United States

Central American migrant caravans, the pipe-bomb mailings, and the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting

This episode of instant American history was starkly reminiscent of the accusations of sexual impropriety made by Anita Hill during the Senate confirmation hearing of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas in 1991. Riveted and riven by the Kavanaugh confirmation, the country headed into the 2018 midterm elections suffused in partisan rancor. Trump emphatically embraced the election as a referendum on his presidency as he stumped for Republican candidates. Rather than emphasize positive developments on the economic front (including an unemployment rate that had fallen to 3.7 percent by September 2018 and GDP growth of 4.2 percent in the second quarter and 3.5 percent in the third quarter of 2018), the president instead chose to refocus attention on immigration, which remained a “red meat issue” for his core supporters. In particular, he repeatedly raised the alarm against the supposed threat of violence posed by the imminent “invasion” of several thousand asylum-seeking Central Americans in a caravan that was slowly making its way northward toward the United States.

In the weeks before the election, with divisive rhetoric escalating, a series of shocking events quickly unfolded. Beginning on October 22, pipe-bomb-bearing packages were intercepted that had been bound for more than a dozen political opponents and prominent critics of Trump, including Hillary Clinton, activist billionaire George Soros, and former president Obama. A Florida man who was a staunch Trump supporter was arrested in connection with the pipe bombs and charged with five federal crimes, including the illegal mailing of explosives. Another man who had made anti-immigrant and anti-Semitic statements on social media stormed a synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on October 27, killing 11 people who were attending services there. Earlier in the week, still another individual had shot and killed two seemingly random African American victims in a grocery store in a suburb of Louisville, Kentucky, after failing to gain entrance to a black church. These events produced a national outpouring of concern over the virulence of the political tribalism that had not only taken root but seemed to be growing quickly in American life.