The governor of Pennsylvania and his family were settled into their private quarters when the political violence that seems more common and more inevitable finally came to them.
When law enforcement began pounding on the door to the official residence in Harrisburg early Sunday morning, one can only imagine the sleepy disorientation, the sudden jolt from rest to alarm, when Josh Shapiro was informed that the house was on fire and everyone inside needed to evacuate.
Shapiro and his family, only hours after marking Passover with a seder, escaped physical harm. Most of the damage to the house, completed in 1968 and now charred and stinking of smoke, is centered on the first floor amid the public rooms. They can be repaired. But the destruction to the political system, to the fundamental belief that there’s good embedded in the government, to any semblance of comity, is deep and widespread.
“We have to be better than this,” Shapiro said during his emotional public remarks after the attack. The words echoed like a plea, a demand and a prayer.
A 38-year-old man from Harrisburg named Cody Balmer has been arrested for allegedly climbing over a security fence, smashing a window, launching a couple of molotov cocktails into the residence, and then scrambling back over the fence and fleeing the scene. When officers brought Balmer to his arraignment Monday morning, he was revealed to be a gaunt bearded man with heavy-lidded eyes who at one point turned toward cameras, opened his eyes wide and stuck out his tongue in a gesture that seemed both wild and intentional.
His family has said they’d feared for Balmer’s mental health and had alerted authorities to those concerns but were told nothing could be done. The president has said Balmer was “probably just a whack job” — as if the attack were a one-off — and said the alleged arsonist was “not a fan of Trump” — as if to relieve himself of any responsibility for inspiring some of the violence.
But the entire country is enmeshed in this awfulness. Not that long ago, it seemed that political violence was something that was mostly relegated to American history. A person read about the turmoil of the 1960s and the assassinations of the Kennedys, King and Malcolm and it all could seem terribly distant, events absorbed only through grainy black-and-white film, fading photographs and crackling audio recordings. The 1981 attempt on Ronald Reagan’s life fueled a larger conversation about the issue of gun violence and greater control over handgun purchases and this country’s growing propensity for mass mayhem. The country managed to file the shootings of Reps. Gabby Giffords and Steve Scalise into that category, too. At least momentarily.
But now it has become impossible to ignore that all of these events are connected. The country is all too familiar with violence against public servants — liberal, conservative and centrist — who are targeted for intimidation, injury and death. The anger is at such a boil that it spills over to those outside of the political sphere but who nonetheless are tethered to it by family, friendship or cosmic misfortune.
Our day-to-day politics is infused with violence, and it affects everyone: from the local leaders who make decisions about new roads, zoning laws and factories, all the way up to those who aspire to the White House. The violence ranges from deadly to psychic. The list of those touched by it includes U.S. District Judge Esther Salas, whose son was killed in an attack at her home by a lawyer trying a case in her courtroom. It includes Paul Pelosi, who was bludgeoned in his home with a hammer by a man on the hunt for his wife, then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. It includes Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, who was the target of a foiled kidnapping plot. It includes death threats against Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and Supreme Court Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh. It includes the countless citizens on social media who are harassed to despair for the sheer amusement of others.
We, the people, are both the cause and the collateral damage as the country’s adherence to the basic rules of democracy falters. In a conversation at Hamilton College recently, former president Barack Obama considered the sorry state of things. “I do believe that our commitment to those principles has eroded, and I think it eroded in part because the government itself got really big and what that meant is sometimes it felt distant and unresponsive. And rules are a hassle and some of the rules aren’t smart and people get frustrated,” he said.
Then he added: “It’s easier to agree to disagree and have forbearance to people who you don’t agree with if they all sort of look like you.” And in a country where the economy isn’t working for everyone and inequality has increased and billionaires are digging around in people’s private data, blasting off into space and organizing the world on their terms, the frustration overflows — until a declaration about Black lives having value begins to resonate as disdain for White ones. Until the sound of a non-English-speaking resident struggling to be understood sounds like a taunt. Until a kid struggling with their gender identity requires punishment instead of compassionate medical care.
Instead of steadfastly recognizing the violence for what it is — shameful, horrifying — it has become bound up in the politics that helps fuel it. The violence is morphing into symbolism and mythology. The truth of it is getting muddled. After a gunman’s bullet hit Trump’s ear during a 2024 campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, and killed a bystander, the photograph of the bloodied Trump with his fist raised became a rallying cry for fearlessness and resilience for the candidate and his supporters.
Now, as the trial of another alleged would-be Trump assassin unfolds in Florida, a painting inspired by the Butler shooting has a place of honor in the foyer of the State Floor in the White House. An act of political violence has been constantly mutating in the hands of Trump and his admirers. First it was an image of a martyr’s plight. It was soon evidence of God’s plan. It is a statement of patriotic determination. And now, painted in vivid pop art hues with the president’s face seemingly chiseled from sandstone, it has the look of cultural deification.
The violence has become legendary. And the number of victims continues to grow.
