Journalist Dylan Byers wrote one of the most disturbing things I have read about the third known attempt to assassinate president Donald Trump. In the aftermath of the attempted shooting at a gala dinner, Byers and some colleagues adjourned to a local bar to regroup and watch the news coverage.
No one in the bar seemed to be aware anything had happened. When the journalists requested that CNN be switched on, after a short while, the bartender said it was against the bar’s policy to show political content so the channel was switched back to sports.
Byars contrasted this indifference with what things would have been like on March 30th, 1981 an hour or so after John Hinckley Jr shot and wounded president Ronald Reagan at the very same hotel. The bar would have been packed with people hanging on every word of the coverage. Now, people did not even bother to check their mobile phones for news.
Something is seriously awry in US culture that an attempted assassination of a president is just another day in Washington.
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It is not just in politics. Earlier in April a principal in Oklahoma, Kirk Moore, was crowned prom king. Despite being unarmed Moore had tackled and immobilised a former student carrying two guns who had entered the school in an attempt to cause another Columbine-style school shooting. Things are tough in Irish schools, and some principals do face violent students, but training to deal with active shooters is not considered an essential skill set.
The recriminations started immediately after the attempt to assassinate Trump, with Melania Trump calling for the firing of Jimmy Kimmel because he had made a joke a few days earlier about Melania having the glow of an expectant widow. She called it “hateful and violent rhetoric”.
This week former FBI director James Comey was charged over posting a picture on social media a year ago of seashells arranged to read ‘86 47’. Acting US attorney general Todd Blanche claimed it was an incitement to kill president Trump, the 47th president of the US.
The meaning of 86 is disputed, with some claiming it comes from a restaurant code for turfing out an unruly patron, while the Trump administration claims it means to kill.
Comey, who has a long history of conflict with Trump, deleted the picture a few days after posting it and repudiated any form of political violence.
Treating Comey’s seashell post as incitement to assassination helps nothing. Similarly, Kimmel’s comments, while crass and in poor taste, cannot possibly be construed as urging anyone to assassinate Trump. Satire and humour are essential parts of public debate. Distinctions must be made between crass comments, robust criticism, political commentary and incitement to violence or killing.
Attempting to fold them into one homogenous mass with exactly the same impact helps no one.
That is not to say that all speech is acceptable. The children’s rhyme that “sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me” is not true and never has been. In studies of genocide, for example, the use of dehumanising language is a recognised stage in creating the conditions for mass murder. When opponents are routinely described as vermin or subhuman, this has potentially lethal consequences.
Trump is well able to be extremely nasty, everything from rejoicing at the death of Rob Reiner to using the crimes of some illegal immigrants to dehumanise all of them. It is particularly bad when someone as powerful as a US president engages in this kind of inflammatory rhetoric. Yet self-righteously pointing only to the flaws of the other side just reinforces hunkering down behind barriers. The response to Charlie Kirk’s death in some quarters was viciously celebratory.
Announcing your delight at the violent deaths of political opponents may not be direct incitement to violence but it’s much closer than Kimmel or Comey’s contributions. It’s also ugly and degrading in itself.
Unsurprisingly, a January PRRI (Public Religion Research Institute) poll found that responsibility for political violence is perceived along partisan lines. Democrats overwhelmingly attribute most responsibility for political violence to right-wing groups (73 per cent), while Republicans attribute most responsibility to left-wing groups (72 per cent).
Scarily, the Skeptic Research Center published research in 2025 showing that Americans with graduate or professional degrees were the most supportive of political violence. Thirty-six per cent agreed that “If protesting something unjust, it’s reasonable to damage property”, while 40 per cent agreed “Violence is often necessary to create social change”.
The kind of apathy about and desensitisation to political violence that Byers experienced in the Washington bar creates conditions where it is easy for outright support of political violence to arise.
In such a volatile climate, complicated by the bizarre obsession with the right to bear weapons, it behoves everyone not just to watch their language but to constantly and clearly reject both dehumanisation and incitement to violence, no matter what their sources.
However, it remains important to make clear that robust criticism and mockery are not the same as urging murder and mayhem. We can have a culture of free speech without wishing violence and death upon each other.
