The battle for Minneapolis and the killings of two American citizens by federal agents have freshly exposed the dangerous degree to which the nation’s social fabric has frayed, the latest smudging of an already thin line between politics and violence in America.
Representative Ilhan Omar, Democrat of Minnesota, became the latest target of violence directed at lawmakers on Tuesday evening, when a man charged her at a town hall and used a syringe to spray her with a liquid that smelled like vinegar before he was tackled by security.
That same night the United States Capitol Police released a disturbing report showing a surge in threat cases against lawmakers, their families and staff members: They spiked to a staggering 14,938 last year, up from 9,474 in 2024.
Earlier in the day, President Trump had traveled to neighboring Iowa, talking up efforts to “de-escalate a little bit” on Fox News. But he targeted Ms. Omar just hours before she was attacked and stoked the darkest fears about immigrants, warning a crowd of supporters they would “blow up our shopping centers, blow up our farms, kill people.”
“Hardened, vicious, horrible criminals,” Mr. Trump said, vilifying those who have been arrested.
There is a new normalcy to political violence in America, a numbing rhythm to the repeated denunciations after whatever happens to be the latest incident: the assassination of Charlie Kirk; the firebombing of Gov. Josh Shapiro’s home in Pennsylvania; the attack on former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband; the shooting of Representative Steve Scalise at a congressional baseball practice.
Representative Jared Golden of Maine, a Democrat, announced he was retiring from Congress last year in part because of rising threats to his family. He is 43 and a former Marine.
After the incident at Ms. Omar’s town hall, Mr. Trump, who survived two assassination attempts in 2024, did not offer empathy. Instead he questioned whether it had been staged, even before he said he had seen video of it. “She probably had herself sprayed, knowing her,” he told ABC News.
Minneapolis has become the most recent flashpoint in a darkening political struggle that increasingly blended the rhetoric and reality of violence.
The city was not just home to the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti this month by federal officers taking part in Mr. Trump’s deportation operation. It is where George Floyd, a Black man, was killed by a white police officer in 2020, a death that sparked widespread protests and a racial reckoning — and then a backlash. And it was in a nearby suburb that Melissa Hortman, a Democratic state legislator, was assassinated by a gunman last year with her husband, Mark, in their home.
On Tuesday night, Ms. Omar did not retreat as she was confronted. She moved forward toward the assailant, raising an arm before security tackled him.
“I’ve survived war,” Ms. Omar told CNN shortly after the attack. “And I’m definitely going to survive intimidation.”
The two parties are both casting the looming midterm elections in existential terms, polarizing ever further as the elections approach.
“There is no reward for restraint,” lamented Peter Meijer, a former Republican congressman from Michigan who was defeated in a 2022 primary after voting to impeach Mr. Trump in his first weeks in Congress after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. “If anything, there is a penalty for restraint because you’re not ‘rising to the moment.’”
He described a country on “this acceleration treadmill toward the extremes.”
Republicans in the hard-right House Freedom Caucus endorsed a call for the president to make use of the Insurrection Act, a 200-year-old law allowing deployment of armed forces to suppress civil disorder. At the same time a majority of House Democrats are moving to try to impeach Mr. Trump’s homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, over the killings in Minneapolis.
“The left wants total war,” Representative Andy Ogles, a Tennessee Republican, said in a social media post calling for the use of the Insurrection Act. “Republicans cannot afford to ignore them.”
In Iowa on Tuesday, Mr. Trump was met with protesters and hecklers. “Lunatics,” he called them. One of his warm-up acts, Representative Mariannette Miller-Meeks, a Republican who represents a swing district in the state, spoke disdainfully of the protesters outside the venue.
“I wanted to give the one-finger salute to our welcoming committee,” she said from the stage.
Later in the rally, Mr. Trump stirred up the crowd by dramatizing the sounds of blowing boats out of the water — “Boom, boom, boom,” he said — as his administration has done in the Caribbean. The strikes have killed people who the administration has accused of drug smuggling.The Trump administration has argued the attacks are lawful killings — not murders — because Mr. Trump has declared America to be in an armed conflict with drug cartels. International law experts have expressed deep skepticism.
The riff came as he was in the middle of mocking Somalia, the nation where Ms. Omar was born. He called it “not even a country” and claimed it was only known for its “pirates.” “They’re good at one thing — pirates — but they don’t do that anymore, you know why? Because they get the same treatment from us as drug dealers,” he said.
Elsewhere in the state on Tuesday, a long-shot Republican candidate for governor cast Democrats as a force for “evil” in a primary debate. “That evil is trying to creep into the state of Iowa and flip us from red to blue,” said Adam Steen, the Republican candidate.
In Ohio, a Democratic candidate for attorney general and former state legislator described why he said he wanted to “kill” Mr. Trump. “I want to tell you what I mean when I say that I am going to kill Donald Trump,” the candidate, Elliot Forhan, said in the video, going on to say he would “obtain a conviction rendered by a jury of his peers” and seek “capital punishment.”
Of course, in a fight between good and evil, there are precious few limits to the tactics the two sides are willing to adopt in order to win. And online, outrage merchants and algorithms alike push users toward the most extreme material.
“I don’t need guardrails,” Mr. Trump told Fox News on Tuesday. “I don’t want guardrails. Guardrails would hurt us.”
Top Trump officials have accused Democrats of inciting violence and protesters of being rioters, with Stephen Miller, the influential White House deputy chief of staff, initially describing Mr. Pretti as a “domestic terrorist,” and, without any evidence, suggested he was an “assassin” who had “tried to murder federal agents.” Videos of the incident showed that Mr. Pretti was holding only a phone in his hand when he was subdued and shot by federal agents.
Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland, a Democrat and former constitutional law professor, said Mr. Trump’s deportation operation in Minnesota had “ravaged” the Bill of Rights.
“The Trump administration has been bulldozing the American social contract,” Mr. Raskin said. “It has been a searing and vivid sequence of events in Minnesota.”
But he said that he believed that the killings of the protesters in Minneapolis would turn the tide toward nonviolent de-escalation, because the administration would be chastened by shifting public opinion.
“I think the names Renee Good and Alex Pretti will resound in history like the names Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman,” he said, comparing them to the civil rights activists murdered in the 1960s by the Ku Klux Klan. “Donald Trump understands that the country has turned against him in a dramatic way because American citizens are being murdered in cold blood by federal agents.”
One Trump ally, Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, offered a paradoxical view of the president. “Trump is man of peace,” Mr. Graham said on Fox News on Tuesday night. “But he’s an eye for an eye guy.”
Shane Goldmacher is a Times national political correspondent.
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