'It Really Hits Home': Bay Area Leaders Reflect on Political Violence After Trump Shooting

The attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania over the weekend has awakened national memories of violence across the political spectrum.

For several Bay Area leaders, the shooting served as a reminder that threats they receive — which, by several accounts, have escalated in recent years — are real and dangerous. Political rhetoric is increasingly divisive and violent, and research shows members of marginalized groups are disproportionately targeted.

In San Francisco, the assassination attempt stirred painful memories of the city’s most notorious act of political violence: the 1978 shootings of Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk by a former colleague in City Hall. More recently, Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul, was attacked in the family’s Pacific Heights home by a man who was allegedly radicalized by conspiracy theories.

“It brought back memories, and it really hits home that these threats of violence are not that far away,” Jeffrey Kwong, the president of the Harvey Milk LGBTQ Democratic Club, said of the shooting at Trump’s rally on Saturday.

Kwong said that many can still recall the horrific back-to-back assassinations of Moscone and Milk, the city’s first openly gay supervisor, by former Supervisor Dan White.

“We still have a lot of members that remember that night, recollect the emotional outpouring of people — thousands walking from Castro to City Hall with flowers and candles,” he said.

State Sen. Scott Wiener knows the dangers of political violence on a personal level. He had his home searched following bomb threats in 2022, which he said were related to his policy work for the LGBTQ+ community.

Wiener, who is gay, wrote in a post on X at the time that the threats came after Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and conservative political activist Charlie Kirk posted “homophobic lies” about him.

“The San Francisco bomb dog is very familiar with my home because I’ve received bomb threats at my home,” he told KQED. Political violence “is very real, and San Francisco is very impacted by it.”

In January, technology entrepreneur Garry Tan wished death upon seven members of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in an apparently alcohol-fueled rant on X. The Y Combinator CEO said, “Die slow motherf—ers,” an allusion to Young Thug lyrics he directed at seven of the board’s progressive members. After Tan’s posts, some of the supervisors he named received letters that said: “Garry Tan is right! I wish a slow and painful death for you and your loved ones.”

In the wake of the assassination attempt on Trump, Supervisor Connie Chan, one of the officials targeted by Tan, said such violent rhetoric needs to be taken seriously.

“We need to really draw the line when it comes to threats of violence and violent acts. We have to denounce it immediately,” she said. “Things like this have happened in the past in American history, and yet we haven’t learned from it.”

Tan has since deleted the post and publicly apologized, but Chan and others said his close ties with the city’s moderate political wing — Tan is a board member of the powerful political action committee GrowSF and a major donor to the Democratic Party and moderate causes — contributes to the normalizing of such threatening language.

“We are not holding people accountable when they make threats of violence against elected officials,” Chan told KQED. “We downplay it, and we normalize it, and that’s not acceptable if you’re a Democrat or a Republican.”

Supervisor Dean Preston, who was also named in Tan’s online rant, noted that “no one returned his money.”

“We see Democrats here making statements about the violence against Trump and his supporters at the rally this weekend, and yet we have many local leaders and candidates for office who were completely silent when we had tech CEO Garry Tan calling for the death of supervisors followed by direct mailings calling for the death of supervisors and our families,” Preston told KQED.

Multiple studies show that harassment and violence directed at local officials is increasing across the country.

According to a 2021 study from the National League of Cities, people who identify as LGBTQ+, people of color, women and nonbinary people or other marginalized groups are “disproportionately targeted, and perpetrators of harassment, threats and violence capitalize on the identities of public officials.”

In the East Bay, Oakland City Councilmember Carroll Fife said threats against her and other public officials have felt like they are ramping up.

In a series of posts on X in January, Fife, who is Black, shared several voicemails containing horrific and violent threats that were made against her. More recently, she has been accosted outside of City Hall by people donning Trump and MAGA gear, photos and videos shared with KQED show.

“They are getting more and more aggressive and it’s concerning. People think MAGA is outside of the liberal Bay Area, and it’s absolutely not,” Fife told KQED. “We have people in Oakland who are doing the exact same thing.”

Antioch City Councilmember Tamisha Torres-Walker, an Afro-Latina woman, said harassment got so bad she started paying for private security out of pocket to follow her at large events. She has since stopped, she said, because the cost was unsustainable.

“At one point, I felt unsafe going to City Council meetings because I have been confronted by an angry mob,” she said. “I have never been afraid; I used to walk and run in my neighborhood before I was on council. As soon as I got elected, I no longer felt safe in the community.”

In January, a member of Berkeley’s City Council who pushed for permanent supportive housing at People’s Park resigned over “harassment, stalking, and threats” that he said took a toll on his personal and family life. Rigel Robinson wrote in a column published in Berkeleyside that the job and associated backlash left him in a “perpetual state of stress and exhaustion.”

The mounting instances of threats and political violence are especially concerning in an increasingly tense election year.

Public opinion polls show that a growing number of Americans “say that political violence would be acceptable in at least some circumstances,” according to Shirin Sinnar, a legal scholar on political violence at Stanford Law.

Political violence has escalated across the political spectrum, she said, “but right-wing attacks [are] actually more frequent and far more deadly in terms of lives lost in recent years.”

Wiener said the nature of the threats he receives from right-wing actors is more violent.

“I get criticized by both extremes on the left and the right, and I get sometimes harshly criticized. But the death threats I receive, it’s only one side — it’s from the extreme right,” he told KQED.

He warned against “both-sidesing” the blame for increasing violent rhetoric following Trump’s assassination attempt, recalling that after the attack on Paul Pelosi, Republicans and Democrats did not exactly come together.

“Some of the people on the right are being so aggressive and self-righteous about the [Trump] attack, falsely claiming that Democrats somehow instigated this violence — which I think is very untrue,” Wiener told KQED. “These are some of the same people who made fun of Paul Pelosi for being brutalized almost to death.”

KQED’s Alex Gonzalez and Sukey Lewis contributed to this report.