Most Americans were glad that Donald Trump dodged a bullet at his fateful rally in Pennsylvania.
But not everyone was happy that 20-year-old killer Thomas Matthew Crooks was such a poor shot.
Until now, many assumed that only a few bad apples wanted the Republican candidate shot in the head.
Not so, says alarming new research from a UK-based academic.
Eric Kaufmann says a surprising one-third of Democratic voters wished Trump had left his July 13 campaign event in a body bag.
At least a third of people in this photo wanted Trump to be shot in Butler, polls show
A staggering 71 percent of hard-line leftists said they supported the attempted assassination of Trump.
Among progressives, the figure is much higher, says the University of Buckingham politics scholar.
A staggering 71 percent of hard-line leftists said they supported the attempted assassination of Trump.
Kaufmann said his results could be explained by “awakened moral absolutism.”
“Identity politics has moralized the vision of the left, presenting conservatives as evil rather than wrong,” he says.
Eric Kaufmann says leftists have adopted “conscious moral absolutism”
Kaufmann conducted his snap poll of a few hundred people five days after the attack, in which Crooks killed firefighter Corey Comperatore, 50, and wounded two others, including Trump.
In the hours that followed, several high-profile liberals expressed support for the killer, who was shot dead by a Secret Service sniper.
Jacqueline Marsaw, who worked for a Mississippi House Democrat, posted on Facebook that Crooks should take “shooting lessons so he doesn’t miss next time.”
“Oops, that wasn’t me,” he added.
Kyle Gass, who performs alongside film star Jack Black in the American comedy-rock duo Tenacious D, said: “Don’t miss Trump next time,” in an off-hand comment during a show in Australia.
Steven Woodrow, a Democratic state representative in Colorado, lamented how the failed attack created “sympathy for the devil.”
The comments were a bad idea and sparked a fierce backlash against all three.
Marsaw was fired, Woodrow backtracked and apologized, and Gass’s musical career collapsed.
Although those three were fiercely attacked on social media, Kaufmann’s research suggests their views were widespread in America’s repressed leftist politics.
This is due to a growing “partisan asymmetry” in the United States, he says.
“The left is more prejudiced against the right than the other way around,” he adds.
Their research shows that leftists are more likely to unfriend, refuse to hang out with conservative people, or otherwise discriminate against conservatives than the opposite.
Respondents who supported the attempted assassination of Trump also had other hardline sentiments against the Republican Party.
Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump gestures as he is surrounded by U.S. Secret Service agents as he is led off the stage.
Kyle Gass, Jack Black and bassist John Spike stopped performing in the wake of Gass’ comment supporting the shooting.
For example, many of them also agreed with the statement that “white Republicans are racist,” Kauffman found.
This highlights an attitude among leftists that conservatives are “more evil than wrong,” he says.
As a result, they use “catastrophic language around ‘white supremacy,’ ‘fascism’ and ‘danger,’” he says.
“Given our new politics of identity-based sacredness and moral absolutism, we should not be surprised to see a rise in political extremism,” he warns.
He is not the only observer expressing alarm over the volatile political rhetoric in the 2024 presidential race.
Speaking from the Oval Office after the Butler shooting, President Joe Biden said it was time to “lower the temperature on our politics.”
“The political rhetoric in this country has become very heated,” he added.
“It’s time to cool down.”
Biden later revised some of his terse political language and retracted a statement from a week before the killing in which he said it was “time to put Trump on the spot.”
Thomas Matthew Crooks
FBI Director Christopher Wray this week updated Congress on his agency’s investigation into the shooting.
He said this came amid an increasingly tense political atmosphere surrounding the presidential campaign.
“I’ve been saying for some time that we live in a high-risk environment,” Wray testified.
“Tragically, the… attempted murder is another particularly heinous example.”
The motive for the shooting remains unclear.
Wray said many people have described Crooks as a loner and that the contact list on his phone was short and his political leanings unclear.
A day before Wray’s testimony, Kimberly Cheatle resigned as director of the U.S. Secret Service after bipartisan calls for her to step down over her failure to prevent the assassination attempt.
Much of the criticism has focused on the failure to secure the roof of an industrial building where the gunman was located, about 150 metres from the stage where Trump was speaking.