Something is going seriously wrong with American politics when people who constantly speak about defending democracy can contemplate throwing democracy aside when they despise the person who won an election. A new Center for Strategic Politics poll conducted with Liberal Currents surveyed 683 Democratic voters and found that 59% would feel either “very positive” or “somewhat positive” if Donald Trump were removed from office through a military coup supposedly intended to safeguard the Constitution. Another 13% were neutral. Even more disturbing, 29% expressed a positive reaction to the hypothetical assassination of Trump.
Read those numbers again. We are talking about a MILITARY COUP in the United States of America. This is the same country that has spent decades lecturing the rest of the world about democratic institutions and peaceful transfers of power. The entire purpose of constitutional government is that you do not get to overthrow the government simply because you hate the person occupying the White House. Elections have consequences, and when your side loses, you organize, argue your case, go back to the voters, and try again. Once political opponents become enemies who must be removed by force, democracy has already begun to rot from within.
The willingness to view a military overthrow positively is nevertheless astonishing because it shows how easily democratic principles can become conditional. Democracy apparently becomes sacred only when it produces the desired result.
The assassination response is even darker. Why should ANY meaningful portion of the population respond positively to the murder of a political opponent? We have crossed into dangerous territory when political disagreement becomes so emotional that the death of the person on the other side begins to look like an acceptable political outcome. Many are willing to simply turn to violence rather than go through the standard democratic procedure.
There is broader evidence that left-wing political violence has increased, although the facts are considerably more complicated than partisan rhetoric suggests. The Center for Strategic and International Studies found that left-wing terrorist attacks and plots increased over the preceding decade and that 2025 became the first year in more than three decades when attacks attributed to the violent left outnumbered those attributed to the violent far right.
The moment you start explaining why violence against your opponent is somehow understandable, you have abandoned the rule of law. It does not matter whether the victim is Donald Trump, Charlie Kirk, a Democratic politician, an ICE agent, a Republican congressman, or some anonymous citizen attending a political rally. If you excuse political violence when your opponents are attacked, you surrender the moral authority to complain when the violence eventually comes for you.
America has been down this road before. Political violence erupted throughout the late 1960s and 1970s from revolutionary organizations across the ideological spectrum. Bombings, assassinations, riots, and attacks on government institutions did not produce some enlightened political paradise. They produced fear, repression, greater government surveillance, and an expansion of state power. Violence ALWAYS becomes the excuse government needs to take more power because frightened populations willingly surrender freedoms politicians could never take from them during peaceful times.
This is what both sides should understand before cheering the destruction of their opponents. You may despise Trump. You may despise Democrats. You may believe the government is corrupt beyond redemption. None of that changes the basic equation. Once military coups and assassination become acceptable tools of politics, elections become meaningless because political power ultimately belongs to whoever controls the guns.
The Constitution was designed precisely to prevent that outcome. Presidents leave through elections, constitutional succession, impeachment, resignation, incapacity procedures, or the expiration of their terms. The military does not decide who governs the United States. Assassins do not decide. Mobs do not decide. If those principles become negotiable whenever people convince themselves that the other side represents some existential evil, then eventually every election becomes an existential struggle in which almost anything can be justified.
That is how republics destroy themselves. They rarely collapse because everybody suddenly wakes up and announces that democracy has ended. They decay when each faction gradually decides that constitutional restraints apply only when convenient and that violating those restraints is justified because the other side is supposedly worse. Once enough people embrace that mentality, there is no longer a constitutional system to defend. There are merely competing tribes fighting over who gets to control the state.
Americans had better reject political violence regardless of which flag the person committing it happens to wave. Otherwise, the greatest threat to the republic will not come from Russia, China, Iran, or any foreign enemy. It will come from Americans who have become so consumed by political hatred that they would rather destroy the constitutional system than accept that sometimes their side loses an election.