The big question in the 2024 election is increasingly not just who will take office come Jan. 20, 2025, but also what kind of ugly scenes will be visited on the country before we ever reach that point.

That specter looms larger and larger amid a series of ominous signs.

One obvious such sign is what may have been the second assassination attempt on former president Donald Trump in nine weeks on Sunday. But compounding the problem are the increasingly coarse and partisan reactions to violence and threats of violence; the significant embrace of potentially justified political violence and vast conspiracy theories; a rise in threats; and the increasingly shameless and tolerated promotion of misinformation and bigoted views on social media.

And it’s often the right raising the temperature.

Reactions from Republicans to the latest threat to Trump’s life, at his Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, Fla., were foreboding.

After slowly warming to the idea of blaming the political left for the assassination attempt at a rally in Butler, Pa., in July — despite scant evidence — Trump on Monday wasted little time assigning blame similarly for the latest threat.

“He believed the rhetoric of Biden and Harris, and he acted on it,” Trump claimed to Fox News about Ryan Wesley Routh, the man who has been arrested and charged after he allegedly shrouded himself in the bushes near the golf course with a rifle as Trump played golf. “Their rhetoric is causing me to be shot at …” (The suspect allegedly fled without firing.)

This echoes previous Republican suggestions linking the July assassination attempt to Democrats having called Trump a “threat to democracy” and a danger to the country.

Trump said that Democrats, in fact, “are the ones that are destroying the country — both from the inside and out.” He added: “It is called the enemy from within. They are the real threat.”

There is no evidence that Routh was spurred by Democrats’ rhetoric, just as there is no evidence that Thomas Matthew Crooks, the suspect in the Pennsylvania shooting, was back in July. Crooks was a registered Republican who left little in the way of a paper trail about his motivations before his death; Routh is apparently a former Trump voter who embraced both Democrats and Republicans who challenged Trump in recent years.

Democrats have also largely backed off the “threat to democracy” rhetoric over the past two months. Trump, in turn, has stepped up such rhetoric against them.

There is plenty to learn about both cases. But Trump is signaling to his supporters that Democrats have effectively played a hand in possibly trying to get him killed — twice — after previously suggesting that the FBI sought to assassinate him. And he continues to use precisely the kind of rhetoric that he himself casts as inciting. His supporters, meanwhile, leap to blame the left; Elon Musk late Sunday night even noted that “no one is even trying to assassinate Biden/Kamala,” before deleting the post. Many high-profile Trump allies and congressional Republicans quickly linked Sunday’s events to Democrats’ rhetoric, as well.

The tense political debate comes after plenty of other markers of a political tinderbox.

While Republicans have cried foul about Democrats’ rhetoric, it wasn’t that long ago that they and their allies greeted an attack on a prominent Democrat with jokes and ridiculous conspiracy theories. Republicans and conservative commentators frequently joked about the late 2022 attack at former House speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) house that left her husband, Paul Pelosi, with severe injuries. They even suggested, based on bogus evidence, that it was a gay lovers’ tryst gone wrong. Trump made light of the situation as recently as this month, quipping that the wall around the Pelosis’ house “didn’t help too much with the problem she had.”

Such conspiracy theories have increasingly found voices not just in extreme activists and social media users but Republican officeholders and prominent commentators. In recent days, many of them have pointed to thinly constructed theories about last week’s debate between GOP presidential nominee Trump and Democratic nominee Vice President Kamala Harris being rigged.

The scene Sunday also came as Trump and his allies have zeroed in on a debunked and dehumanizing conspiracy theory about Haitian migrants stealing and eating pets in Springfield, Ohio. They have doubled down despite the lack of evidence and the city facing a series of reported threats made against city hall, schools, colleges and hospitals. The mayor said the threats have included “hateful language towards immigrants and Haitians in our community,” while a college cited two threats that “were targeted toward members of the Haitian community.” Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine (R) said Monday that none of 33 threats were legitimate and that “many” of them came from overseas.

Threats have become commonplace in our politics, as The Washington Post documented earlier this year. Republican lawmakers critical of Trump have increasingly cited the role of threats from Trump allies in their colleagues’ voting and retirement decisions. The last House speaker election a year ago was marred by threats from people apparently trying to influence the outcome.

Election officials have also warned about potential violence as Trump cues up yet another series of stolen-election claims — less than four years after his supporters cited such claims while attacking the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

Trump now casts those arrested in connection with the Jan. 6 riot as political prisoners, absolving them of blame in a way that Trump’s supporters have warmed to. And ever since Jan. 6, Trump has increasingly sent suggestive signals about political violence, often predicting his supporters would rise up in defense of him.

Data continues to show a remarkable degree of tolerance for potential political violence, especially on the right. Last week, a Public Religion Research Institute poll showed nearly 3 in 10 Republicans and 1 in 10 Democrats agreed that, because things have gotten off track, “true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country.”

The poll also found that about a quarter of Republicans agreed that if Trump isn’t declared the winner of the 2024 election, he should “do whatever it takes to assume his rightful place as president.”

Whether any of it will ultimately lead to unrest or tragedy remains to be seen. But the country has experienced that before, with ugly scenes begetting more ugliness. The resilience of the democracy has been put to the test over the past two elections. There’s every reason to believe that’s going to be the case again in 2024.

Former president Donald Trump on Monday blamed the “rhetoric” of President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris for the potential assassination attempt he faced Sunday.

“[The suspected gunman] believed the rhetoric of Biden and Harris, and he acted on it,” Trump said in a Fox News interview published Monday morning. “Their rhetoric is causing me to be shot at, when I am the one who is going to save the country, and they are the ones that are destroying the country — both from the inside and out.”

The Harris campaign did not respond to The Washington Post’s request for comment.

The former president echoed the claims again Monday afternoon on his Truth Social platform, writing: “The Rhetoric, Lies, as exemplified by the false statements made by Comrade Kamala Harris during the rigged and highly partisan ABC Debate, and all of the ridiculous lawsuits specifically designed to inflict damage on Joe’s, then Kamala’s, Political Opponent, ME, has taken politics in our Country to a whole new level of Hatred, Abuse, and Distrust. Because of this Communist Left Rhetoric, the bullets are flying, and it will only get worse!”

Harris and Biden have routinely portrayed Trump as a threat to democracy because of his refusal to accept the 2020 election results and his role in stoking rioters who attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, in an attempt to overturn the election.

Trump’s claims come the day he was scheduled to host a virtual address on Spaces, X’s live audio platform, from his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Fla. on the launch of “World Liberty Financial,” a cryptocurrency platform. The former president is also expected to appear on Fox News’s “Hannity” at 9 p.m. Eastern time. The appearances are the first public event Trump has done since the possible assassination attempt at his golf course on Sunday.

Police arrested Ryan Wesley Routh, a 58-year-old man, on Sunday after he pointed a rifle through a fence around a golf course where Trump was playing, authorities said. The FBI is investigating the episode as an apparent assassination attempt. Trump, who survived an assassination attempt this summer in Pennsylvania, was not harmed in the Florida incident.

Authorities have not said Routh shot at Trump on the golf course. They have said a Secret Service agent opened fire on Routh after seeing his rifle poking through the fence.

Routh’s social media activity quickly came under scrutiny. He reportedly wrote on X that “DEMOCRACY is on the ballot” in the November election, a refrain Biden and Harris have used on the campaign trail. Routh also had expressed past support for Trump, suggesting he backed him in 2016 but became disillusioned with him.

Biden and Harris said Sunday that they were relieved Trump was safe and condemned any kind of political violence. Biden, talking to reporters Monday morning outside the White House, said “thank God” Trump was okay and urged “more help” for the Secret Service.

On X, Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr. described having conversations with his young children about the second attempt on Trump life.

“No person should ever have to do this in America or anywhere else and yet I had to have that conversation five times again yesterday,” he said.

After Trump criticized Biden and Harris online and on Fox News, some of his critics noted that he has long spread hateful rhetoric against his political opponents. In a post shared on X, former Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.), who was part of a now-defunct House select committee tasked with investigating the deadly Jan. 6 riot, pointed to Trump’s political rhetoric as a source of tension.

“Look violent rhetoric is wrong, and has no place,” Kinzinger wrote. “But MAGA pretending they didn’t light this fire is gaslighting to the 100th power. Since Trump showed up our politics has gone to crap.”

“Literally just accused a group of people of eating our pets,” Kinzinger added, a reference to Trump’s baseless claims that Haitian migrants are eating their neighbors’ cats in Springfield, Ohio.

Rep. Brendan Boyle (D-Pa.) on X also shared a response to Donald Trump Jr.’s post asking if he has apologized to the grandchildren of Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), the former House speaker, after he posted a tweet mocking the attack on Pelosi’s husband’s life.

Former Rep. Joe Walsh (R-Ill.), who is also now a Trump critic, said in an X post that two things can be true at the same time: “1. This potential assassination attempt on Donald Trump is horrible and should be strongly condemned by ALL of us.” and “2. There is no politician in America today who spews as much hate or incites as much violence with reckless/dangerous rhetoric as Donald Trump does.”

An Ohio sheriff this weekend urged residents in his county to collect the addresses of homes sporting signs for Vice President Kamala Harris, arbitrarily suggesting that there would be an influx of undocumented immigrants if she wins the presidential race.

Bruce Zuchowski, the sheriff of Portage County who is seeking reelection, made the incendiary remarks Friday in two identical posts on his personal and professional Facebook accounts.

“I say … write down all the addresses of the people who had her signs in their yards!” Zuchowski (R) said. That way, he said, when undocumented immigrants — which he referred to as a “locust” — flooded in, “We’ll already have the addresses of their New families … who supported their arrival!”

The sheriff’s posts sparked tension across Portage County, which President Donald Trump carried by 12 points in the 2020 election. Some residents accused Zuchowski of voter intimidation ahead of November’s election. One Republican official described the post as “bullying” and stepped down from a role with a county GOP committee, the Portager reported.

Alongside his caption, Zuchowski posted photos of Fox News coverage showing footage from Springfield, Ohio, and Aurora, Colo. — two cities that have been in the national spotlight in recent weeks as former president Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), have publicly repeated baseless, inflammatory claims about the immigrant communities there.

Comments are limited on both of Zuchowski’s posts. He did not immediately respond to The Washington Post’s requests for comment Monday evening.

In Monday posts on X, the American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio condemned Zuchowski’s comments, adding that putting up political signs was “most decidedly, protected core First Amendment speech.”

“For the sitting sheriff of Portage County to be engaging in the very type of behavior he’s meant to combat is despicable,” the organization wrote.

Since Harris ascended to the top of the Democratic ticket in July, she and Trump have publicly criticized each other’s border and immigration policies. Republicans have been lashing out against Harris by characterizing her as a failed “border czar.” Shortly after taking office, President Joe Biden directed Harris to address the root causes of migration, but she was never put in charge of the border. Harris and the Democratic Party have cited the messaging of the far-right Project 2025, a proposal including mass deportations that Trump has tried to distance himself from, to dissuade voters from supporting a second Trump term.

In recent weeks, Trump and Vance have taken the immigration-policy-based criticisms to a new level by repeating unsubstantiated comments about Haitian immigrants in Springfield. They falsely claimed that Haitian immigrants were stealing and eating pets in the town.

During the presidential debate last week, Trump repeated the Springfield rumor. Though he was fact-checked by a moderator — Ohio officials have denied the claims — it was too late.

The rumor had already spiraled into an onslaught of racist memes and anti-immigrant sentiments online. In the days since the debate, Springfield has received threats of violence. Schools, the city hall and other government buildings were evacuated last week after bomb threats.

Of the TV news photos Zuchowski posted Friday, one showed Springfield with the chyron: “Kamala’s open borders are destroying small towns.” Zuchowski wrote that if residents made note of the homes with Harris campaign signage, they would “already have the addresses” of immigrants who came to Portage County after the election. He also took a jab at Harris’s laugh, another dig Trump and his allies have used against the vice president.

The posts stoked fear across Portage County residents, said Reney Romine, president of the county’s NAACP chapter. Portage County, which is about 180 miles northeast of Clark County, where Springfield is located, is a predominantly White area with lower-than-average immigration.

Since Sunday, Romine said she’s received calls and texts “constantly” from community members about the Facebook posts. They’ve told her they’re considering removing their yard signs. Some have said they feel unsure now about requesting help from the sheriff’s office. Others are worried about their safety while casting their ballot on Election Day.

“It’s hard to hear,” Romine said. “It’s hard to see.”

Anthony Badalamenti, a Republican county commissioner, said in a video that he would resign from the county’s Republican Central Committee, according to the Portager.

Zuchowski’s call to write down addresses, Badalamenti said, “prompted” him to make the video, in which he said the remark “scares people, it’s called bullying from the highest law enforcement in Portage County.”

Romine said the local NAACP chapter called an emergency meeting for later this week to talk about how to address the community’s concerns ahead of November.

“What a world it would be if we could all have our own opinions and still get along in that space,” she said. “You know, what happened to that?”

A judge has denied a request from Mark Meadows, who was Donald Trump’s White House chief of staff, to move the Arizona election-subversion-related prosecution against him from state court to federal court.

The ruling Monday by U.S. District Court judge John J. Tuchi in the district of Arizona is a further setback for Meadows, who unsuccessfully tried the same legal maneuver a year ago in a separate election interference case in Georgia.

Meadows has pleaded not guilty to nine felonies related to his alleged role in trying to subvert Joe Biden’s win in Arizona after the 2020 presidential election. He is one of 18 defendants indicted in April by a state grand jury, which determined that the defendants engaged in crimes including conspiracy, forgery and fraud when they tried to deliver the state’s 11 electoral votes to Trump instead of Biden.

In Monday’s ruling, the Arizona court found that Meadows had failed to “demonstrate that the conduct charged in the state’s prosecution relates to his former color of office as Chief of Staff to the President.”

“Although the Court credits Mr. Meadows’s theory that the Chief of Staff is responsible for acting as the President’s gatekeeper, that conclusion does not create a causal nexus between Mr. Meadows’s official authority and the charged conduct,” the court concluded.

Meadows’s lawyers did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Monday.

In both the Georgia and Arizona cases, Meadows had hoped a move to the federal court could lead to a quick dismissal of the case against him on the basis that as a federal officer he was immune from prosecution for acts taken in the course of his normal work.

“Mr. Meadows has the right to remove this matter because he has a federal defense of Supremacy Clause immunity to the State charge and Congress has provided that federal courts are the appropriate forum to adjudicate such issues,” his attorneys said in a July 26 motion. “The conduct giving rise to the charges in the indictment all occurred during his tenure and as part of his service as White House Chief of Staff.”

In the Georgia case, Meadows has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn a lower-court ruling that rejected claims that his alleged conduct was tied to his official federal duties.

Sanchez reported from Phoenix.

Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) trekked to Georgia this week to give the keynote speech at a dinner hosted by the Faith & Freedom Coalition, an organization founded by longtime conservative activist Ralph Reed. Reed introduced Vance, praising the senator and encouraging the audience to work for his election.

“Can we agree that it’s time for the Christians to be the head and not the tail of our political system,” Reed said to cheers, “and turn out the biggest vote of people of faith in the history of this state?”

When it was his turn to speak, Vance lamented that so many people accused Christians of trying to impose their beliefs on others.

“While we’re disparaged by the media and disparaged by the Democrats as people who want to force our faith on other people,” Vance said, “I think I speak for every single person in this room, saying, we don’t want to force our faith on anybody.” Instead, he said, “what we want is to recognize and to have motivate us the faith that is, I think, the source of all great truth in human history, and especially in this country.”

After offering praise for the family as an institution, he explained the motivation behind his politics.

“We are motivated, in other words, by living our faith and ensuring that our public policy promotes the common good,” Vance said. “And I think that in this moment in time, in 2024, with all the violence and all the negative political rhetoric, we need to remember above and beyond that we must love our neighbors, that we must treat other people as we hope to be treated, and that we must love our God and let Him motivate us in how we enact public policy, and how we live our faith and how we can govern our nation.”

You, dear reader, may evaluate the extent to which a public policy motivated by the Christian faith is an effort to force that faith upon the country. Pew Research Center data, though, shows why this probably appeals to a gathering of Christian conservatives. Relatively few of those who voted for Donald Trump in 2020 were not religious; about a third were White evangelical Protestants. By contrast, about a third of those who voted for Joe Biden were not religious or not members of an organized religion.

There are about twice as many unaffiliated Americans as evangelicals, but they don’t vote as heavily.

It is obviously also ironic for Trump’s running mate to espouse a philosophy of loving one’s neighbor. Trump’s rhetoric has, since he began running for president nine years ago, been almost uniquely toxic, embracing and elevating hostility in ways that were previously rare in national politics. But this was in part why Trump was successful: He converted the latent power of partisan hostility manifested in the fringe-right media into votes.

He took advantage of a political system that has grown increasingly toxic and divided. It is not the case that only his party has grown contemptuous of its opponents, certainly, but polling — like the American National Election Study’s “thermometer” of feelings about political ideologies — shows a sharper downward turn among Republicans considering the term “liberal” than Democrats considering “conservative.”

Particularly over the past 20 years, the most loyal partisans have grown increasingly hostile to the other party’s presidential candidate.

One of the most recent striking measures of partisan hostility came after the death of O.J. Simpson this year. Partisans viewed Simpson — defendant in the most famous murder case in modern history — more favorably than the other party’s presidential candidate.

Into this context walks Vance with his love-thy-neighbor mantra. But, then, perhaps he’s only talking about literal neighbors, those who live near and interact with his audience. Before the 2020 election, Pew found that 6 in 10 Trump supporters and 5 in 10 Biden supporters knew a lot of people supporting the same candidate. Four in 10 in each group knew no one who supported the other candidate.

This is in part because of what’s been called “the big sort,” people moving into areas where others share their politics, either intentionally or as a function of other factors (like seeking jobs or attending college). The result is a significant increase in the number of counties where margins in presidential contests are lopsided — particularly in favor of Republican candidates.

We must, of course, also note the hypocrisy in Vance’s comments that was apparent to you at the outset. Vance is calling for a love-thy-neighbor approach after having spent a week disparaging legal Haitian immigrants to Ohio as disruptive, dangerous people who steal and eat their neighbors’ pets. His unsubstantiated claims have earned a broad rebuke, including from Republican officials in the state he represents, and after he embraced and elevated these toxic rumors, the town of Springfield faced a number of threats of violence.

New analysis from Bloomberg published Monday notes that recent immigrants to the United States have largely settled in more populous counties that voted for Biden in 2020. This isn’t surprising; immigrant have long settled overwhelmingly in cities with communities of other immigrants from their home countries, for obvious reasons. The analysis, though, reinforces that increases in immigrants in rural parts of the country are more unusual, potentially making scapegoating like that embraced by Vance easier and arguments about an erosion of “traditional America” more potent.

It is hard to reconcile Vance’s indifferent insults about Haitian immigrants with his insistence to the Georgia audience that “we must love our neighbors, that we must treat other people as we hope to be treated.” But the audience to whom he was speaking, a gathering of conservative Christians, didn’t seem particularly fazed by that inconsistency either.

Vance did at one point seek the audience’s forgiveness — should he use naughty words while running for vice president.

“I’d ask you to forgive me if you ever see me make a misstep on the campaign trail with my language,” he said, “but I came by it honestly.”

The audience tittered, recognizing that he meant things like the f-word, not his allegations that immigrants were stealing and eating pets or spreading disease. That’s just neighbor-loving.