Borrowed Battlegrounds: When U.S. Political Violence Becomes Partisan News Abroad—Evidence from Five Language Communities on X (2024–2025)
When political violence strikes a partisan figure in the United States, does the world read it as party news or as country news? This study examines how discourse in five language communities on X (Chinese, Korean, Japanese, French, and Russian) processed two American attacks: the July 2024 assassination attempt on Donald Trump and the September 2025 assassination of Charlie Kirk. Combining complete daily post counts, 298,000 sentiment-coded posts, thread-level conversation linkage, and pre-event recognition measured in each community’s own language edition of Wikipedia, the analysis decomposes 1.3 million posts collected in the two weeks around each attack. Three findings emerge. First, party-labeled attention rose by a nearly identical absolute amount after both attacks, but person-absorption differed radically: attention to the globally recognized Trump flowed in near-parallel into Republican-Party discussion, whereas the locally unknown Kirk absorbed virtually all attention himself. Second, the additional party talk sits almost entirely inside event conversations, yet roughly seventy percent of it is free-standing partisan argument that never references the attack: political violence convenes foreign party-talk rather than being its subject. Third, foreign publics routinely domesticate American politics—using U.S. events to argue about their own—at rates highest in Japan and Korea; attacks temporarily suppress this mode while the American event absorbs attention. Post-event sentiment shifts are driven almost entirely by new entrants rather than opinion change. The findings show how the interpretive reach of American partisan conflict abroad depends on who is attacked, with implications for soft power and the transnational diffusion of U.S. political categories.