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EXCLUSIVE: Iran VP denies plot to kill Trump
Donald Trump on Wednesday accused Iran of being behind plots to kill him.
Citing information reportedly given to him a day earlier by US intelligence, he said, “If I were the president, I would inform the threatening country, in this case, Iran, that if you do anything to harm this person, we are going to blow your largest cities and the country itself to smithereens. We're going to blow it to smithereens.”
There have, of course, been two known plots to kill Trump, one in July and one earlier this month.
But what do Iran’s leaders have to say about the matter?
“We don’t send people to assassinate people,” Iran’s Vice President for Strategic Affairs Mohammad Javad Zarif told GZERO Media President Ian Bremmer on Wednesday during an interview for our nationally televised program GZERO World.
“I think that’s a campaign ploy in order to get former President Trump out of the not-so-favorable situation he’s in in the elections,” he said.
He also maintained that Iran doesn’t intervene in the internal affairs of other countries.
“It’s not for me to decide who is going to win in the American elections. That’s for the American people to decide. And Iran doesn’t have a preference in this election,” Zarif said.
Pressed by Bremmer about allegations that Iran was behind recent efforts to hack into US presidential campaigns, Zarif conceded that while the attacks may have originated from within the Islamic Republic, it was “hackers operating in Iran,” but “not on behalf of Iran.”
“We are ourselves victims of hacking,” he said.
Watch the clip here, and tune in next week for Ian Bremmer’s full interview with Zarif in the next episode of GZERO World, airing on PBS stations around the country. Check local listings.
GZERO World with Ian Bremmer, the award-winning weekly global affairs series, airs nationwide on US public television stations (check local listings).
New digital episodes of GZERO World are released every Monday on YouTube. Don't miss an episode: subscribe to GZERO's YouTube channel and turn on notifications (🔔).
Opinion: The lanternfly law of American politics
You have probably heard the news. New Yorkers of all ages have become gleeful, merciless killers.
On the streets. In the subways. In the parks. Even in their own homes. The massacres here continue, with no end in sight.
But it’s not what you think.
The tens of thousands of nameless dead are in fact Spotted Lanternflies, nickel-sized insects with kimono-like layers of spotted gray, black, and fiery-red wings. “A sexy cicada,” as my colleague Riley Callanan aptly describes them.
And the trouble with the Lanternflies around here is simple: they’re out-of-towners.
Native to Asia, they’re believed to have hitched a ride to the US on a shipping container about a decade ago. The population exploded across the Northeast, along with concerns about their impact on forests and farms.The Lanternflies, it turns out, secrete a gooey honeydew that foments deadly fungi.
Experts began warning of billions of dollars in damage. And so local governments urged us all to kill them on sight.
People listened.
Today, if you point out a lanternfly on any New York sidewalk, stoop, shirtsleeve, subway platform, or slide, people will spring into action: stomping, swatting, crushing, squashing. The bloodlust for this tiny creature is immense. As one popular science magazine put it, we must “destroy this useless garbage insect ... without mercy.”
Even the youth have been conditioned to kill. My 8-year-old son told me yesterday a girl in his class has declared herself head of “The Lanternfly Committee.” Her primary responsibility in this role is to scream that there are lanternflies around whenever there are lanternflies around. And when there are lanternflies around, all committee members (and present non-members) must stomp them into oblivion.
I will say this – it can be cathartic to stomp the shit out of lanternflies. Boss chewed you out at the office? Stomp a lantern fly. Mets blew a lead in the ninth? Die, lanternfly. Fed up with your kids asking you about lanternflies? Stomp more lanternflies.
No one is sure if all this killing is really controlling the lanternfly population, but so what? We aren’t just venting – we’re doing our part for society. This violence is virtuous. The killing must go on. And it will.
In that sense, I think there’s actually a little of the lanternfly in our politics more broadly these days. Call it the Lanternfly Law of Politics. It says: our opponents are no longer simply people we happen to disagree with, they are a threat that must be wiped out before they can do more harm.
You see this kind of thinking everywhere these days. Depending on what your views are, you might see liberals, or conservatives, or Donald Trump, or Kamala Harris, or the media, or the tech companies, or the police, or the federal government itself as a menace steadily devouring the foliage of our society.
As a result, in response, our political culture is becoming more extreme, more violent. People on the left will point to January 6th or the broader increase in threats of rightwing terrorism in recent years. People on the right will point to the not one but two plots to kill Donald Trump that occurred this summer.
We should all point to this as evidence that we are in a bad place.
Perhaps nowhere is the Lanternfly Law more obvious, or more dangerous, than in the language used to describe immigrants. When Donald Trump describes his political opponents as “vermin”, or immigrants as parasites who are “poisoning the bloodstream” of our country, he is tapping into a rich, vile history of demonizing foreigners as invasive species.
It’s powerful, of course, because it works. True vermin and invasive species are, by definition, threatening to our organisms, our communities, our ecosystems. So that kind of language taps deep into our lizard brains and provokes a primal emotional response.
But we aren’t … lizards, we are human beings. And immigrants or people you disagree with politically aren’t vermin, they are … also human beings.
We can argue about sensible rules for immigration, abortion, speech, guns, Lanternflies, whatever. But giving ourselves permission to dehumanize our neighbors and rivals like this is always dangerous.
The Lanternfly Law is, in the end, the root of all demagoguery: it’s a kind of political conjuring trick that gives people license to express their basest impulses under the cloak of civic virtue or community protection. You aren’t behaving like an ideologue, a loon, or a psychopath, the Law of the Lanternfly says, you are defending society as you know it.
So the next time a Lanternfly scuttles by or settles down, by all means stomp it to death if that makes you feel good.
But when it comes to the way we speak and think about our politics and society more broadly, be careful before you go chasing those sexy cicadas.
Ian Bremmer on Trump second assassination attempt
Now, it's not going to have much impact on the election, in part not just because so many unprecedented things get normalized these days in U.S. politics, but also because there's no video that suddenly... The last assassination attempt you had Trump literally escaping with his life less than a fraction of a second, and the blood on him and the rest. Here, the Secret Service did what they should have. They shot at the perpetrator well before Trump was in the sights of this would-be assassin. The U.S. did what it was supposed to, and he's in custody, so one assumes that we're going to learn a lot more about him as a consequence of the interrogations and the rest. Trump can and will fundraise on the back of it, but I'd be very surprised to see any movement in the polls as a consequence or any change in policy, so really not going to move the needle on the election itself.
And yet I think we have to ask ourselves, if Trump had actually been killed, can you imagine how much different the environment today would be? The political environment, the social environment, the violence, the reprisals. This is already considered to be an illegitimate election by a lot of Americans. Many, many Americans believe shouldn't be allowed to run because he's a convicted criminal. He was twice impeached, not convicted, but impeachment is broken as part of the political process. Many of Trump's supporters, a large majority, believe he should be president now, that he won the election in 2020, and that they're going to do everything possible–them, the deep state, the political opposition, the Democrats–to prevent him from becoming President again, to jail him, and even to call for violence against him. And that means that if we did have Trump assassinated, I think it would be much worse than January 6th in the U.S. It would be much worse, more saliently perhaps, than January 8th in Brazil, where you would have George Floyd-style riots, but larger and also much better armed.
A lot of people, including militias, but even Trump supporters in police forces in low-level positions in the military and National Guard that engage in protests that could easily become very violent, certainly in red states across the country. And I think that because it hasn't happened, even though it's been very close, we're not talking about it, we're not thinking about it. But the lack of resilience, the vulnerability, the frailty of U.S. political stability in this environment, I think is remarkable and deserves more focus, more attention because it would prioritize the steps that Americans need to take and political leaders need to take to rebuild that resilience, rebuild that trust, which is nowhere on the political agenda right now. I have to say, we have to give Trump and the GOP credit in the sense that they oppose all gun restrictions as a matter of policy, and that hasn't in any way changed even after both of these assassination attempts of Americans that are unhinged, that have access to these powerful weapons.
And that doesn't happen in other countries. That is a huge difference between the U.S. There's vastly more gun violence in America, not because there's so much more mental health issues, not because there's so much more economic inequality, but because there's so much less restrictions on assault-type weapons, on military-type weapons. The United States has more guns per capita than any country in the world except for Yemen, and Yemen is in the middle of a civil war. The United States is not, and yet there is no feasible capacity politically in the near term to do anything about that. No political will. Very relieved that this series of headlines does not include an actual assassination. Very relieved that former President Trump has survived this. Deeply concerned that it continues to happen. And of course, everything about U.S. politics promises you that you're going to see a lot more of it.
That's the state of play today and this election, and in the broader context that we talk about. So I hope everyone's well, and I'll talk to you all real soon.
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Political violence is on the rise again, at home and abroad
In a small town out in coal country, a lone assassin shoots a controversial populous leader. The leader miraculously survives, and his supporters blame the press and his political opponents for fomenting violence. Does that sound familiar? Months before Donald Trump was shot in Pennsylvania in the first assassination attempt of its kind in America in 40 years, Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico took a bullet to the stomach during a visit to Central Slovakia. But Fico is just one of many leaders or high-level candidates who have been attacked in democracies around the world in recent years.
Across the democratic world, political violence and violent political language are becoming more common again as polarization deepens, viewpoints harden, and political differences start to feel like existential battles. Here in the US last year, there were more than 8,000 threats of violence against federal lawmakers alone, a tenfold increase since 2016. And as we head into the most contentious and high-stakes election in America's modern history, people are bracing for more. A poll taken just after the attempt on Trump's life showed that two-thirds of Americans think the current environment makes political violence more likely. Who is responsible for stopping this slide into violence? Is it our leaders, our media outlets, or our social media platforms? Is it ourselves? Unless things change, we will be lucky if it's another 40 years before this happens again in the US.
Watch full episode: Trump, Biden & the US election: What could be next?
Season 7 of GZERO World with Ian Bremmer, the award-winning weekly global affairs series, launches nationwide on public television stations (check local listings).
New digital episodes of GZERO World are released every Monday on YouTube. Don''t miss an episode: subscribe to GZERO's YouTube channel and turn on notifications (🔔).
Republican presidential candidate and former US President Donald Trump is assisted by the Secret Service after gunfire rang out during a campaign rally at the Butler Farm Show in Butler, PA, on July 13, 2024.
Electoral violence comes out of the shadows
The brazen assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump this weekend has pulled from the shadows an inevitable implication of the country’s polarization: the risk of political violence. In this consequential US election year, with questions of institutional legitimacy hanging in the air, misinformation flooding social media, and worries about the fitness of at least one of the candidates, we have now been alerted to how real the threat of violence is for the months ahead.
Elections offer voters an opportunity to express something fundamental about what they expect from their government. This is at least the theoretical underpinning for conducting elections. But in each election, losers also have a responsibility. At its core, democracy is a system in which groups lose elections. Votes are held, results are counted and respected, and turnovers take place. Losers consent to being losers in any given election cycle because they believe they will have the opportunity to be winners in the future.
If, however, the institutional framework does not allow losers to become winners later, the system’s legitimacy erodes. Losers may withdraw their consent and pursue alternative strategies to access power. Sometimes this leads to boycotting elections, but sometimes the strategy is the use of force.
When winners repeatedly win and losers repeatedly lose, or if winners are perceived to repeatedly win and losers to lose, ballots may be replaced by bullets. In fact, according to data from the National Elections Across Democracy and Autocracy Dataset, in more than 4,000 global elections between 1945 and 2020, just under 19% of them involved significant violence. Nearly one in five elections over the past 75 years turned violent. Already in this pivotal election year, we have seen violence in the run-up to elections in Senegal, Pakistan, South Africa, Mexico (at historic rates), and France.
In the US, grievances that have been stoked around the legitimacy of the system and how well it is serving voters, travel through the existing fault lines in American politics – particularly political party identification – activating them further. It is now a near-truism that there is little common ground between the two political sides, and the gap is widening.Survey data from 2022 and 2023 has repeatedly found that a wide swath of the US population believes the system is rigged, and as much as a quarter of those polled agreed that it may soon be time to take up arms against the government. In 2021, these realities culminated in the Jan. 6 storming of the US Capitol. In 2024, this blueprint heightens the likelihood of civil unrest and violence across the US in the lead-up to and, depending on the outcome, after the election.
The name Thomas Matthew Crooks will now go down in the annals of US history alongside John Hinckley Jr. and Lee Harvey Oswald. While very little is currently known about what motivated Crooks’ attempt, lone-offender terrorism has become all too common. It speaks to a broader thread of radicalization that has emerged from US polarization – as political parties no longer speak to the same set of facts and individuals find themselves moving towards the extremes.
“Lone actors are difficult to detect and disrupt because of their lack of affiliation,” according to the2024 US Intelligence Community’s Annual Threat Assessment. “While these violent extremists tend to leverage simple attack methods, they can have devastating, outsized consequences.”
Yet it would be a mistake to focus too narrowly on Crooks’ character or political affiliation in attempting to make sense of the current US political climate. The polarization, the movement to the poles, the rising radicalization – are not just left (including ecological or animal-rights extremism, anarchists) or right (including racially or ethnically motivated extremism) problems. They are brewing on both sides of the aisle, especially as the center has become hollowed out.
When Trump was reported to have shouted “Fight” after being pierced by a bullet on Saturday, he was being heard. His message resonated with those who want to see him be returned to the White House in November, and those who just as desperately want to see him lose.
Security will be stepped up at rallies, this week’s Republican National Convention, August’s Democratic National Convention, and across all campaign stops. But as grievances grow, as fight talk and candidate fitness persist, so too will the shadow of political violence.
Lindsay Newman is the practice head of Global Macro, Geopolitics for Eurasia Group and is based in London. She writes the Views on America column for GZERO.
Former President Donald Trump, with his face bloodied by a shot that hit his right ear, raises his fist as he's rushed from a rally stage in Butler, PA.
Donald Trump survives assassination attempt. What happens next?
What happened: Shots rang out at a rally for Donald Trump on Saturday in Butler, PA. The former president – who was speaking at the podium – dropped to the ground and was surrounded by the Secret Service before standing with what appeared to be blood dripping from the right side of his face. He then pumped his fist into the air and was whisked away by his guards.
The Secret Service issued a statement Saturday evening indicating that the shooter aimed from atop a nearby rooftop and was “neutralized,” and that one spectator was killed while another two were critically injured. The FBI has identified the suspected shooter as Thomas Matthew Crooks, a 20-year-old registered Republican from Bethel Park, PA.
A few hours after being rushed from the scene, Trump took to Truth Social to thank the Secret Service. His upper right ear was hit by a bullet, he explained. “I knew immediately that something was wrong in that I heard a whizzing sound, shots, and immediately felt the bullet ripping through the skin,” he wrote. “Much bleeding took place, so I realized then what was happening. GOD BLESS AMERICA!”
The United States has not seen this level of political violence since the assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan in 1981 in Washington, DC.
President Joe Biden was quick to respond to the violence, saying that he is “grateful to hear that [Trump is] safe and doing well” and that he’s “praying for him and his family and for all those who were at the rally, as we await further information.”
“There’s no place for this kind of violence in America. We must unite as one nation to condemn it,” Biden emphasized.
The Biden campaign has reportedly suspended its campaign ads, and elected officials on both sides of the aisle have condemned the shooting, denouncing political violence and hoping for Trump’s recovery.
Eurasia Group and GZERO President Ian Bremmer says it’s essential that everyone across the American political spectrum denounce the violence. “Ideally, that is done in a bipartisan manner, that is done in Congress, in the House, and in the Senate. Not with individual posts, and comments, and tweets, but from the entirety of a joint session condemning it and working for peace,” he says. “That’s what the country needs.”
What to expect: Trump’s quick reaction and defiant fist pump will likely cement his image as a political martyr – and benefit his campaign in the runup to the November election. “That response, and being caught on tape,” says Bremmer, “is going to be a rally for his people for a long time.” All eyes will be on Trump’s appearance at the upcoming Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, which gets underway on Monday.
It may also lead to a slew of conspiracy theories that the Democratic Party was responsible, while Democrats are likely to wonder whether it was staged by the Trump campaign to boost him in the polls.
While the motivation of the shooter remains unknown, political tensions have been rising in the United States in recent years. Nearly 25% of Americans agree that “patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country,” and 75% believe that American democracy is at risk in the 2024 presidential election.
Against that backdrop, and with political extremism and disinformation having been weaponized through the media landscape, especially social media, Bremmer says today’s attempt on Trump’s life means “we should be prepared for more violence.”
Political violence in Mexico
Graphic Truth: Mexico’s political murder problem
The Mexican political campaign season that concluded with the June 2, 2024, general election was the deadliest on record, with at least 34 candidates for local or state office killed during the preceding nine months.
According to observers at the Colegio de Mexico in Mexico City, nearly a third of the dead were members of current president Andres Manuel López Obrador’s ruling Morena party, whose candidate Claudia Sheinbaum won the presidential vote in a landslide.
Over the past two decades, homicides have soared in Mexico, driven in large part by the rise of powerful drug cartels warring for territory and markets. Between 2000 and 2018, the rate of killings more than tripled to 16 per 100,000 people, before coming down slightly in the years since.
But within that, there’s also been a staggering rise in political violence specifically. This includes assassinations of candidates, officials, human rights defenders, journalists, and other activists.
During the presidential term of Vicente Fox, between 2000 and 2006, there were a total of 58 such killings. In the current term of López Obrador, which extends until October, there have already been 500.
Here is a look at how political violence in Mexico has evolved over the past quarter of a century.
Participants in a rally to mark an attack on an SPD politician stand on Pohlandplatz. After the brutal attack on the SPD politician Ecke, a 17-year-old turned himself in to the police.
Latest attack on a German politician stokes concern ahead of elections
Last week, the top European Parliament candidate of the governing Social Democrat Party was beaten unconscious in the eastern city of Dresden while campaigning. A Green Party operative was assaulted there as well. Several teens with ties to far-right ideologies are suspected in both cases.
Statistics show rising violence against German politicians. In 2023, there were nearly 2,800 physical or verbal attacks, twice as many as in 2019, when a neo-Nazi assassination of conservative lawmaker Walter Lübcke stunned the country.
Last year’s violence included about 500 attacks on politicians from the far-right Alternative for Deutschland, or AFD, and more than 1,200 on members of the center-left Green Party.
Why now? The problem has deep roots, according to Jan Techau, a Berlin-based Europe expert at Eurasia Group. Establishment parties’ long-standing failure to address big issues like immigration, schooling, or the economy, he says, opened the way for more radical and violent forces on both the left and right. “What we see is an overall more charged, political atmosphere where this kind of violence becomes more legitimate.”