers]

Donald Trump: I promise you, I will pay for the legal fees. I promise. I promise. We're not allowed to punch back anymore. I love the old days. You know what they used to do to guys like that when they were in a place like this? They'd be carried out on a stretcher, folks. I'd like to punch him in the face, I'll tell you.

[crowd cheers]

Donald Trump: Are we having a good time? USA, USA.

Brooke Gladstone: Lilliana Mason is a professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University and co-author with Nathan Kalmoe of Radical American Partisanship. Her research looked at the three forces that most encourage a growing tolerance for political violence and the public support for it, namely rhetoric, culture, and an aggressive Republican coalition that seems to encourage it.

Lilliana Mason: What we were looking at was to what extent Americans approve of using violence to achieve political goals. We found generally that relatively low numbers of Americans approve of it, but sometimes it gets up to 20%, above 20%, which is an uncomfortable number.

Brooke Gladstone: A number significantly up from 2017 when she started asking survey participants to respond to these questions.

Lilliana Mason: If you are a Republican, the question you read is, "Democrats are not just worse for politics. They're downright evil. Democrats are a danger to the United States and its people. Even Democrats don't deserve to be treated like humans because they behave like animals." Of course, Democrats read questions that said, "Republicans are not just bad for politics, et cetera."

Brooke Gladstone: The percentage of Americans who believe that violent retaliation is justified gets even higher if they believe their political opponent started it.

Lilliana Mason: In 2019, we saw that number go from 20%-ish to 40%-ish. We asked that, "What if they start at first question again in June of this year?" Now, it's 60% of Democrats and Republicans who are willing to say, "Okay, yes, if they start it first, then it's okay." Levels of people saying that it's okay to threaten and harass leaders and other people, the numbers for those spiked right around both of Trump's impeachments, both in his 2019 impeachment and 2021 impeachment right after January 6th. Much larger numbers of Republicans thought it was okay to threaten and harass people based on their politics during those particular events.

Brooke Gladstone: You have found that rising violent rhetoric corresponds with a rise in violent plots, attacks, threats?

Lilliana Mason: Yes, we tend to be extremely responsive to what our political leaders say. This makes sense because they set the norms for us. One thing that we've seen, particularly since Trump became politically active, was this increasing level of violent rhetoric coming from Trump himself and from the Republican Party, from Republican leaders in general. Prior to Trump, that type of language was really frowned upon and often would end a political career.

Brooke Gladstone: Do you have an example of someone's career blushed because of this kind of excess?

Lilliana Mason: There's the norms against crass rhetoric. For that one, I think of George Allen, who was running for Senate in Virginia. He famously called someone "Macaca" and that was it. He lost the election. People turned away from him immediately. He clearly knew that he had done something wrong. That was, "Yes, you mess up and you're finished." Everyone thought that would be the case with Trump, for example, with the Access Hollywood tape. He basically just said, "No, I'm not embarrassed. I'm not ashamed."

It's really important to remember that shame can be very bad, but it's a really powerful emotion precisely because it's the only way that our norms are enforced. We enforce laws with law enforcement. We enforce norms with people and feeling shame and feeling like, "Oh, I went too far. I did something wrong." That's how we police ourselves in our language and each other and what we consider to be normal. When our leaders are providing us an example of shamelessness, then it opens the door for the rest of us.

Brooke Gladstone: One data point that really shocked me was that in 2020, ABC News identified more than 50 criminal cases in which the defendants invoked Trump's name to explain their own violent acts or threats of violence or assaults.

Lilliana Mason: Yes, a lot of the people, even at January 6th, were saying, "If he had told us to stop, I would have stopped." There's video of people from January 6th talking to each other and saying, "Should we keep doing this?" They say to each other, "Well, he didn't say to stop."

Brooke Gladstone: Then when he sort of did, the shaman guy said, "We got to go now because he said to stop."

Lilliana Mason: Exactly. The second there was a hint of him saying, "Stop," they were done.

Brooke Gladstone: Political rhetoric, that's force number one.

Lilliana Mason: Yes.

Brooke Gladstone: Force number two is culture. That can also foster violence.

Lilliana Mason: When we look at these attitudes, for example, about violence in the electorate, there's relatively similar levels of approval of violence among both Democrats and Republicans, around 20%-ish. What the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI and other federal agencies have found is that actual political violence, usually, in the form of domestic terrorism, that is almost entirely coming from right-wing extremists. Culture helps us explain, why is it that we see more actions on the right? Part of it is gun culture, but the distribution of weapons is largely towards more right-wing leading people.

Brooke Gladstone: Some studies have found that nowadays, people identify with parties more than any other identifier, even more than religion or race.

Lilliana Mason: This is something that I've been looking into for a number of years. Part of the reason Democrats and Republicans just seem to hate each other so much is that their partisan identities are increasingly connected with other very important social identities like racial identities or religious, geographical identities. When we link all of these other identities to our partisan identity, our sense in the voting booth becomes, "Not only am I voting for which policies I think are the best for Americans or what I think the role of government should be." Instead, we're thinking, "If my party loses this election, then my religion loses. The people that I associate with, we all lose." That creates opportunity for much bigger clashes than we would otherwise associate with politics.

Brooke Gladstone: It's basically a proxy for everything else. What about social isolation, though?

Lilliana Mason: In the 1950s, you would go to your local bowling alley or your Elks club or your church or your grocery store. You'd run into people from the other party, part of your community. It's really hard to dehumanize somebody buying bread at the store. What we've seen is that a lot of Americans have moved into politically homogeneous neighborhoods. In a red state, Democrats will all live in one neighborhood together. Vice versa in blue states.

At the neighborhood level, we've become politically segregated. That segregation has made it harder for us to think of our political opponents as having things in common with us. Also, we are living in an information environment online where we can decide not to read information that makes the other side look good and only read information that makes our side look good.

Brooke Gladstone: Tell me about the Bridging Divides Initiative.

Lilliana Mason: Bridging Divides Initiative is a group, they're out of Princeton University, interested in trying to identify real-world examples of political violence and to map those events. They decided to start asking the people who are targeted, so asking local government officials to what extent that they had actually experienced threats and harassment. Between 2022 and 2024, they were seeing basically around 40% of these local officials have been harassed.

Around 20% of them have been threatened. Very low numbers have actually been attacked. The people who tend to be threatened and harassed the most are women and people of color. One of the reasons this is important is that by harassing and threatening these local elected officials, there is a real intimidation effect. People do leave their jobs because of it, right? People will just say, "I sign up for this to help out. I didn't sign up to have my kids threatened."

Brooke Gladstone: What does all this portend for the security of election officials? Do you foresee a rerun of January 6?

Lilliana Mason: Well, we haven't seen any indication that these threats are decreasing. Almost certainly, it will actually ramp up as we get closer to the election itself. My personal prediction is that there will not be another January 6 in Washington, DC. A lot of people went to jail, right? There were real consequences for that. You can certainly imagine that Washington, DC, will be basically turned into a fortress during this election.

Brooke Gladstone: Because Biden will be president and he won't hesitate to call out the National Guard.

Lilliana Mason: Yes, exactly. What we're seeing now is that all of this energy is really focused at the state level. By the time January 6 happened, the states had already certified the elections. They had just sent their electoral votes to Washington. One other way to start dealing with losing an election earlier is to address it while the states are counting the votes.

I have vivid memories of armed people taking over state capitols during COVID because they didn't want to wear masks or have economic shutdowns. Those people still live in those places. One can imagine state capitols where the secretary of state is working and trying to make sure that they certify that election. That is going to be the place where we might see more violence this time around.

Brooke Gladstone: Let's stipulate that you found the most important factor that could diminish American support for political violence is responsible leadership from party leaders. You noted that after the second assassination attempt on Trump and campaign messages last Sunday, he called for unity and peace, but he hasn't actually denounced violence like President Biden and Vice President Harris have. You've done focus groups looking specifically at the impact of political leaders denouncing violence.

Lilliana Mason: We asked randomly assigned people to read the quote from either Donald Trump or Joe Biden that said something to the effect of, "Violence is never acceptable. I disavow violence." What we found was that the people that read that type of message were less approving of violence afterwards. They were more willing to actually act to prevent violence that if someone they knew was threatening violence that they would report them or intervene to try to stop them. This was just after reading one sentence from either Trump or Biden.

Brooke Gladstone: These were made-up sentences?

Lilliana Mason: No, these were real sentences that we had found from speeches that they had given at various times.

Brooke Gladstone: Was Trump's disavowal similarly impactful?

Lilliana Mason: It was.

Brooke Gladstone: Because they always seemed to be a little bit coming out of both sides of his mouth, but go ahead, tell me about that.

Lilliana Mason: We didn't give them the full context, right? We only gave them the sentence that disavowed violence. Then we could compare the Trump supporters who read the quote versus the Trump supporters who didn't read the quote. What we found was that the Trump supporters who read the quote were significantly less approving of violence. Those who didn't read it were just at the same level that they had always been. If he did tell his people to stop being violent, they would listen.

Brooke Gladstone: Right now, many people compare American politics to a tinderbox. What is the one principal way that we can prevent that fire from igniting or spreading?

Lilliana Mason: It's quite simple to reduce the temperature, and that is for the person who is advocating violence to stop doing that. It's simple, but it's not easy because Trump won't do it. In the absence of a leader, we all have to do it. We need regular people to start being more responsible in their political language and in how they talk to each other and the types of things that they allow to be said in their presence. It's a lot easier for a leader to do it and then everybody just follows along. If that leader won't do it, then it's up to the rest of us.

Brooke Gladstone: Lilliana, thank you very much.

Lilliana Mason: Thank you so much for having me.

Brooke Gladstone: Lilliana Mason is a professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University and the author, with Nathan Kalmoe, of Radical American Partisanship. According to Matthew Dallek, a historian and professor of political management at George Washington University, political violence is just part of the national character.

Matthew Dallek: The American past is shot through with political violence.

Brooke Gladstone: After all, the United States was born of revolution, built on slavery, and expanded by exterminating the First Nations that already lived here. In our formative years, we fought against Britain, against Mexico, and, of course, ourselves. In the early '60s and '70s, violence poured into the street from both sides of the political spectrum.

Matthew Dallek: It was coming on the far left as a reaction to the war in Vietnam. Also, after Martin Luther King was assassinated by a white supremacist in 1968, more than 100 American cities burned. One theory at the time was that that kind of violence in the '60s correlated with a society becoming more tumultuous. The other theory, which may be relevant to today, is that when government endured a crisis of legitimacy, when Americans were cynical about its ability to help the country solve problems, more Americans were willing to turn to the bullet.

Brooke Gladstone: What sorts of words were used in our past to help quell political violence?

Matthew Dallek: I'll give you an example. George H.W. Bush in 1991 gave a very vigorous denunciation of David Duke.

Brooke Gladstone: He was a grand wizard once for the Ku Klux Klan and he was running for a Louisiana governor.

Matthew Dallek: Exactly. George H.W. Bush very forcefully denounced his hatred and did, I think, what he could to try to rid the Klan and Duke out of the Republican Party.

George H.W. Bush: When someone asserts that the Holocaust never took place, then I don't believe that person ever deserves one iota of public trust. When someone has so recently endorsed Nazism, it is inconceivable that such a person can legitimately aspire to leadership. I believe that David Duke is an insincere charlatan attempting to hoodwink the voters of Louisiana.

Matthew Dallek: George W. Bush also tried to push back. A few days after 9/11, George W. Bush went to a mosque and said, "Islam is peace." John McCain in 2008 during a rally, a woman asked him basically a conspiratorial question about Barack Obama. McCain very quickly shut her down.

John McCain: No, ma'am. No, ma'am. He's a decent family man, citizen that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues. That's what this campaign is all about.

Matthew Dallek: This is not to say that the presidents Bush or John McCain have no blemishes on their record in terms of race, but it is to say there is a contrast between how they handled blatant racism within their ranks versus what we see today.

Brooke Gladstone: What do you make of the recent attempts on Trump's life? This really astonished me. You found that at least a quarter of American presidents have been killed or nearly killed by an assassin.

Matthew Dallek: Yes, of course, it depends on how you define nearly killed. A gun pointed at a president, a bullet fire that misses the president, an attempt to storm, let's say, Blair House in 1950 where Harry Truman, the president, was staying and very plausibly could have been killed. Reagan being shot in '81. It's at least a quarter. Part of it gets back to this idea of Americans were born as a country, as a revolt against the state, a view that government is the great oppressor. What we would call today, "the deep state," has animated some of these would-be or actual assassins in times past.

For example, in the second attempt to assassinate President Gerald Ford in September 1975, it was an anti-Vietnam War radical. Of course, in the United States, the easy access to firearms, particularly in the post-World War II era up through today, where cheap foreign imports of guns were readily available. Lee Harvey Oswald, John F. Kennedy's assassin, bought a mail-order rifle to assassinate Kennedy. Ever since the ban on assault weapons expired, most of these would-be assassins or assassins have semi-automatic assault rifles.

Brooke Gladstone: You say that the United States stands alone as the most politically violent of all industrialized democracies.

Matthew Dallek: In the modern era, the number of heads of state who have been nearly killed or assassinated, the United States is a leader of the pack. I think it's hard to argue that assassination is not part of America's political heritage.

Brooke Gladstone: Many politicians have blamed mental illness for these attacks. They argue that it's not representative of our society. You look at somebody like John Hinckley, who is trying to impress Jodie Foster, or you can go back to the time that Teddy Roosevelt took a bullet. It was fired by a former saloon keeper who said that the ghost of William McKinley had told him to avenge his death by killing Teddy.

Matthew Dallek: A lot of individuals who attempt to kill a president or commit another act of political violence are mentally ill, but that's not to say that those same people are not influenced by particular ideas within the political sphere that push them to take this heinous step.

Brooke Gladstone: Some pundits have wondered if the assassination attempts against Trump might help his election chances. It certainly seems to bolst his position with Christian supremacists who believe he has divine protection.

Matthew Dallek: What's interesting is that when presidents or people trying to be president, when they have been shot or almost shot, you would think that the country would rally behind them and that they would get some kind of political boost. In fact, it's actually been more the opposite. Teddy Roosevelt was shot in 1912, running for president on a third-party ticket, and he lost. 1950, Harry Truman. After being the target of an assassination attempt, his popular support continued to plummet. So much so, he didn't even run for election in 1952. Gerald Ford, 1975, two near-misses against him. In September of that year, he ran and lost, actually almost lost the nomination to Ronald Reagan in 1976.

Brooke Gladstone: Ronald Reagan?

Matthew Dallek: When Reagan was shot in 1981, the memories of the three major assassinations in the '60s were still very powerful in people's minds. Reagan almost died. When he survived, a lot of Americans felt relief that what happened to John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King did not happen to Reagan. On top of that, Reagan was really quite adept at using the assassination attempt to harness the outpouring of sympathy to push through his economic agenda. It later shaped his views about gun control. There's some evidence that the assassination attempt even shaped his views on nuclear war.

Brooke Gladstone: As a historian, looking back, how did the nation recover from those spasms of violence we've experienced throughout our history?

Matthew Dallek: The country never fully recovers. The country has never recovered from the assassination of John Kennedy or the assassination of Martin Luther King. People speculate about what happened if Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., had lived. I think that there are ways in which America's democratic society and its civic institutions do attempt to learn and process and channel into more positive ends some of these horrific events. I'm not saying that that does the job.

Brooke Gladstone: Yes, I don't think it does. [chuckles] If you were saying all of this 10 years ago, I'd go, "Yes, our institutions." I have now gone through a decade where I've slowly and painfully learned that our institutions can't save us. I'm inclined to think that this is less like a treatable disease and more like a recurring virus like herpes.

Matthew Dallek: [chuckles] The only quibble I would have with that is that sometimes, at least after Watergate, after the Vietnam War ended, the United States became less violent politically. There were absolutely episodes of violence, but there is a way at times in which American society, violence has almost burned itself out a little bit. It just becomes less prominent and less central.

Brooke Gladstone: Right, but the embers remain to be blown on and flare up again.

Matthew Dallek: The embers remain. It's also the structural forces that are in play. Look, one reason maybe that there were not violent acts around Trump's arraignment and his trials was that a lot of January 6 insurrectionists were in jail. That was an object lesson that if they're going to commit an act of political violence, they're going to pay a price, at least at the margins. Society, the judicial system, government leaders, corporations can push back on some of these things. It is something. Something's better than nothing.

Brooke Gladstone: Well, I appreciate that. Thanks very much.

Matthew Dallek: It's been great talking with you.

Brooke Gladstone: Matthew Dallek is a historian and a professor of political management at George Washington University.

Micah Loewinger: Coming up, how January 6 became the perfect recruiting tool for one of the largest militias in America.

Brooke Gladstone: This is On the Media.

[music]

Brooke Gladstone: This is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger. In any discussion of political rhetoric turned to real-world violence, January 6 looms large. To date, over 1,400 people have been charged with federal offenses for crimes committed that day, with more than 900 convictions so far. The militia groups at the center of the violence were catapulted into the national spotlight. The Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers became almost household brands, but one of America's largest militias was notably absent from the events in the coverage.

Joshua Kaplan is a reporter at ProPublica and author of the recent article, Armed and Underground: Inside the Turbulent, Secret World of an American Militia. He spoke to current and former members and pored through thousands of pages of leaked internal documents to trace the evolution of a powerful but largely invisible group called American Patriots Three Percent or AP3 led by a man named Scot Seddon.

Joshua Kaplan: He's not necessarily who you'd expect to lead a major paramilitary organization. He served in the army reserves as a young man, but he also bounced between jobs through his 20s, 30s, early 40s. He spent some time as the manager of a small-time rapper. He worked as a model, appearing on the covers of erotic novels, but he proved really adept at using social media to reach people and to bring them from message boards to actually engaging in real-world activities in his militia.

Micah Loewinger: On January 6, where were these militia guys?

Joshua Kaplan: AP3 was not a big-name presence on January 6 for a funny reason, which is that Scot Seddon and his deputies were focused on Biden's inauguration. Plenty of members went anyways, but they were under orders to not wear gear linking them to AP3. That didn't save them from the fallout from January 6. It's easy to forget at this point, but the immediate backlash to the capitol riot, even amongst MAGA conservatives, was incredibly intense. Militia members were losing friends over their role in the militia. They worried that they could get fired from their jobs.

Micah Loewinger: There was this bipartisan disgust with the events of January 6 directly after. Then we saw a cascade of different narratives that seemed to cast doubt on what we all plainly saw.

Donald Trump: Exactly how many of those present at the capitol complex on January 6 were FBI, confidential informants, agents, or otherwise working directly or indirectly with an agency of the United States government? People want to hear this.

Joshua Kaplan: In these files, you see the impact of that made explicit. Right after January 6, leaders in this militia were worried. By the summer of 2021, they're noticing that they're getting a new type of member. They're actually having people join now saying, "I've never been part of a militia before, but January 6 inspired me to join." You get to the point where they're bringing in as many as 50 new people a day applying to the militia.

Micah Loewinger: They were also making inroads with police and sheriff's departments, right?

Joshua Kaplan: They've had a lot of success. There are a lot of police officers around the country who were just members of the militia. Scot Seddon wasn't satisfied with that. He wanted more police and he wanted to move up the chain of command. They took a kind of bureaucratic approach to this at times. They actually sent out spreadsheets, the militia's rank and file, listing every sheriff in the country saying, "Reach out to your sheriffs in your area and mark down who's a Republican, who's friendly to us."

Micah Loewinger: The militia was also supercharged by illegal crossings at the southern border. You write, "Seddon had sounded a call to arms in late 2021." He wrote, "Our country is being invaded at the southern border, Haitians, Middle Easterners, South American invaders that are coming in." He had about 20 members preparing to deploy to a town on the Texas-Mexico border. He said he was seeking more volunteers. Tell me about what happened.

Joshua Kaplan: They had some trouble getting the numbers there because a lot of members didn't want to go if they couldn't kill migrants.

Micah Loewinger: People didn't want to go to the border if they couldn't kill migrants?

Joshua Kaplan: Yes, this gets to a larger schism that was happening in this group that tells us a lot about where the militia movement is right now, which is there is this heated running debate inside AP3 about if and when they should commit mass political violence. There's a contingent in the group that's against it that says, "Maybe sometime, but right now, let's focus on traditional politics." Then there's a group that really thinks that what we need to do is commit acts of terror. Reading through these files, it's hard to tell what's bluster and what's a serious, imminent threat. It got to the point where even longtime members of the group quit because they were scared by the number of people advocating for acts of terror.

Micah Loewinger: That's really disturbing.

Joshua Kaplan: What they actually did there, and they kept a presence at the border for at least a year and a half, is they led armed vigilante patrols in southern Texas where they would go around with semi-automatic rifles and catch migrants and turn them over to the authorities.

Micah Loewinger: Is that legal?

Joshua Kaplan: It was documented in these files of militia leaders saying that they were collaborating with Border Patrol agents and photographs of Border Patrol there taking over a group of migrants that the militia had rounded up. I reached out to the Border Patrol. They didn't comment on the alleged collaborations, but they did say that civilians involving themselves in this sort of activity is unlawful and dangerous.

Micah Loewinger: At the same time that these pretty horrific fantasies were playing out behind closed doors in public, AP3 under Scot Seddon's leadership was seeing the benefits of their public relations work and starting to wonder like, "How could we really ratchet this thing up?" which is how, in 2022, Seddon got the idea for creating a nonprofit called American Community Outreach Network.

Joshua Kaplan: His vision was this charity that he called, perhaps ironically, ACON. If you look at its website, it's a stock photo of a bunch of people of different races linking hands together. It was advertised as a kind of anodyne charity providing services to disadvantaged youth and relief in disaster zones. Internally, he was very explicit saying, "This is going to get us all rich. I want us to all, in two years, be on a yacht together because of this."

Micah Loewinger: He said that members would receive a 20% cut of any donations they brought in. Is that how nonprofits work? I don't know.

Joshua Kaplan: Exactly. As he framed it, this wasn't just a "get rich quick" scheme. This was going to be the way where they would have a reliable funding stream that could make the militia thrive in this post-January 6 era. Because if they didn't have to juggle their militia duties and their day jobs, if being in the militia could be a full-time pursuit, they'd be so much more effective at rounding up migrants and anything else that they thought they needed to be doing.

Micah Loewinger: In 2022, the group took a particular interest in the midterm elections. Seddon wrote, "This election is do or die for us."

Joshua Kaplan: Scot Seddon had this vision where members would fan around the country and stake out ballot boxes and prevent voter fraud from happening at these drop boxes for absentee ballots. As he framed it to them, "Sit outside and look scary so that people are intimidated and don't go and commit fraud."

Micah Loewinger: Commit voter intimidation. [chuckles]

Joshua Kaplan: This almost immediately went wrong. In Maricopa County, a member who had a little bit of a criminal record was sitting outside a ballot box with a tactical vest on and a handgun on his chest. He got in a confrontation with a woman. The sheriff's department arrived and the Department of Justice got involved and said that these sort of activities could constitute illegal voter intimidation. Nobody connected this guy back to AP3. If you're reading the coverage at the time, it seemed that this was a lone-wolf vigilante. The militia was able to keep themselves out of the spotlight and avoid anyone realizing that this was actually part of a concerted national operation.

Micah Loewinger: After the midterms, violent fantasies of a civil war percolated in the group's internal communications. Some unsavory rumors about Seddon started to spread there too.

Joshua Kaplan: Seddon said in a public résumé that he was a veteran of Operation Desert Storm. Around the turn of the year, a member got ahold of his discharge papers and revealed the somewhat less sexy truth. He was in the reserves. Of course, still honorable, but his active-duty tenure lasted five months and just consisted of him going through initial training.

This image of this experienced soldier, he used to get authority in the militia and get people to listen to him. He faced a lot of backlash, but things really started to go wrong for him in the spring as a rumor started to spread that law enforcement was investigating his ACON charity scheme. Leaders who had spent months pushing the charity started condemning it as this scam to put money in Seddon's pocket.

There was, in the spring, a mass defection. They didn't leave the movement, though. They either joined other militias or formed new ones. What used to be the AP3 chapter in Washington State is now its own militia operating independently. Scot Seddon hasn't gone away. He still has around 10 states under his command. Right now, we're looking at a version of AP3 that is fractured but is also, frankly, even harder to track.

Micah Loewinger: Earlier this month, Donald Trump vowed to free January 6 defendants if he's reelected.

Donald Trump: The moment we win, we will rapidly review the cases of every political prisoner unjustly victimized by the Harris regime. I will sign their pardons on day one. I will sign it on day one.

Joshua Kaplan: If he wins and goes through with that, experts are worried that the most extreme wing of the Republican Party is going to interpret that as a sort of political hunting license, which gets to, I think, the most important question underlying all of this, which is, are we going to look back at January 6 as the peak of militia violence in America or as just the prelude to something even more consequential? While one might take comfort in the fact that we haven't seen something like January 6 in the past three years, every expert I talked to said it's really too early to know the answer to that question. They think a lot is going to hinge on what happens in the November election.

Micah Loewinger: Josh, thank you very much.

Joshua Kaplan: Thank you so much for having me.

Micah Loewinger: Joshua Kaplan is a reporter at ProPublica and author of the recent article, Armed and Underground: Inside the Turbulent, Secret World of an American Militia. That's it for this week's show. On the Media is produced by Molly Rosen, Rebecca Clark-Callender, Candice Wang, and Katerina Barton.

Brooke Gladstone: Our technical director is Jennifer Munson. Our engineer is Brendan Dalton. Eloise Blondiau is our senior producer. Our executive producer is Katya Rogers. On the Media is a production of WNYC Studios. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger.

 

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