The Dangers of America’s Fraught Political Climate

For the second time in less than a year, authorities are investigating suspicious packages that were apparently sent to election officials across the country. The threatening mailings were received or intercepted in at least 16 states. Some of the mailings contained what was described as an “unknown substance,” the FBI and United States Postal Service said in a statement Tuesday. Some, as ABC News reported, were signed by the “United States Traitor Elimination Army.”

The National Association of Secretaries of State issued a statement Tuesday condemning the intimidation tactic and describing it as part of a “disturbing trend.” “This must stop,” the statement read. “Our democracy has no place for political violence, threats, or intimidation of any kind.”

The latest round of suspicious mailings comes months after envelopes containing fentanyl and other substances were sent to election offices in at least five states last fall and underscores the threats facing election workers this cycle and the perilous political climate in the US right now as we head into November.

As I reported earlier this year, large numbers of election workers and officials say they’ve experienced threats and harassment in their jobs, driven by Donald Trump’s unrelenting lies about the integrity of the democratic process. It feels like “you’re the bull’s-eye,” one election administrator told me. But the threats to election workers—which began in 2020 and have only continued to grow through the 2022 midterms and into 2024—are only part of the chaos surrounding the 2024 presidential election, a cycle that has now featured two apparent assassination attempts against the Republican nominee.

The former president, his running mate JD Vance, and other Republicans have cynically tried to blame Democrats for the thwarted attempts on Trump’s life. “Their rhetoric is causing me to be shot at,” Trump said Monday. But, of course, Trump and his allies have been the ones turning up the temperature, not mainstream Democrats, who have repeatedly condemned political violence. Trump and Vance spent days amplifying racist lies about Haitian immigrants in Ohio, leading to bomb threats in Springfield and a hate campaign against Haitians more broadly. The former president has also ramped up his authoritarian rhetoric, vowing to cast “vermin” from the country, calling to jail political foes, and continuing to sow doubts in the election system. “We cannot let our Country further devolve into a Third World Nation, AND WE WON’T,” Trump posted Tuesday, saying he would be “watching the Sanctity of the 2024 Presidential Election very closely.”

With those kinds of attacks on the election process, Trump is again laying the groundwork to contest the results should he lose. His effort to overturn his loss to Joe Biden failed in 2020. But Democrats are concerned about what another round of election subversion could bring this cycle, especially if Mike Johnson—who helped lead Capitol Hill Republicans’ objection to Biden’s victory—retains his speakership in November and is in a position to potentially interfere with the congressional certification of the presential election in January, if, say Kamala Harris wins. “It would be silly to ignore the history here,” Democratic Representative Joe Morelle told Politico on Tuesday.

Election experts and officials emphasize that the system remains secure, withstood Trump’s stress test in 2020, and will do so again. Still, the democratic process this fall will play out against a uniquely tumultuous backdrop—one in which turmoil, polarization, and the specter of political violence loom large. “The United States has an undercurrent of political violence,” University of Virginia’s Barbara Perry told the Washington Post Tuesday. “I think this undercurrent has now become the current. Right now, it’s at the surface, and it’s rushing along. We’re in a white-water rapids.”

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