Vice President JD Vance wrote in a post early Monday that “a crazy person tried to break in by hammering the windows.”
Thankfully, the Vances were not at their Ohio residence, where the incident occurred. They were in Washington, D.C.
“I appreciate everyone’s well wishes about the attack at our home,” the vice president wrote.
William D. DeFoor, 26, who has also gone by the name Julia DeFoor, faces federal and local charges related to vandalism. DeFoor appeared in court on Tuesday.
The suspect’s mother, Catherine DeFoor, told reporters outside the federal court that her child was a straight-A student and played many musical instruments, as NBC News reported.
“Mental illness is a terrible thing,” she said. “It is a struggle that can take over the life of a beautiful person and the people who love and support them. Unfortunately for our child, it has taken over his life in a way that we could never have imagined.”
The attack on the private residence of a high-ranking elected American official came after a year that was marked by “a historic high for political violence,” said Robert Pape, a political science professor and the director of the Chicago Project on Security and Threats at the University of Chicago, to the Deseret News.
Back in October, during a guest appearance on “The Charlie Kirk Show” podcast, Vance stated, “Political violence is just a statistical fact that it’s a bigger problem on the left.”
He later added, “Right now that violent impulse is a bigger problem on the left than on the right.”
But Pape argued that “it’s happening on both the right and the left.”
“It’s important to know that there is a groundswell of public support for political violence in the United States. Nearly a third of Republicans and nearly a third of Democrats support political violence for their political goals. That represents 60 million Americans.”
One October 2025 poll from NPR/PBS News/Marist found that 3 in 10 people say they think Americans may have to resort to violence to get the country back on track.
“When you have this major support for political violence, volatile individuals can be nudged over the edge to actually act violently and these individuals can be volatile for their own psychosocial reasons,” he said.
“They can be mentally ill. Just like the attacker on JD Vance’s home may well have been. But the support for political violence tends to nudge them over the edge because they have the extra reason to attack because they believe they’re going to get social approval. They believe there’s a community that’s going to support what they do.”
2024 and 2025 were marked by political violence
Pape said, “It’s a pretty big deal when the home of the vice president is attacked,” while noting that former vice presidents Kamala Harris and Mike Pence and former President Joe Biden did not face such attacks.
In September 2025, conservative activist Charlie Kirk was shot and killed. The murder of Minnesota state lawmaker Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark happened in June of last year.
A man set fire to Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro’s home in April 2025 while Shapiro and his family were sleeping inside.
In 2024, there were two attempts on President Donald Trump’s life, including one that resulted in the death of Pennsylvanian Corey Comperatore.
According to a December report from the Bridging Divides Initiative, School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University, threats and harassment against public officials — disproportionately affecting women and minorities — increased by 280% in September, with more than 80 recorded cases.
“Almost half (48%) of the incidents in September were directly related to responses to Kirk’s death while local community-specific issues drove a smaller proportion of events (10%), breaking with recent trends,” the report states.
Donald G. Nieman, a professor of history and provost emeritus at Binghamton University, State University of New York, said the trend of tragic events “deserve our attention and demand our outrage.”
“They are products of our polarized politics and social media ecosystems that amplify vicious, hateful rhetoric and direct it to those who are most susceptible to internalize it,” said Nieman.
“We should be disgusted with the perpetrators but even more disgusted with the many public figures who weaponize these events by using them to vilify ‘enemies’ on the left or the right instead of calling out all violence for what it is,” said Nieman, the author of The Path to Paralysis: How Our Politics Became Nasty, Dysfunctional and a Threat to the Republic.
Both he and Pape agree that the condemnation of incidents of violence from high-ranking elected officials is important.
Nieman said that the perpetrators in these situations are typically “isolated, highly troubled, alienated, mentally unstable individuals” who aren’t a part of an organized movement or system.
“They aren’t, in other words, like John Wilkes Booth and his co-conspirators, the Weather Underground, Timothy McVeigh and his co-conspirators or the networks that organized the Jan. 6 insurrection,” said Nieman.
Booth assassinated President Abraham Lincoln at Ford’s Theatre in Washington with several others involved in the killing.
The Weather Underground was a radical left-wing domestic terrorist group in the 1970s, known for bombing federal buildings and holding anti-government views. Meanwhile, McVeigh was a domestic terrorist who was the mastermind behind the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995.
“All of them posed a much greater threat to the political order,” Nieman said.
“So while the political violence we saw in 2025 is the mark of overheated politics fanned by irresponsible political leaders, it’s not the sign of a system on the brink of Civil War.”
Looking back at the extreme responses last year, James Newman, an associate professor in the political science, philosophy and religion department at Southeast Missouri State University, speculated, “I don’t think things will change much in 2026.”
Despite the turbulent events of 2025, there’s a movement gaining momentum for greater civility and constructive dialogue in politics, as championed by leaders like Gov. Spencer Cox and his “Disagree Better” campaign. This movement signals hope for a shift away from division and violence toward mutual understanding and cooperation.