How far have Americans drifted from the ballot box as a way of resolving political disagreements? A new essay in American Thinker argues that the answer is farther than most people want to admit.
Writing for the outlet, Dr. Brian C. Joondeph, a Colorado-based ophthalmologist who frequently publishes on medicine, science and public policy, points to newly described survey results from University of Chicago political scientist Robert Pape and the Chicago Project on Security and Threats. According to the essay, Pape’s data indicates that roughly 25 percent of American adults now support “the use of force to prevent President Trump from being president.” Among self-identified Democrats, the share rises to 44 percent.
Joondeph stresses that this is not the fringe of the fringe. He cites Pape’s account of follow-up focus groups and survey experiments, in which 55 percent of those who endorsed force understood that endorsement to include assassinating the president with a rifle — the method used in the 2024 attempt on Trump’s life in Butler, Pennsylvania. That attempt, the essay notes, came within millimeters of killing him.
From tax rates to existential stakes
The gap between ordinary democratic disagreement — arguments over marginal tax rates or military budgets, as Joondeph puts it — and support for lethal force is the emotional hinge of the piece. The traditional American toolkit for opposing a politician, he writes, has long been arguing, campaigning, letter-writing, speech-making, rallying, donating and eventually voting. That understanding, he suggests, is fraying, and he frames the change as a shift in the Overton Window of acceptable political conduct.
His central suspicion is that the erosion did not emerge from nowhere. For years, he writes, Trump has been described not merely as a bad president but as a Hitler-like figure, with his rhetoric compared to that of Nazi Germany — a framing he traces through commentary in The Atlantic, a 2023 graphic produced by the Biden campaign titled “TRUMP PARROTS HITLER,” and Kamala Harris’s public agreement during the 2024 campaign that Trump could be described as a fascist.
Joondeph argues those are not ordinary political insults. Hitler, in his telling, is not remembered as a politician with whom reasonable people disagreed about fiscal policy — but as one of history’s great embodiments of evil, responsible for a regime that murdered millions.
From there he walks through a familiar historical thought experiment: if you could travel back in time and kill Hitler before he came to power, would you? Most people treat it as a moral conundrum complicated by the possibility that Joseph Goebbels, Heinrich Himmler or someone else might simply have filled the void. But Joondeph’s concern is about what happens when the hypothetical migrates into present-day politics. If someone genuinely accepts that Trump is another Hitler, he writes, the next logical question is uncomfortable — and the answer, for some, would be that killing the next Hitler is as justified as killing the first.
Most Americans, in his view, recognize the comparison as hyperbole. But not everyone thinks abstractly or recognizes rhetorical exaggeration, and among hundreds of millions of people there will always be those who take the charge literally. Rhetoric does not pull a trigger, Joondeph concedes. It can, however, help construct a moral framework in which pulling the trigger feels righteous.
A glimpse of where the road leads
The essay points to events that, it argues, already show where that framework can lead. Beyond the Butler shooting and the subsequent arrest of a man found with a rifle near Trump’s golf course, Joondeph highlights what he calls the almost-as-disturbing reaction: people celebrating a killing online, sharing jokes and memes, and advertising events around the first anniversary that mocked the assassination. A husband and father was murdered because someone apparently hated what he represented politically, he writes, and for some Americans the response was amusement.
He applies the same lens to Luigi Mangione, who is accused of murdering UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. One need not defend the health insurance industry, Joondeph writes, to recognize that assassinating insurance executives is not legitimate consumer advocacy — yet Mangione became something of a folk hero. A Generation Lab survey of college students found 45 percent sympathized more with Mangione than with Thompson, while 48 percent considered Thompson’s killing totally or somewhat justified.
The essay then widens its scope, arguing that modern culture has cheapened life more broadly. It cites Canadian euthanasia — formally Medical Assistance in Dying — as now accounting for one in twenty deaths in Canada, and notes that full-term abortion is legal in nine U.S. states, before turning to the case of Lindsay Clancy, which he presents as an example of the idea that killing your children can be acceptable under the right circumstances. Once murder becomes permissible because the victim represents something we despise or has become a burden, Joondeph writes, an important line has been crossed. Today it is an insurance executive, tomorrow a conservative activist, the day after a president, he warns.
Where does the principle stop?
The essay presses the logic further by asking where the boundary sits if force is deemed justified to stop Trump from governing. What of his cabinet secretaries, members of Congress who vote for his agenda, judges who uphold administration policies, or people serving on federal advisory committees? That last possibility, Joondeph claims, is not purely theoretical: in 2024, Democratic congressional candidate Paula Collins spoke about the need to “re-educate” Trump supporters and acknowledged that what she described sounded like a “re-education camp.” She later clarified that she meant civic education, but Joondeph argues the terminology itself should have raised alarm — noting that Nazi concentration camps were euphemistically called “protective custody camps” intended to usher in the “final solution,” and that history offers ample examples of governments “reeducating” people whose politics were deemed unacceptable.
He is careful to draw one distinction. Presidents of both parties have deployed military forces or federalized the National Guard during severe civil unrest, and whether any particular deployment is constitutional, necessary or excessive is a legitimate subject for debate. That, he argues, is categorically different from a private citizen deciding a political opponent should die.
The bargain under strain
Joondeph’s closing argument is less about any single incident than about a foundational agreement: democracy works as a pressure-release valve for political disagreement. You organize, persuade, nominate candidates and make your arguments; your opponents make theirs. Sometimes your side wins, sometimes it loses — but the losing side does not get to substitute a rifle for a ballot. This is why, in his view, casually equating political opponents with Nazis is so dangerous. Such comparisons do not merely say “these people are wrong,” he writes; they say these people are evil, that democracy may be incapable of stopping them, and that extraordinary measures may therefore be justified. Once that premise takes hold, political violence stops looking like political violence at all — which, he suggests, may help explain the numbers Pape is recording.
The essay also acknowledges hypocrisy on all sides, observing that each political tribe tends to notice violence from the other while finding elaborate explanations for violence associated with its own. Republicans should condemn political violence from their side without qualification, and Democrats should do precisely the same, Joondeph writes.
America has survived bitter elections, terrible presidents, unpopular wars, riots, assassinations, depressions and a civil war, he notes. The system endures, in his account, only because enough people keep accepting one basic bargain: differences get resolved through persuasion and elections rather than violence. Break that bargain, and there is no obvious stopping point. If an assassin gets to decide the voters chose wrongly, elections become meaningless. And if killing political opponents ever becomes an acceptable form of political expression, Joondeph concludes, the question will no longer be whether American democracy is in danger.
Source: www.americanthinker.com — https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2026/10/when-political-violence-becomes-acceptable/