As political violence escalates in the United States, chaos is spreading and democracy itself is under threat. The words of anger, ill-considered and increasingly crude, are accelerant on the American bonfire.

When President Donald Trump told his top generals and admirals, “It’s a war from within… we’re under invasion from within,” he assumed the role as provocateur-in-chief.

Back in 1942, the US Supreme Court ruled that some words like these, by their very utterance, could shatter the peace by inciting violence. That wise guidance has been ignored by Trump and many of those he declares his enemies. They are forgetting that violence is a contagion.

After the shooting of the MAGA crusader, Charlie Kirk, Trump boasted that he did not forgive his enemies. He hated them. By toying with the idea of invoking the National Emergencies Act of 1976 or more radically the 1807 Insurrection Act, Trump declared that he was ready to call out the military and federalise control of the National Guard to “straighten out, one by one” cities run by the Democrats including New York, Los Angeles, Memphis, Chicago and Washington DC. He claimed, without evidence, that Portland, Oregon was “burning down" because of domestic terrorists.

Trump’s vanquished rival, Kamala Harris, summed up her adversaries this week with, “These motherfuckers are crazy!” She is enjoined by Democrat governors and mayors snarling that Trump is a “wanna-be king”, a “fascist,” constantly “lying to fabricate a dystopian crisis” to cower or purge his political foes. The president’s most vociferous aides, especially Vice-President J.D. Vance and Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, reply with rhetorical volleys and sometimes infantile memes, meant to prove that the “wicked ideology of the radical-left” is to blame for a current day “American nightmare.”

“We will defeat the forces of darkness and evil,” Miller has boasted, referring to American citizens. These are all surely fighting words, not unlike Trump’s extraordinary defiance after Thomas Matthew Crooks narrowly missed assassinating him at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, on 13 July 2024. The raised fist, the angry blood-smeared face and the cry of “fight, fight” echoes still.

While Trump attempts to settle foreign wars such as Gaza in his quest for the Nobel Peace Prize, at home his words rattle of vengeance.

Tellingly, this 79-year-old president has experienced at least three other foiled assassination attempts. In 2016, a British 20-year-old, Michael Steven Sandford, tried to grab a police officer’s gun to shoot Trump at a rally in Las Vegas, Nevada. In 2017, Gregory Lee Leingang stole a forklift in North Dakota with the plan of trying to ram the then-president’s armour-plated vehicle which is known as ‘the Beast’. Just two months after Trump’s close shave in Pennsylvania last year, the Secret Service captured a rifleman, Ryan Wesley Routh, who had planned an ambush on the president’s Florida golf course.

The truth is violence stalks American leaders whether or not they incite a mob of followers or provoke a crazed individual.

As a foreign correspondent for more than a decade in the US, I reported on the attempted assassinations of presidents Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan. Covering the White House, I was aware that four sitting presidents had been assassinated. I came to seriously appreciate that the Secret Service has a very tough job in a nation where so many scores are settled viciously.

The US was born in a bloody revolution and has never healed after its frontier massacres, the bone-deep poison of slavery and a devastating Civil War causing between 600,000 and 800,000 deaths. The addiction to gun carrying, feuding gangs, conspiratorial cults and extreme religious nationalism is a toxic mix. What we are witnessing, the heightened danger of a political divide as glaring as the San Andreas Fault, has been a long time coming.

I used to quip to my travelling cameraman, combat veteran David Brill, “Who is making this movie?” The real America we discovered journeying through all 50 states was more troubled and troubling than anything Hollywood dreamed up.

The current box-office sensation, One Battle After Another, is certainly a timely reflection of the orgy of American violence. Leonardo Di Caprio’s burnt-out radical lefty is pitted against Sean Penn’s pitiful para-military thug leading ICE raids to round up hapless Latino immigrants. The battle opens in a cage where “the illegals” are detained. The radical extremes, the violence of left and right, are grotesquely satirised by director, Paul Thomas Anderson. But you will walk out of this dystopian movie and think it is art imitating life. The nightly news is more disturbing than the movie.

While Trump is provocateur-in-chief, he has a team of veritable haters. Who can forget The War Room podcaster, Steve Bannon, saying that the nation’s leading infectious diseases expert leading the fight against COVID, Dr Anthony Fauci, should have his head on a pike, alongside the skull of then FBI director, Christopher Wray?

On the political left, podcasters such as Hasan Piker, similarly slip into hyperbolic, violent rhetoric. Piker recently apologised, admitting that he had said things without thinking, including a rash taunt that a Florida Senator should be killed if people there really cared about Medicare fraud.

After United Health Care chief executive Brian Thompson was gunned down in New York, social media was flooded with sympathetic comments about the shooter, Luigi Mangione. Too often someone rants on social media that the victim deserved it_._

Fox Television’s former notorious shock jock, Bill O’Reilly, regularly taunted Dr George Tiller, with “Tiller the baby killer” before this provider of women’s health was murdered. Anti-abortion activists have committed at least 11 murders, 42 bombings, 200 acts of violence and 531 assaults, according to the Southern Poverty Law Centre.

In America’s war of words, grim facts are ignored. The US has the highest number of school shootings in the world with at least 53 this year. Each day some 125 Americans are killed with guns.

Yes, Mr President. Your words are locked and loaded. You would say that there is a war within. But tragically Americans are inflicting more damage on your democracy and its place in the world than any of your mortal enemies.

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.