How do incidents of violence against politicians by Trump supporters compare to those by supporters of other politicians?

1. Recent incidents show a right‑leaning concentration of attacks

A string of high-profile attacks and plots since 2017 — the 2017 congressional baseball shooting, the 2020 plot to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, and the January 6, 2021 assault on the U.S. Capitol — are repeatedly linked in reporting to right-wing or pro‑Trump actors and militia networks, and commentators and analysts have documented that many of the most consequential physical assaults on officeholders in the 2017–2025 period trace to that milieu ^{[4] [5] [1]}.

2. Measured support for violence and the disconnect with incidents

Survey work yields a mixed picture: some national series show support for political violence present across the partisan spectrum and, in certain waves, marginally higher among Democrats (particularly in narrowly framed questions), while other surveys and public‑health–style studies find elevated endorsement and willingness to engage in violence among MAGA‑aligned Republicans — especially those who believe the 2020 election was stolen — a pattern that aligns with higher observed rates of armed pro‑Trump demonstrations and violent plots ^{[6] [2] [7] [3]}.

3. Misinformation, elite rhetoric and mobilization mechanics amplify risk

Analysts link the concentration of violent events among Trump supporters to a confluence of elite rhetoric that normalized extreme language, sprawling disinformation networks that converted grievance into targeted action, and organized online infrastructure that helped retask pro‑Trump mobilization into armed demonstrations and conspiratorial plots after the 2020 election ^{[1] [6] [8]}.

4. Perceptions, partisanship and counting the harm

Public opinion research shows a stark partisan divide over who is to blame for political violence: many Americans point to AI‑generated misinformation and leaders’ failure to condemn violent language, while Democrats are more likely than Republicans to single out Trump and MAGA as causal factors — 28 percent of Democrats explicitly named Trump or MAGA as a reason in one Pew summary ^{[9] [10]}. These perceptual gaps matter because targeted threats, death threats and intimidation reported by lawmakers have risen across the board, but members who have been publicly singled out by Trump or besieged in the MAGA context report repeated, severe harassment ^[11].

5. Counterexamples and the broader ideological spectrum

Scholars and fact‑checkers caution against portraying political violence as exclusively a right‑wing problem: research finds violence and extremist acts across the ideological spectrum, and some datasets record upticks in far‑left incidents in particular years, underscoring that partisan violence is not a one‑sided phenomenon ^{[12] [13]}. At the same time, multiple independent accounts emphasize that actual incident counts, armed protest rates and coordination with militias have been greater among pro‑Trump events in the period under study ^{[1] [3]}.

6. Limits of available data and what remains unsettled

Existing studies vary in definitions (endorsement vs. action), sampling frames and time windows, and many rely on surveys with differently worded questions that produce divergent estimates of “support” for violence; open questions remain about long‑term trends past 2025 and the causal weight of any single leader versus broader social drivers like weapon access, conspiracy subcultures and social media amplification ^{[2] [7] [8]}.

Conclusion

Weighing documented incidents, event analyses and multiple surveys, the balance of evidence in recent years points to a higher share of actual violent attacks and organized plots against politicians originating from pro‑Trump and associated right‑wing networks, even while scholarly polling shows episodic pockets of support for political violence across the spectrum and important debates about measurement and causation persist ^{[1] [3] [12]}.