The attempted shooting at the White House correspondents’ dinner added to an ever expanding timeline of political violence in the United States. There have been at least six serious assassination attempts against Donald Trump since 2016 by domestic assailants. While US presidents have always been targets, the repeated targeting of Trump is part of a disconcerting trend of growing political violence in the United States. Yet the Trump administration has gutted the very programs meant to prevent and address such targeted violence and terrorism against elected officials.
Many datasets measure targeted violence, including one produced by the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, the START database and the Bridging Divides Initiative. Each has recorded upticks in political violence in the United States in recent years, largely driven by increasing partisan polarisation and perceptions that the “other side” is more violent and threatening.
Post-mortems of high-profile incidents and assassination attempts, like the attempted attack at the White House correspondents dinner, tend to focus on security breaches and inadequate security protocols. Even the alleged attacker’s leaked manifesto noted that there was “No damn security” and that, “I walk in with multiple weapons and not a single person there considers the possibility that I could be a threat. The security at the event is all outside, focused on protestors and current arrivals, because apparently no one thought about what happens if someone checks in the day before.”
But to truly understand what could have prevented such an attack, we have to consider even earlier measures. What could have been done to prevent and deter Cole Tomas Allen before he checked into the Washington DC Hilton? Or the many others who have engaged in violence as they were radicalising, isolating, considering and planning violence?
You cannot arrest and prosecute your way out of political violence and terrorism.
Quite a lot. The counterterrorism and countering violent extremism field and practice across many countries – spurred largely by previous policy innovation within the United States – has over the decades adopted a public health approach to extremist violence prevention, enacting frameworks that incorporated a three-tiered policy and programming approach. These are tailored to different levels of risk and stages of radicalisation to violence. It starts with the broad base of the pyramid, with primary prevention efforts, secondary intervention programming targeting those deemed at risk, and, when those fail, the pointy ended efforts at law enforcement and interdiction.
But the Trump administration has gutted federal programs and funding for extremist and targeted violence prevention – as well as intervention programming that had previously enjoyed bipartisan support.
Since returning to office last year, Trump has been systematically dismantling and undermining federal violence prevention efforts, pulling back funding that supported data collection, community intervention programs, and academic research – all of which existed to stop the political violence that has directly affected its own administration and its backers. The administration has used a sledgehammer approach to “efficiency”, with misapprehensions that these programs were politicised to focus on far-right actors, some of whom the administration counted as supporters.
Caught up in the DOGE meat grinder, the Department of Homeland Security’s Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships (CP3) was shut down. Federal research funding for the study of terrorism – and violent extremism and evaluations of prevention and intervention efforts – was also severely cut, with previously awarded grants cancelled. Federal funding for a longstanding database that collected comprehensive data on terrorism and targeted violence events in the United States, that helped drive program priorities and resourcing, was also withdrawn.
Bill Braniff, former director of CP3, who resigned in the wake of those cuts, testified to a Senate inquiry that, “although CP3 has been fully dismantled, research and recent experiences indicate that advancing a public health-informed approach is a cost-effective strategy to prevent targeted violence and terrorism.”
Instead, the Trump administration has relied exclusively on muscular, at times constitutionally questionable, law-and-order counterterrorism approaches. But decades of experience, evidence-based research, and evaluation of countering violent extremism programs have proven that you cannot arrest and prosecute your way out of political violence and terrorism.
Like with many things, prevention is the best cure. Interventions work best when applied before a credible threat emerges, to help identify and address root causes of radicalisation and extremism. The earlier the intervention, the more options are available to forestall danger.
