President Donald Trump used an Oval Office address and subsequent remarks to call for a crackdown on what he described as "radical-left political violence" in the wake of the killing of conservative influencer Charlie Kirk. Federal and independent data, however, indicate that right-wing extremists have been responsible for a larger share of political homicides in the United States in recent years and over longer historical periods.
In a study drawing on 18 data sets, researchers at the libertarian Cato Institute found that 81 people were killed by politically motivated violence in the United States in the past five years, and that right-wing extremists accounted for about 54% of those killings. Islamist-inspired attackers accounted for 21% and left-wing actors 22% in the same period. The study, which also examined records going back to 1975, concluded that right-wing perpetrators have caused more deaths than left-wing ones when the 9/11 attacks—which account for a large share of Islamist-inspired fatalities—are excluded.
The Cato analysis reported that since 1975 there have been 3,599 murders tied to politically motivated terrorist attacks, a total heavily influenced by the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Excluding 9/11, the researchers found that right-wing attackers accounted for roughly 63% of those deaths, compared with 10% for left-wing attacks. Over the full post-1975 period, right-wing attacks were linked to 391 deaths and left-wing attacks to 65.
Experts who study domestic extremism said the data reflect a distinct disparity in lethality between right- and left-wing violence. "There's no question that, if you look at the numbers in terms of lethality, it is the far right that's been far more lethal—Tree of Life, the El Paso Walmart attack, the Buffalo supermarket shooting," said Colin Clarke, a senior researcher at the Soufan Center who focuses on domestic and transnational terrorism. Each of those attacks was carried out with extremist, white-supremacist motivations, Clarke said.
Trump’s public statements after the Kirk killing emphasized left-wing culpability. In the Oval Office address the president said, "Radical-left political violence has hurt too many innocent people and taken too many lives," and promised to find those responsible. In follow-up remarks, he asserted that "most of the violence is on the left." Those assertions drew immediate scrutiny from researchers and commentators who pointed to the Cato findings and to a string of high-profile right-wing attacks in recent years.
Alex Nowrasteh, the Cato researcher who led the analysis, emphasized that political violence in the United States remains uncommon and warned against overreaction. "The main takeaway is that politically motivated violence is very uncommon in the United States," he said. "A horrible individual murder is not evidence of a massive society-wide problem or trend. I just don't want to blow this out of proportion to give the government an excuse to crack down in a way that would be detrimental to all of our liberties."
Researchers and legal scholars also noted that public attention and high-profile rhetoric can shape perceptions of risk. Benjamin Radd, a political scientist and professor of law at the University of California, Los Angeles, said that modest increases from a low base can appear dramatic. "If the number grows from one to five, that is like a five-fold increase," Radd said. "So I think what Trump is saying is, yes, we do have more than we did before, but before was basically negligible—so does that represent a trend? No, we don't have enough data."
The debate over framing and policy arrived amid a broader increase in politically charged incidents. The last several years have included the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, thousands of recorded threats against members of Congress, an attacker who struck Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband with a hammer, the attempted stabbing of gubernatorial candidate Lee Zeldin at a campaign rally, and two attempts on Mr. Trump's life while he campaigned. The past year also saw an arson attack on the residence of Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro; shootings of Minnesota legislators and their spouses; the killing of two Israeli embassy staffers outside a Washington museum; a Molotov cocktail attack at a pro-Israel demonstration in Boulder that killed one person; and an alleged anti-vaccine–motivated shooting at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention headquarters in Atlanta.
Some commentators have criticized the administration for selective attention to victims. When asked whether flags should have been flown at half-staff for Minnesota Democratic lawmaker Melissa Hortman after her assassination, the president initially appeared unfamiliar with her name and later said he would have lowered flags if the state governor had asked. Investigators said the suspect in that killing had compiled a "hit list" of Democratic officials.
Clarke and other experts said the administration's focus on left-wing incidents can omit more lethal episodes tied to right-wing extremists. "He mentioned all these issues of far-left terrorism… But he omitted the attack on [Michigan Governor] Gretchen Whitmer. I don't think he mentioned the arson attack against Governor [Pennsylvania Josh] Shapiro," Clarke said. "So do we only care about one type of extremism? And if so, why wouldn't we care about the more lethal threat?"
Policy responses to politically motivated violence remain contested. Some lawmakers and administration officials say new measures are needed to confront all forms of political violence. Others, including researchers who compiled the Cato data, caution that the rarity of such attacks counsels against broad expansions of state power that could impinge on civil liberties.
The data and expert assessments make clear that political violence in the United States takes varied forms and is motivated by multiple ideologies. While researchers disagree about whether recent upticks represent a durable trend, they agree that isolated, high-profile attacks and the media attention they generate influence public perception and political rhetoric even as the underlying numbers remain comparatively small.