Brian Snyder/Reuters

Pictures of Republican candidate and former President Donald Trump are displayed on screens during Day 1 of the Republican National Convention, where the party will choose its presidential nominee, at the Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee, July 15, 2024.

Former President Donald Trump, coming off an assassination attempt that shook America, will soon give what may be the most closely watched political speech of his life. How he leverages this moment will shape the trajectory of a turbulent era in U.S. politics. 

Mr. Trump, a uniquely polarizing political figure in recent American history, has become a near-messianic figure to some supporters and a dangerous, despotic presence in the view of his detractors since his unlikely presidential victory in 2016. His narrow escape from a fatal shooting Saturday, which left him bloodied and a rally attendee dead, has only magnified some supporters’ belief that his candidacy is divine – and raised the stakes even further for this election.

That makes what Mr. Trump says this week, and for the rest of the campaign, so crucial. If a man famous for incendiary rhetoric leads the way in lowering the political temperature, it could go a long way toward avoiding future political violence. But if he can’t resist the urge to use this moment to paint Democrats as the real threats to democracy, that will likely further inflame tensions – and could spark more violence. 

To paraphrase Mr. Trump himself from his 2016 Republican National Convention speech, he alone can fix it.

“Trump, in the wake of a near-death experience, may be seeing the world differently, at least for a little while. How that will manifest itself is unclear, but right now he’s more conciliatory,” says Carol “Rollie” Flynn, a 30-year CIA veteran and president emeritus of the Foreign Policy Research Institute who specializes in political violence.

Mr. Trump survived an attempt on his life and got another chance Saturday. This week will begin to show how he uses it.

Will he take the high road?

Taking the high road could pay political dividends. Mr. Trump’s divisive style is one of his biggest drawbacks politically, and his supporters’ violent breach of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, after he spent months trying to overturn his election loss, still haunts his campaign. 

The former president told the Washington Examiner that he’d completely rewritten his planned convention speech after the assassination attempt. “This is a chance to bring the whole country, even the whole world, together,” he said.

A senior Trump campaign adviser told the Monitor: “Given the experience of Saturday, he is looking to not only unify the party, but unify the nation, and make sure that Americans understand his vision for where the country can go.”

Brian Snyder/Reuters

A television in a restaurant outside the site of the 2024 Republican National Convention in Milwaukee shows the news after reports of multiple shots fired and apparent injuries to Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump at his rally in Pennsylvania, July 13, 2024.

But there’s skepticism that he and his team will exercise the restraint and discipline that this would require – and signs that they’re already falling back into old habits. After a Trump-appointed judge on Monday dismissed the charges the former president faced in a Florida court for mishandling classified documents, Mr. Trump wrote: “The Democrat Justice Department coordinated ALL of these Political Attacks, which are an Election Interference conspiracy against Joe Biden’s Political Opponent, ME. Let us come together to END all Weaponization of our Justice System, and Make America Great Again!” 

Also on Monday morning, Trump campaign spokesperson Danielle Alvarez blasted “Crooked Joe Biden,” saying it was “shameful” that he’d turned down an NBC-Telemundo debate offer focused on Hispanic issues, before saying the president was too cobarde (cowardly) to debate.

“Trump has had several opportunities to surprise and go in a different direction that at least to outside observers would seem to be politically in his interest, and in the past he hasn’t taken those opportunities,” says Peter Feaver, a Duke University professor who served on President George W. Bush’s National Security Council and has been critical of the former president.

“The track record shows he doesn’t stay a unifier for long,” he says, pointing to Mr. Trump’s reaction to a white supremacist’s murder of a counterprotester during violence in Charlottesville, Virginia; his martial response to the Black Lives Matter protests in Washington, D.C.; and his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic rhetorically. “Their narrative of ‘He’s the martyr; everyone is out to get him, and therefore, whatever he does in retaliation is acceptable’ – it’s very hard for them to go a whole week without that.”

How VP pick, allies also set tone

Another signal is Mr. Trump’s decision to name Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance as his running mate Monday, choosing a man with a penchant for sharp-elbowed rhetoric over two rhetorically sunnier options, North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio.

This weekend, Senator Vance blamed Democrats for the attempt on Mr. Trump’s life.

Mike Segar/Reuters

Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance is greeted by supporters as he arrives for Day 1 of the Republican National Convention at the Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee, July 15, 2024.

“Today is not just some isolated incident. The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination,” he posted on X.

Mr. Vance, a Marine veteran and Yale Law School graduate whose book “Hillbilly Elegy” tells his story of growing up amid poverty and drug abuse in Appalachia, is also a former Trump critic. In 2016, he warned about where Mr. Trump’s incendiary rhetoric was leading America.

Trump campaign co-chairs Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles sent an internal memo to staffers warning them not to use “dangerous rhetoric” after the assassination attempt. “We condemn all forms of violence, and will not tolerate dangerous rhetoric on social media,” they wrote, according to Reuters.

Mr. LaCivita himself had posted on X blaming Democrats for the assassination attempt Saturday evening, but quickly deleted it.

But plenty of Mr. Trump’s other close allies were quick to ramp up the rhetoric after Saturday’s tragedy.

Tennessee Republican Sen. Marsha Blackburn, who has a prime-time Monday evening speaking slot at the Republican National Convention, immediately cast blame on President Biden’s recent rhetoric. “Just days ago, Biden said ‘It’s time to put Trump in a bullseye,’” she posted on X Saturday evening, in a remark widely cited by Republicans.

(Mr. Biden’s fuller remarks indicate he was speaking rhetorically about refocusing criticism on Mr. Trump, but on Monday he said that it was a mistake to say he wanted to put a “bullseye” on the former president.)

Vivek Ramaswamy, a 2024 rival-turned-Trump acolyte who is also speaking at the convention, characterized the shooting as but the latest in a string of attempts to sideline the presumptive GOP nominee, including suing him and organizing legal challenges to having him on the ballot.

“No amount of verbiage today changes the toxic national climate that led to this tragedy,” he posted on X after the shooting.

Evan Vucci/AP

A campaign rally site for Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump is empty and littered with debris Saturday, July 13, 2024, in Butler, Pennsylvania.

Biden: “Democracy is on the ballot”

There’s no doubt that many Democrats feel that Mr. Trump is an existential threat to democracy, given his own rhetoric and actions as well as a core political message pushed by Mr. Biden and his allies that Mr. Trump’s reelection could be the end of democracy.

Mr. Trump spent the 2016 campaign leading chants of “Lock her up” about his political opponent, Hillary Clinton; tried to overturn his election loss in 2020 in efforts that led to the Capitol insurrection; and during the 2022 midterm elections tried (mostly unsuccessfully) to help election-denying allies win positions by which they could control future election results.

“Democracy is on the ballot. Your freedom is on the ballot,” Mr. Biden said in a major January campaign speech, warning that Mr. Trump is “willing to sacrifice democracy to put himself in power.”

Mr. Trump’s base feels the same about Mr. Biden – and has been stirred by similar rhetoric from the ex-president. “If we don’t win this election, I don’t think you’re going to have another election in this country,” he said in March.

But Mr. Trump has shown some previously uncharacteristic message discipline during this campaign, most recently following his debate with Mr. Biden in which he kept mostly quiet and instead let the story focus on Democrats’ dismay over Mr. Biden’s performance. The more he can maintain that, the better it might be for him politically – or at least for the country.

“I don’t know if it’s political advantage,” Reince Priebus, chairman of the 2024 Republican National Convention host committee and Mr. Trump’s first White House chief of staff, told the Monitor. “It could be American advantage.”

An assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump, speaking at a campaign rally Saturday evening in western Pennsylvania, comes at a high-stakes, highly volatile moment in American politics.

The shooting – which pierced Mr. Trump’s right ear, killed a spectator, and critically wounded two others – raised concerns about an escalation of political violence ahead of Election Day. But it also led to a temporary truce in the 2024 presidential race and, for a moment at least, produced a consensus of sorts among some political leaders. We are better than this, many said – calling for a change of tone not only in the campaign, but also more broadly in public discourse. 

In an Oval Office address Sunday evening, President Joe Biden called on the nation to “lower the temperature in our politics,” adding that “we can’t allow this violence to be normalized.” Earlier in the day, he announced an independent review of security at the rally. 

“Obviously, we can’t go on like this as a society,” Republican Speaker of the House Mike Johnson said on NBC earlier in the day. “We’ve got to turn the temperature down.”

Many other Democrats and Republicans alike called for calm. Mr. Trump, for his part, signaled courage. Shortly after the shooting, as a swarm of Secret Service agents tried to hustle him off the stage, the former president raised his fist defiantly and mouthed “Fight! Fight! Fight!” It was an instantly iconic image at a defining moment in American political history.

Evan Vucci/AP

Former President Donald Trump gestures as he is surrounded by U.S. Secret Service agents as he leaves the stage at a campaign rally July 13, 2024, in Butler, Pennsylvania.

It’s also a sign of the times.

“There is such visceral hatred pertaining to politics and political leaders today, and the invective has been normalized,” says Brian Levin, founder of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino. “What we need is unity of message with condemnation of political violence as a threat to democracy, irrespective of who is targeted.”

On Sunday, the former president urged the nation via his social media platform to “stand United.” In a statement soon after the shooting, President Biden – who was attending church in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, when Mr. Trump was attacked – said: “There’s no place for this kind of violence in America. We must unite as one nation to condemn it.” 

Reality is more complicated. Hyperpolarization is a hallmark of the current-day political scene, and assassinations have formed some of America’s most searing moments – perhaps foremost the 1865 killing of Abraham Lincoln, widely seen as America’s greatest president. In the modern era, people of a certain age remember where they were when President John F. Kennedy was gunned down in a Dallas motorcade in 1963 and when President Ronald Reagan was shot in Washington in 1981, almost fatally. 

The killing, too, of President Kennedy’s brother and then-presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy in June 1968 – two months after the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. fell to an assassin’s bullet in Memphis, Tennessee – resonates today. Mr. Kennedy’s son Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is an independent presidential candidate, and on Monday, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas announced that he had granted Mr. Kennedy Secret Service protection at the president’s direction. This was after repeated requests from Mr. Kennedy.

AP/File

Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy speaks at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles flanked by his wife, Ethel (left), and California campaign manager Jesse Unruh shortly before being shot June 5, 1968. His son Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. called for healing following Mr. Trump’s shooting.

The analogies to 1968 are significant. As with today, the era was full of ferment over race and social justice. And just as the Democratic convention in Chicago was marked by violent protests over the Vietnam War so, too, are the 2024 conventions preparing for potential unrest. 

Progressive protesters have been gearing up to make noise at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee this week, albeit at a remove from the convention site, over such issues as abortion, wars abroad, and LGBTQ+ rights. But their big target will be the Democratic convention in August, again in Chicago.  

FBI identifies shooter

The FBI identified the alleged shooter, who was killed almost immediately, as 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks of Bethel Park, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Pittsburgh. At press time, his motive was unknown. The perpetrator’s evident ability to shoot Mr. Trump also raised questions about security, particularly the U.S. Secret Service. 

One witness told the BBC he alerted authorities to a man with a rifle climbing a nearby building minutes before shots were fired. A Boston Globe reporter said he “noticed movement on the roof of what appeared to be a barn behind the stage” about 25 minutes before Mr. Trump took the stage. 

Amid the weekend drama, Mr. Biden changed plans on the fly. Within hours of the shooting, the president left Delaware and returned to the White House, and his team took down campaign ads. The president also spoke with Mr. Trump by phone, according to the White House.

Mr. Trump – the presumptive Republican nominee for president – announced that he would still attend his party’s convention in Milwaukee, which starts Monday. His wife, former first lady Melania Trump, made an appeal for calm in an open letter posted on the social platform X. 

“America, the fabric of our gentle nation is tattered, but our courage and common sense must ascend and bring us back together as one,” she wrote.

But wider expressions of political vitriol have hardly abated. Almost immediately, Trump allies – from U.S. senators to rallygoers – blamed liberals and the media for Saturday’s attack. 

“Let’s be clear,” wrote GOP Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina on social media. “This was an assassination attempt aided and abetted by the radical Left and corporate media incessantly calling Trump a threat to democracy, fascists, or worse.”

Reagan forgave would-be assassin

Some assassination attempts against U.S. presidents have come despite relative comity between the two major parties. President Reagan, a Republican, and then-Democratic House Speaker Tip O’Neill used to share a drink after hours. After Mr. Reagan was shot – by a man with mental health problems, not political motivations – the speaker visited the president in the hospital and prayed for him by his bedside. 

The friendship offered a pathway for communication and cooperation – and a lesson in leadership that could “go very far” if practiced in today’s culture of political animosity, says James Rosebush, a former deputy assistant to Mr. Reagan in the White House.

“It’s one thing to disagree, but it’s another thing to be violent, or violently opposed to the other individual’s beliefs. It should be cooperative,” Mr. Rosebush says, describing Mr. Reagan as an eternal optimist, with “zero ego,” who was able to forgive his would-be assassin.

Evan Vucci/AP

Republican presidential candidate and former President Donald Trump is surrounded by U.S. Secret Service agents at a campaign rally July 13, 2024, in Butler, Pennsylvania.

The potentially deadly attack on Mr. Trump is the first on a U.S. president or presidential candidate since Mr. Reagan, though numerous plots have been foiled over the years. “Political violence has been rising over the last eight years against politicians of all stripes,” says Rachel Kleinfeld, senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who focuses on the  intersection of democracy and security.

Ms. Kleinfeld says it’s mostly been coming from the right, but also from the left. But, she adds, “it’s been about equal against politicians of the right and the left, because people are attacking moderates on their own side in order to force everyone into a polarized edge.”

The congressional baseball shooting of 2017, which critically wounded Louisiana GOP Rep. Steve Scalise – now House majority leader – was perpetrated by a supporter of progressive Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who condemned the violence. In 2011, Democratic Rep. Gabby Giffords of Arizona was shot in the head at a constituent event in her home district.

After the Trump shooting on Saturday, there have been calls for congressional hearings and an investigation into the Secret Service’s apparent failure to secure the site. In a statement to the Monitor, a former director of both the FBI and CIA expressed confidence in the ability of the relevant agencies to sort out what went wrong. 

“After the assassination of President Kennedy, the United States established very clear procedures on how future attempts on the life of a president should be handled,” said William Webster, who was director of the FBI during the Reagan assassination attempt. 

“When Reagan was shot, we at the FBI had very clear direction,” he said. “I’m confident that the United States Secret Service, FBI, and law enforcement are working as well as possible during what is always a very challenging period, especially at the beginning of such an investigation.” 

Staff writer Francine Kiefer contributed reporting from Pasadena, California. Staff writer Christa Case Bryant also contributed reporting from Washington. 

Editor’s note: This story has been updated to reflect ongoing coverage.

The U.S. Supreme Court is a notoriously difficult workplace to join. But perhaps not if you’re already coming from a family of nine.

Amy Coney Barrett cracked that joke at the ceremony announcing her nomination to the high court in 2020. Over the ensuing four terms, it has become less a joke and more an asset. Making yourself heard amid nine different voices is a valuable skill for a justice, it turns out.

And it has helped Justice Barrett become perhaps the most intriguing – and most scrutinized – member of the court.

After a few hints in prior years, this term she has established herself as an independent and intellectually principled jurist. In oral arguments and in written opinions on hot-button issues ranging from abortion and gun rights to immunity for former President Donald Trump, she has displayed a conservative but disciplined approach to the law.

In particular, she has sought to provide more guidance for lower court judges. And on a court in which broad rulings often breed division, she has been building consensus through her diligent and methodical analysis of legal text and history. Foreshadowing a longer-term debate, she has criticized some conservative colleagues for how they interpret the original meaning of the Constitution.

She has likewise dressed down liberal justices for what she sees as alarmist rhetoric. And with the public growing increasingly sour on a high court it views as dogmatically divided along ideological lines, the first ever justice to be the mother of school-age children is proving a breath of fresh air.

“She has been a very impressive justice. She certainly is not hesitating to go her own way,” says Michael McConnell, a professor at Stanford Law School and a former federal appeals court judge.

Jose Luis Magana/AP

Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett speaks during The Federalist Society’s 40th anniversary at Union Station in Washington, Nov. 10, 2022.

“She may be [unpredictable], though I don’t think unpredictable is a bad thing,” he adds. “If you care more about how constitutional meaning is discerned than you care about how cases come out, you may look unpredictable to people who only care about how cases come out.”

“Getting things right for the right reasons”

Prior to this term, it was difficult for many court-watchers to distinguish Justice Barrett from the rest of the high court’s six-justice, deeply conservative supermajority.

Before becoming a three-time professor of the year at the University of Notre Dame Law School in Indiana, she clerked for the conservative legal titan Justice Antonin Scalia. Since she joined the court, she’s voted for conservative policy objectives such as overturning Roe v. Wade, abolishing affirmative action in college admissions, and expanding gun rights.

But now she’s beginning to stand out. To everyone.

“Barrett has decided she’s a politician, not a justice,” said Mark Levin, a lawyer and conservative commentator, on his podcast last month.

“By the end of her term,” he added, “I believe [she] will have flipped all the way to the left.”

His comments came the day the court decided a high-profile social media case brought by conservatives who claimed the Biden White House was trying to silence users online. The court dismissed the case on the grounds plaintiffs couldn’t establish a concrete injury.

Writing for the bipartisan, six-justice majority, Justice Barrett criticized lower courts in the case for “gloss[ing] over complexities in the evidence” and relying on “clearly erroneous” factual findings.

That commitment to judicial rigor – at the expense of conservative policy goals – manifested in other rulings. Concerns over procedural flaws convinced her to, in one case, vote to retain access to a widely used abortion pill, and in another case to temporarily allow hospitals in Idaho to continue performing emergency abortions.

In oral arguments in both cases, she focused questions on already existing federal conscience protections for hospital employees who have religious objections to providing abortion-related care. Both final opinions pointed to those protections as an important tool for compromise.

“At least at present there is a foundation, that cuts across the whole country, of at least some conscience protections for medical professionals,” says Richard Garnett, a professor and former colleague of Justice Barrett’s at the University of Notre Dame Law School.

Justice Barrett also broke from her conservative colleagues in high-profile cases involving Mr. Trump. In one, she dissented from a court ruling vacating obstruction charges against Jan. 6 defendants. (Her fellow conservatives, she critiqued, performed “textual backflips.”) In another, she wrote separately to take issue with aspects of the majority’s holding that former presidents have a degree of immunity from criminal prosecution.

Her positions in those cases came “because of the law, and her view of what the law required,” says Jonathan Adler, a professor at Case Western Reserve University School of Law.

“She cares about getting things right for the right reasons,” he adds. That has meant voting “against what one might have thought would be her policy preferences.”

The history test 

In the realm of constitutional interpretation, this approach has also seen her emerge as a leading reformist in what is now the dominant legal theory on the Supreme Court.

J. Scott Applewhite/AP/File

Members of the U.S. Supreme Court sit for a group portrait Oct. 7, 2022. Bottom row, from left, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, Justice Clarence Thomas, Chief Justice John Roberts, Justice Samuel Alito, and Justice Elena Kagan. Top row, from left, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, Justice Neil Gorsuch, Justice Brett Kavanaugh, and Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.

Originalism, on its surface, is a simple legal philosophy: The Constitution should be interpreted in line with its original meaning; otherwise judges will just invent their own rules.

But that definition obscures an ocean of complexity – complexity that Justice Barrett is now articulating. What’s more, she’s articulating it in opposition to Justice Clarence Thomas, the current court’s foremost originalist.

Two years ago, his majority opinion in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen held that gun laws must be consistent with America’s history and tradition of firearm regulation. The decision soon caused widespread confusion among lower courts tasked with applying a new history and tradition test.

Justice Barrett was part of the Bruen majority, but this term she has helped lead the way in clarifying it. In an 8-1 decision holding that the government can temporarily take guns from people subject to domestic violence restraining orders, she wrote separately to detail how she sees originalism applying to modern-day law.

“For an originalist, the history that matters most is the history surrounding the ratification of the text,” she wrote, not “scattered cases or regulations pulled from history.”

But her most pointed criticism of Thomas-style originalism came in a little-watched trademarks case. While she joined Justice Thomas’ majority, she wrote a concurrence that rebuked Bruen’s core philosophy.

“Relying exclusively on history and tradition may seem like a way of avoiding judge-made tests,” she wrote. “But a rule rendering tradition dispositive is itself a judge-made test.”

“The court’s laser-like focus on the history,” she added, “misses the forest for the trees.” 

This rift is unsurprising, experts say. Throughout history, “the bigger a social movement gets, the more likely you’re going to have factions inside it,” says Christine Bird, an assistant professor of political science at Oklahoma State University.

Originalist scholars view the disagreement as less a fundamental difference of opinion, and more a result of the philosophy moving with breathtaking speed from legal theory to practice.

Several justices expressed “a lot of unhappiness ... about what Bruen had wrought,” says Keith Whittington, a political science professor at Princeton University.

Justice Barrett “wants to provide the lower courts with a lot more guidance,” he adds. It helps that, since her time as an academic, she has been “thinking through the puzzles of how to articulate originalist methods clearly and deeply.”

Mark Schiefelbein/AP/File

U.S. Supreme Court Justices Amy Coney Barrett (left) and Sonia Sotomayor speak during a panel discussion at the National Governors Association, Feb. 23, 2024, in Washington. Conservative Justice Barrett and liberal Justice Sotomayor said a Supreme Court in which voices don’t get raised in anger can be a model for the rest of the country in polarized times.

As originalism continues its rise from the pages of law review articles to the day-to-day workings of federal judges, she could have a major influence over how the theory – and American law – evolves.

“She’s playing a long game,” says Professor Whittington. “She’s thinking about what the future of the conservative legal movement might look like, and how it should think about these big ideas.”

“Justice Thomas has been a lead defender of originalism and a lead proponent,” he adds, “but he’s not the only game in town.”

“She’s ... more of a Sandra Day O’Connor”

While she departs from her most conservative colleagues in some ways, she has built consensus with other members of the court, at least in the short term. That includes the liberal wing – which consists of all of her fellow women justices – and Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh, with whom she votes most often.

There was a concern among some liberals that she would be more of an uncompromising originalist, says Professor Bird.

“But it seems to me she’s operating as more of a Sandra Day O’Connor,” she adds. “She’s amenable to bipartisan negotiation, she’s amenable to bargaining in a way that [I was] surprised by.”

Thus, several high-profile cases have been resolved with bipartisan opinions on procedural grounds. Some conservatives have condemned these rulings, but Justice Barrett also hasn’t been shy in criticizing her liberal colleagues. When the court unanimously dismissed a case seeking to remove Mr. Trump from Colorado’s 2024 presidential primary ballot, she wrote separately to rebut the liberals’ opinion criticizing the breadth of the ruling.

“This is not the time to amplify disagreement with stridency,” she wrote. “Particularly in this circumstance ... the Court should turn the national temperature down, not up. For present purposes, our differences are far less important than our unanimity.”

There may be no better encapsulation of a term in which she has crafted a path of independence and consensus-building on a court often defined by its divisions. While that may surprise some, for Professor Garnett – who is also her former neighbor – it’s no surprise at all.

“She was a great teacher and a generous colleague, and a very careful and valuable scholar,” he says.

Looking ahead, her demeanor and her intellect will likely only become more important. “Harder ... problems,” she acknowledged in her gun rights opinion, “await another day.”

Courtesy of Popi Sibiya

Blogger Popi Sibiya poses in Matadi, Congo, one of many places she has visited across the African continent as a female traveler.

Last year, South African travel blogger Popi Sibiya found herself cruising the canals of Ganvié, a village on stilts in the middle of a lake in Benin. As she sat in the back of a wooden canoe, she pulled out her smartphone and began broadcasting the experience to her 40,000 Instagram followers. 

“My lover is paddling to me as we speak,” she joked, giggling as a man propelled toward her in a water taxi. 

Ms. Sibiya is a former kindergarten teacher who has spent much of the last two years crisscrossing the African continent on public transportation – and now has over 100,000 followers. She is part of an emerging group of young African women travel bloggers who are using their social media platforms to redefine what adventure travel looks like in Africa – and who gets to experience it. They are pushing back on the stereotype that travel on the continent is the exclusive domain of khaki-clad Europeans on safari or sunburned Americans sipping cocktails on Zanzibari beaches – and inviting their mostly African audiences to do the same. 

African travelers “are starting to prioritize fun and adventure” on their own continent, says Ms. Sibiya, whose followers are mostly well-off South Africans used to traveling to Europe, the Middle East, and Asia for their vacations. On her account, “they see that we also have beautiful beaches; we don’t have to go to Thailand,” she says.

Documenting a different Africa 

Each year, African countries clock more than 80 million visitors, and the industry generates about 25 million jobs, according to the World Travel & Tourism Council, an industry advocacy group. 

Still, African countries are rarely featured on global “where to visit” lists – at least outside stock-standard international favorites like Morocco, Mauritius, South Africa, and Egypt. 

Ordinary travelers with large social media followings are filling that void, says American travel journalist Rosalind Cummings-Yeates, who has traveled extensively in the region and often uses travel influencers to help plan her trip. 

“We don’t have to rely on traditional media [anymore],” she says. Instead, would-be travelers can scroll the feeds of influencers like Ebaide Joy, Instagram alias @go_ebaide, a Nigerian adventure traveler currently riding her motorcycle from Nigeria to Kenya. Or like Ess Opiyo (@ess_opiyo), a Kenyan travel guide with a passion for offbeat destinations. This generation of influencers is “call[ing] out ignorant stereotypes” and “expand[ing] the image of Africa,” Ms. Cummings-Yeates says. 

Courtesy of Popi Sibiya

Travel blogger Popi Sibiya hikes around the Twin Lakes in Rwanda. She has crisscrossed the African continent redefining adventure travel.

Margot Mendes has seen firsthand the power of social media to transform how people travel in the region. She lives in Dakar, Senegal, where she works in marketing. She puts the same skills to use on her Instagram account, @thedakardream, where she shares her life and travels with her 33,000 followers. 

Her grid features scenes from bustling open-air markets, peach-colored sunsets overlooking cerulean hotel pools, and glimpses of local cuisine including baguette sandwiches and spiced rice dishes. 

Ms. Mendes started the account five years ago, when she moved back to Dakar from Paris, where her Senegalese and Bissau-Guinean family had migrated when she was a child. Originally, the page was just to show her worried friends and family in Europe how much Dakar had transformed in the decades since they emigrated. 

“It was just me being curious about my culture and going to places to discover my own culture,” she says. 

But soon her page began to gain an audience beyond people she knew. She says her new followers – most of them African – told her they loved seeing their own continent branded as a glamorous travel destination for the first time. 

Complicating the story 

Ms. Mendes’ account has the feel of a glossy travel magazine, but for many young African women documenting their travels, it is important not to shy away from the continent’s struggles – or the challenges that make travel there tricky to navigate. 

Recently, for instance, Nigerian British travel blogger Pelumi Nubi completed a 10-week road trip from London to Lagos in a purple four-door Peugeot 107 she named Oluwa-Lumi – Lumi for short. It means “God lights the path” in her native Yoruba.

Ms. Nubi documented the journey for more than a quarter million people on her Instagram account, @pelumi.nubi. Her posts bounced between travel highs – like when Lumi the Peugeot’s wheels touched African soil for the first time in Morocco – and lows – a video of Lumi’s crumpled hood after she slammed into a parked car on a dark road in Ivory Coast. 

“You have the people who are trying to paint [Africa] as a war-torn place, a dangerous place, and then you have the people who are trying too hard to sell it as this paradise,” says Ms. Sibiya, whose page cheerfully records her travels in rickety buses she describes as “hearses” and doesn’t shy away from her brushes with poverty, bad roads, and chaotic border crossings. “I document Africa in a balanced way,” she says. 

Ms. Sibiya says her audience is mainly other South Africans, many of whom tell her they are experiencing the continent’s beaches, safaris, fancy hotels, and restaurants for the first time through her account. For many, the issue is partly cost. Counterintuitively, flights between African countries are often more expensive than flights from the continent to international travel hubs like Dubai in the United Arab Emirates or New York. And instead of high speed trains or rental cars, overland travelers often have to choose between taking rundown public transport or paying up for a private car and driver. 

Ms. Sibiya funds her travels through paid subscriptions to her Instagram account, which cost 140 rand (about $7) a month and give access to more detailed and frequent travel updates than her public page. Currently, she has around 1,200 subscribers. 

She believes social media influencers like herself have become a trusted source of travel information because of their commitment to showing an authentic side of Africa. 

For her, this authenticity is embodied by a recent experience she had in Zanzibar, where she got lost on a cobblestone street in Stone Town. It was clear she was clueless, she says, but no one tried to hustle her. Instead, a group of children guided her back to a main square and told her, “Hakuna matata” – Swahili for “don’t worry.” 

“They are very aware of the beauty of community, the beauty of kindness,” she says.  

REUTERS

Spectators gather for the Fourth of July celebrations in Washington, July 4, 2024.

In recent years, incidents ranging from attacks on pro-life pregnancy centers to the attack on the U.S. Capitol have elevated concern that political violence is on the rise in the United States. That fear deepened with the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump on Saturday.

For his part, after the shooting, President Joe Biden appealed to Americans, saying, “No matter how strong our convictions, we must never descend into violence.” Democracy, he said, is founded on reason, balance, decency, and dignity.

Opinion surveys have measured two seemingly contradictory beliefs about politics and violence. A PBS NewsHour/NPR/Marist poll in April found that 20% of American adults think political violence may be a necessary means for achieving policy goals. A month earlier, however, in a survey by the Institute of Politics and Public Service, 88% of respondents believe leaders of different parties should seek compromises to lower political division.

The discrepancy may not be as sharp as those numbers indicate. Using wider samples of the population, a 2022 study by political scientists at Dartmouth, Stanford, and the University of California, Santa Barbara found that “not only is support for violence low overall, but support drops considerably as political violence becomes more severe.”

In contrast, as the National Conference of State Legislatures has noted, initiatives to cultivate civility have multiplied in recent years, improving passage rates for legislation and building public trust. Similar projects are underway in cities across the country to renew civic affections across policy divides.

Such work starts with political opponents showing more interest in each other as individuals than as stand-ins for a differing policy position. “If we reach the point where we dehumanize the people we disagree with, anything is possible,” noted Stephen Henderson, co-founder of The Civility Project, on the organization’s website. “We must step back and learn to talk to people as people, rather than political adversaries.”

Scott Shigeoka, a fellow at the Greater Good Science Center at the University of California, Berkeley, takes that idea deeper. Seeing the individual rather than seeing a political enemy, he told the John Templeton Foundation, requires asking, “Who are the people that are important to you that made you who you are today?” That level of connecting can reveal common humanity and shared values.

After the Trump rally shooting, legislators in Kentucky gathered in a joint session to reflect. State Senate President Robert Stivers encouraged his colleagues to look across the aisle. “They are your political opponent, but they are not your personal enemies,” he said.

Political aggression is often its own worst enemy because it evokes a renewal of the peaceful values of democracy.