No one who’s been paying attention should have been surprised by Saturday’s attack on former President Donald Trump.

Appalled? Certainly. Frightened? That too. And angry.

But not surprised.

Both sides have employed heated rhetoric against their opponents. President Joe Biden has, on numerous occasions, labeled Trump as “a threat to democracy.”

For their part, Trump and other Republicans say Biden is the real danger to America. His inept handling of the border has allowed criminals into the country who kill and rape our citizens, they say, and his declining mental faculties make him easily manipulated by a “shadow government” intent on keeping Democrats in power.

As many sober-minded people lament the choices available this election year, is it any wonder that someone less sober-minded might take matters in his own hands to force a “do over”?

Much has been made in the media that the attempted assassination of Trump is the first serious attack of its kind since the shooting of President Ronald Reagan in 1981. That overlooks how many potential attacks were thwarted before they reached this point, most of which we never hear about.

It also ignores how much violence has already been directed against politicians other than presidential candidates.

In October 2022, a man wielding a hammer broke into U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s house in San Francisco. She wasn’t there, but he seriously injured Pelosi’s husband.

In June 2017, a gunman opened fire on a practice session for the annual Congressional Baseball Game in Alexandria, Virginia. Six people were wounded, including U.S. House Majority Whip Steve Scalise, R-Louisiana, before police killed the gunman in a 10-minute shootout.

Between those two were the events of Jan. 6, 2021, when a mob of protesters forced their way into the Capitol building as Congress worked to certify the results of the 2020 election. Within 36 hours, five people involved in the riot died, including a protester shot by police and a police officer who died from a stroke. Four other police officers died by suicide in the seven months that followed the riot.

On Sunday, Biden said, “… there is no place in America for this kind of violence. An assassination attempt is contrary to everything we stand for as a nation, everything. It’s not who we are as a nation, it’s not America, and we cannot allow this to happen. …”

A look at recent history and the current political climate does not appear to support the president’s noble view of our nation. In the aftermath of the attempt on Donald Trump’s life, Americans are left with the question of how to make the reality more like the vision.

A cooling of the rhetoric would be a start.