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Let’s start here, just so there can be no confusion: It is wrong to try to shoot the president, or any public official. In a democracy, violence should never be the response to political circumstances when voting, protesting, and many other forms of civic engagement are permitted. But after three serious attempts on Donald Trump’s life in as many years, a secondary, more instrumental reason why Americans who oppose Trump’s political project shouldn’t attempt to harm him has also become clear: It’s actively helpful to his cause.

Even before we had more information about the apparent motive of the armed man who rushed past security at the White House Correspondents Dinner in Washington on Saturday night, prompting Trump and other top administration officials’ swift evacuation, many speculated that the president was his target. On Sunday, we got confirmation. In a manifesto the alleged shooter reportedly sent to family members minutes before trying to storm the hotel ballroom where the dinner was being held, the assailant described himself as “no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes,” an apparent reference to Trump. The missive went on to label administration officials “targets, prioritized from highest-ranking to lowest” and expressed a willingness to “go through most everyone here to get to the targets if it were absolutely necessary”—including security, wait staff, and other hotel guests. Again, the biggest problem with this disturbing behavior is that violence is the wrong response to America’s perceived political problems. But another is it can backfire spectacularly.

Dishearteningly, similar incidents have happened frequently enough that we can actually examine the data around them. Shortly after an assassination attempt at a 2024 campaign event in Butler, Pennsylvania, injured then-candidate Trump and killed one of his supporters, Trump’s favorability rating rose. In one ABC News/Ipsos poll, 40 percent of Americans said they had a positive view of Trump after the shooting, a four-year high. A Trump-linked company sold shoes branded with the candidate’s blood-streaked face and his shouts of “Fight! Fight! Fight!” Trump’s allies argued that if someone wanted to kill him that badly, he must be doing something right. Mark Zuckerberg, who during Trump’s first term spoke out against his immigration agenda and blasted him over the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, described the once and future president’s fist-pumping response as “badass.” Trump’s favorability, already on an upward trajectory, went even higher after the Secret Service foiled a second assassination attempt at his Florida golf course a few months later. It stayed that way through the November election, which some political data........

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