What drove the man who attacked Nancy Pelosi’s husband? | Francine Prose

According to the US Capitol police, there were 9,621 threats against members of Congress in 2021. It's surprising that there aren't more

Surely I'm not the only person haunted by visions of 82-year-old Paul Pelosi, the husband of House speaker Nancy Pelosi, struggling with an intruder in the early hours this past Friday. It's not hard to imagine the terror that Pelosi must have felt as he made his coded phone call to the police, telling them that someone had broken into his San Francisco home. And it's all too easy to picture his assailant, David DePape, calling out, Where's Nancy?", the same cry that went up from the insurrectionists roaming the halls of the US Capitol on 6 January.

In fact, the only thing that's hard to comprehend is why, given the current political climate, incidents like this one don't occur more often. According to the US Capitol police, there were 9,621 threats against members of Congress in 2021, and the frequency of those disturbing emails and phone calls appears to be increasing. Republican and Democrats alike have been warned that they and their families will be killed, and some have wisely taken advantage of the provision that allows them to use their campaign funds to pay for private security teams.

Francine Prose is a former president of Pen American Center and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences