On Saturday night, mere hours after former U.S. President Donald Trump survived an assassination attempt, U.S. Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio tweeted, “Today is not just some isolated incident. The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.” Donald Trump Jr. tweeted on Sunday, “Don’t tell me they didn’t know exactly what they were doing with this crap. Calling my dad a ‘dictator’ and a ‘threat to...

“A has often been an arena for angry minds,” the political scientist Richard Hofstadter wrote 60 years ago in his classic essay, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.” Yet across many eras, this discourse of “heated exaggeration, suspicion and conspiratorial fantasy” festered largely on the fringe. Then the internet made the fringe accessible to everyone, amplifying dissonance and disinformation.

“A has often been an arena for angry minds,” the political scientist Richard Hofstadter wrote 60 years ago in his classic essay, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.” Yet across many eras, this discourse of “heated exaggeration, suspicion and conspiratorial fantasy” festered largely on the fringe. Then the internet made the fringe accessible to everyone, amplifying dissonance and disinformation.

If we were leftists and we were to use leftist tropes to editorialize the recent attempt on Trump’s life, then we would frame the assassination attempt in the following way: We have witnessed for years blatant exceptions to the once common custom that we don’t normalize the imagined killing of any president or presidential candidate and thus lower the bar of violence. But the Left constantly makes Trump an exception. Now, it as if the imagined killing of Trump had been mainstreamed and become acceptable in a way inconceivable of...

The attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, dramatically escalates political tensions in a society that neither wants nor can afford such escalations. Former presidents and various political and media figures have appropriately expressed sympathy for Mr. Trump and condemned the violence. Yet, these might not be enough to avoid further—and more consequential—political violence. Many have pointed to America’s toxic politics as a contributor to the July 13 shooting.