As political acts go, an assassination is more like a natural disaster than a controlled explosion: it will wreak havoc, it will often change the course of history, but its perpetrators can never know in what direction. When Gavrilo Princip shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand, in 1914, his objective was South Slavic independence from the Austro-Hungarian Empire; what he got was the First World War and the slaughter of millions. On the other hand, in 1995, when a far-right extremist assassinated the Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, at a rally in support of the Oslo peace accords, he could be said to have achieved precisely what he intended: the lasting destruction of the peace process. For that reason, Rabin’s killing is sometimes called the most “successful” assassination in modern history.
These appear to be two substantially different acts. But, if you go by the historian Simon Ball’s rubric in “Death to Order: A Modern History of Assassination,” they share a key set of characteristics. “Before 1914, assassination was the preserve of disgruntled individuals, plotters in royal courts, or small groups of fanatics pursuing lost causes,” Ball writes. Princip established a new template: even if the outcome of an assassination proved chaotic, the intention behind it generally was not. The assassin had become a rational figure, precise in his targeting, legibly motivated, and, crucially, often part of a wider movement or conspiracy to topple those in power. Though we usually hear about Princip alone, he acted along with a seven-man assassination squad, tied to a much larger underground network. The man who shot Rabin belonged to a burgeoning movement whose adherents included Itamar Ben-Gvir, a politician who threatened Rabin on live television shortly before his assassination, and who now serves as Israel’s minister of national security.
Historically, Ball notes, the “direct results of assassination have almost always disappointed the assassins.” Rabin’s murder is one exception. Another might be the moment, in 1942, when British special agents and Czech resistance fighters acted in concert to murder Reinhard Heydrich, a brutal Nazi commander and one of the key authors of the Final Solution. It was certainly clear why, and Heydrich’s killing became “a template for ‘honourable assassination’ carried out by righteous democrats,” Ball writes. But the other consequences were horrific: the Nazis went to a village called Lidice, which had once sheltered a British radio operator, and killed all the men, sent all the women to a concentration camp, and gave the “Aryan” children to German families to raise but slaughtered the rest. Ball sums up the conclusion of the British report on the Heydrich assassination: “Technical success, operational disaster.”
“Death to Order” is a dense, detailed, and sometimes dry read, unlikely to set a conspiracy theorist’s (or really anybody’s) blood racing, but its international scope and careful documentation are salutary. Importantly, it does not neglect state-sponsored assassination plots, especially those engineered by the C.I.A. during the Cold War. Ball manages to sound wryly appalled quoting the contents of a C.I.A. assassination manual: though murder cannot be justified, the guide advises, “killing a political leader whose burgeoning career is a clear and present danger to the cause of freedom may be held necessary,” which means that “persons who are morally squeamish should not attempt” assassination. For those who get past their qualms, the handbook recommends the “most efficient” method: dropping a person at least seventy-five feet “onto a hard surface.” Pistols are discouraged, but the manual accepts rifles, which, in the twenty-first century, have become a popular weapon of choice.
What do assassins want now? It’s a case-by-case question, but one worth asking, not least because political violence appears to be on the rise in the United States. Among the recent notable examples are two attempts on Donald Trump’s life, including one in which a bullet struck him as he spoke at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, in 2024; the attempted arson of Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro’s home, in April, as he and his family slept inside; the killings, in June, of the Minnesota state legislator Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark; and the murder of the right-wing activist Charlie Kirk, in September. Two weeks after the Kirk assassination, a man opened fire at an ICE facility in Dallas, killing not the officers who were his reported targets but two detainees; according to his parents, he had lately become overwhelmingly afraid that he had radiation sickness.
A cursory appraisal of these events suggests that the age of Princip is over. We have returned to an era of disgruntled plotters and fanatics—of lone and often lonely men (many things have changed, but the vast majority of assassins are still men), whose hazy motives seem patched together by personal grievances, mental illness, and solipsistic internet quests. Thomas Matthew Crooks, the twenty-year-old who tried to kill Trump in Pennsylvania, was a registered Republican of otherwise jumbled allegiances, who seems to have been choosing between various prominent targets, including Joe Biden and Trump, in the months leading up to the event. We don’t yet know what Tyler James Robinson, the twenty-two-year-old Utah man charged with shooting Charlie Kirk, hoped to accomplish. (Robinson has not filed a plea.) The prosecutor in the case, Jeff Gray, has sketched out a scenario in which Robinson, who grew up in a Republican family, had recently moved to the left, and become, as his mother allegedly told police, “more pro-gay and trans-rights-oriented.” According to Gray, Robinson’s roommate and romantic partner was transgender. In a text exchange after Kirk’s shooting, the roommate asked Robinson why he did it. “I had enough of his hatred,” Robinson replied. “Some hatred can’t be negotiated out.” Whatever Robinson thought might happen, the short-term consequences of Kirk’s killing have included federal and local crackdowns on free speech, and a rising profile for the white supremacistNick Fuentes, who is trying to fill the vacuum left by Kirk. And as a would-be act of solidarity with trans people, if that is what it was, Kirk’s assassination left Robinson’s roommate, and arguably trans people in general, more vulnerable, not less.
In the past, political violence in the U.S. was more likely to be carried out by groups—the left-wing Weather Underground during the nineteen-seventies; the right-wing militia and anti-abortion movements in the eighties and nineties. Now it is more often committed by individuals unaffiliated with any organization. As Rachel Kleinfeld, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, has written, there is a “deeper trend: the ‘ungrouping’ of political violence as people self-radicalize via online engagement.” The Antifa that Trump is always invoking as an all-purpose bogeyman—some lethal, disciplined underground network that resembles the Irish Republican Army—does not exist. Instead, we have individuals whose opaque, ad-hoc gestures rarely fit into a recognizable campaign. Even when they leave a message of some kind—partial manifestos, a crumb trail of social-media posts, or words etched on bullet casings—clarity is elusive. We’re left examining ghostly traces of ideas that won’t coalesce into an ideology. Speaking about the Trump shooting, Katherine Keneally, a threat-assessment expert, told the Times, “These sorts of incidents, where we can’t figure out why they did it, are becoming more common.”
