The New Yorker: Elected officials from both parties are struggling to respond. In the Line of Fire [no paywall] “America is a violent country. Nowhere else that is remotely as rich tolerates so many murders or so many weapons. But, sometime during the tumultuous decade of the Trump era, it began to seem that simply participating in the political process put you at risk. After the riot on January 6th, 2021, when thousands of Trump supporters stormed the Capitol, Tom Manger, a tall, mustached sixty-six-year-old former police chief in Montgomery County, Maryland, was hired to lead the U.S. Capitol Police. Part of the department’s job is to investigate threats of violence against members of Congress. Manger soon learned that, in the years before his appointment, such threats had been increasing dramatically. A decade ago, he told me, members typically reported fewer than two thousand threats per year. “But around 2017 that really started to escalate,” Manger said. “Last year, it was almost ten thousand.” As Manger and his team analyzed the data, he concluded that one of the best predictors of which members received the most threats was not party, seniority, race, or gender but how much attention they generated on social media. “A lot of people love you,” Manger told me. “And a lot of people hate you.” Nearly ten thousand violent threats a year amount to about twenty-eight a day, a number that overwhelmed the investigative capacities of the Capitol Police. A common type of threat, Manger found, emerged from a mundane situation: a member of the public would call his representative to say that he was dissatisfied with his care at the Department of Veterans Affairs, and then, frustrated by a lack of response, call a second time. “Then he calls a third time and says, ‘I’m gonna kill the congressman,’ ” Manger told me. The most ominous threats implied that a member of Congress was under surveillance. “A member will get a letter mailed to his house, and there will be a photo of the congressman’s kid walking the family dog, and there will just be a little Post-it note stuck to the letter that says, ‘What a pretty dog,’ or whatever,” Manger said. “And this sends the message: ‘I was close enough to your kid to take this picture.’ ”