Writing in The American Conservative, commentator Rod Dreher was horrified by what he deemed to be Donald Trump's "whipping up" of a mob at one of his rallies. Trump stood by and listened as the crowd chanted the racist trope "Send her back!" Trump made no attempt to intervene.
The crowd's chant was no surprise, since Trump himself had similarly used the same racist language in recent days ahead of the rally, saying that four congresswomen of color should "
go back" to the countries from which they came. Three were born in the U.S. All are citizens.
"Where does he think this is all going to go?" Dreher wondered. "Where does this cycle stop?" And: "I don’t see how it fails to end in violence." Dreher's warning, which came shortly before the shootings in Gilroy, El Paso, and Dayton, was more prescient than he might have hoped.
A facile view holds that unless there's a direct, provable line of causation from Trump to, say, El Paso, then the president bears no culpability.
More thoughtful observers understand that a president who actively and continuously seeks to divide, incite, and inflame is obviously complicit when conflagrations erupt. An appropriate old idiom is "playing with fire," except that Trump's incitement, which is not merely careless but systematic, goes beyond recklessness that happens to get out of hand. Trump's is a dangerous and willful disregard for decency, propriety, and consequence—all in pursuit of his own cynical self-interest, and seemingly consistent with a genuine personal belief in the hateful ideology he espouses.
That does not mean Trump wanted there to be a mass shooting. But it does mean that mass shootings are more
likely when already-radicalized individuals with festering prejudices and resentments are aroused by presidential rhetoric to heightened outrage, and from there are motivated to action that they otherwise might not take, but for that arousal. A large amount of motivation might be internal, or within a group of like-minded individuals online providing mutual reinforcement, but it concurrently happens in the condition where the individual can connect his grievance to a greater cause and, especially, a greater context, articulated by none other than the president. It just so happens that the "cause" and the rhetoric that accompanies it are noxious, because they deliberately demean, denigrate, and demonize whole classes of people.
This is what George Will meant
when he wrote: "Trump doesn’t just pollute the social environment with hate. He is the environment." Radical or unstable individuals who inhabit that same environment are more prone to act when nudged or affirmed, even implicitly, by the president's invective.
Direct attribution is not required. The president is society's most prominent speaker—this one in particular with a large, devoted following—who sets an overarching tone that can create conditions in which individuals operate. When events transpire in accordance with that tone, he is culpable. Dreher obviously understood that although the what, when, and how cannot be predicted, ugly rhetoric ultimately, one way or another, runs a high risk of begetting ugly outcomes. So Dreher feared violence.
Cynthia Miller-Idriss, a professor at American University and a senior fellow with the Center for Analysis of the Radical Right,
says: "What we know from data is that hateful speech from political leaders sparks large-scale social media hate speech, which in turn can and has inspired fringe actors to take violent action. So the link between the political rhetoric and the violent act is mediated through social media platforms, chat rooms, etc."
Thus the El Paso shooter was operating in a hate-polluted environment inhabited by the president. He and Trump agreed at least on this: That the country (or in the shooter's telling, his state) was being "invaded," a metaphor which evokes threat and urgency. Invasions must be repulsed. The invasion metaphor has been prominent and continuous in Trump's vile rhetoric.
This, by the way, is why presidents in particular have a responsibility to calm and not inflame; to summon our better angels rather than our worst demons. As always, Trump does exactly the wrong thing.
There has always been an ugly undercurrent of racism and white supremacy throughout American history. Trump did not create it. But he has undoubtedly regenerated, energized, emboldened, and elevated it. Trump has promoted an "us versus them" understanding of white grievance. Keeping his base inflamed and wound up is a deliberate strategy, even if America burns with hatred as a result. And burn it will.
Thus does
conservative columnist Ross Douthat note a "dark nihilism" that permeates Trumpism. Borrowing a phrase from Marianne Williamson, Douthat says our president and mass shooters are "connected to the same dark psychic forces."
Trump's narcissistic hunger for adulation sucks goodness and light out of the environment and annihilates them. The president is a parasite who feeds off hatred and division.
Under Trump, society's deepest and most intractable divisions are being inflamed anew. The Department of Homeland Security says that "domestic terrorism," which is almost entirely confined to the right and is substantially driven by white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and the newer (euphemistic) category of "white nationalism," is a rapidly growing concern. FBI director Christopher Wray testified to that effect just the other day.
The White House's own National Strategy for Counter Terrorism in October
stated, "domestic terrorism in the United States is on the rise with an increasing number of fatalities and violent non-lethal acts committed by domestic terrorists against people and property in the United States."
Not only does Trump fail to consistently condemn such groups (he has made a couple of insincere rebukes, which he subsequently walked back), but in many ways he coddles them. Trump was loathe to condemn the white supremacists and neo-Nazis who marched at Charlottesville and killed a counter-protestor, saying there were "good persons on both sides." Except that one side was marching under the Nazi slogan "
blood and soil" and espousing "
replacement theory." White supremacist groups are among Trump's most enthusiastic supporters, not least because his demonization of "other" and "outsider" aligns closely with their own racist ideologies.
Organizations that track hate crimes, such as the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center, report that such crimes are up sharply in recent years. The ADL reports 50 persons killed in 2018 by "domestic extremists" who are overwhelmingly "white supremacists." Hate crimes of all types are increasing, even as the overall crime rate is declining. FBI statistics showed hate crimes up 17% in 2017, the third straight annual increase. There were 7,175 hate crimes in 2017. But hate crimes particularly spike during times of social unrest, such as during the Charlottesville protests.
To illustrate that connection, hate crimes against Muslims rose 23% after Trump called for a "total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States" during the early part of the campaign in 2015.
ADL's chief executive said that "every marginalized community in our country is under attack," and that Trump’s rhetoric contains the "staples of white supremacist rhetoric." Trump has "emboldened" white nationalists, he says. A president's job is to tamp down such flare-ups, but Trump does the opposite, throwing gasoline on the fire and watching it burn.
In one investigation,
ABC News found 36 cases where perpetrators invoked "Trump" in connection with violence, threats, and alleged assaults. It was unable to find any act of violence where Barack Obama or George W. Bush had been invoked.
In another,
USA Today analyzed the texts of several dozen Trump rallies and found he used the word "invasion" at least 19 times when discussing immigration. He used the world "animal" 34 times, and "killer" three dozen times. The El Paso shooter said he was responding to the "Hispanic invasion" of Texas.
As if to instantiate the metaphor, before the midterm elections Trump made a show of sending the U.S. military to the southern border to counter that "invasion," as the early migrant caravans were heading north. Note that those asylum-seeking migrants were trying to turn themselves over to U.S. authorities for legal processing, not to sneak into the country and disappear—much less to pose a threat to the country. You might say Trump's "invaders" actually just wanted to be prisoners of war.
In all,
USA Today found Trump used words like the aforementioned, and also "predator," "alien," and "criminal" more than 500 times in his rallies—never mind his multitudes of tweets and other communications.
Trump typically conflates MS-13 gang members with migrants at the southern border generally. Never forget that the vast majority of the current wave of migrants is seeking legal asylum in the U.S. A very large proportion are families with children. This is the "invasion" Trump repeatedly decries.
Trump has also used the word "infestation." The proper response to an infestation is of course extermination. Perhaps the El Paso shooter saw this as his particular duty.
USA Today found that Trump has used the phrase "the hell out of our country" at least 43 times during his rallies. There's nothing in such rhetoric to induce calm.
Trump set the tone at the launch of his campaign in 2015 by saying foreign countries were "sending people that have lots of problems." The word "sending" implies that countries are deliberately dumping undesirables on our doorstep, which is nonsense. He characterized many of them as "rapists," even though immigrants—both legal and illegal—commit crimes (including violent crimes)
at lower rates than the general populace.
Even after the El Paso shooting, Trump's campaign continued to fund political ads on Facebook under the title "STOP THE INVASION". More would-be shooters might take that as a call to action in a mission yet unfinished.
At a recent rally in Panama City, Florida, Trump asked the crowd: "How do you stop these people?" Someone in the crowd yelled "Shoot them!", to which Trump momentarily grinned and issued his own quip in response.
Social science researchers have been attempting to study the connection between rhetoric and violence.
Researchers at the University of North Texas found that counties that hosted a 2016 Trump campaign rally saw a 226% increase in reported hate incidents over comparable counties that did not host such a rally. More research is need to confirm the connection, but the link between rhetoric and action is consistent with most people's intuitions.
Heidi Beirich of the Southern Poverty Law Center says that Trump’s words have fueled anti-immigrant hatred and amplified conspiracy theories that non-white immigrants are systematically replacing whites. And lest we forget, last year pipe bombs were sent to a variety of targets of Trump's rhetoric: George Soros, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, CNN, Maxine Waters, John Brennan, Eric Holder, Debbie Wasserman Shultz, Joe Biden, Robert De Niro, Kamala Harris. The bomber's attorneys say
he was obsessed with Donald Trump.
I had forgotten, too, that the shooter's complaint in the 2018 Pittsburgh synagogue shooting was that a Jewish American organization,
HIAS, was providing support for Central American migrants, and the
Pittsburgh Tree of Life synagogue was participating in that support. The shooter posted an explanation of his motivation, saying "HIAS likes to bring invaders in that kill our people. I can't sit by and
watch my people get slaughtered. Screw your optics, I'm going in." Eleven people were killed. Seven injured. It's easy to forget as each new wave of ugliness washes over.
In the immediate aftermath of the synagogue shooting,
Trump opined that "a lot of people" say George Soros, a Jew, is funding the Central American caravan. "I wouldn't be surprised," Trump said, encouraging yet another bizarre conspiracy theory. The shooting was a twofer, going after both migrants and Jews. Anti-Semites were all too happy to
make the connection between the two groups. All this, plus the movement of U.S. military troops to the southern border, was happening just before the midterm elections.
Crowds shouting "Lock her up!" are still a feature of Trump rallies. At a 2016 rally, Trump urged his supporters to
"knock the crap out of" protestors. At another, he said of one protestor that he'd "like to punch him in the face." At another, a Trump supporter punched a Black Lives Matter protester, and a protester was beaten by a mob at yet another. Trump has promised to pay the legal fees of supporters who use violence against protestors. As Rod Dreher understands, mobs follow the cues of their leader.
In remarks to police at a law enforcement event,
Trump said they should not be "too nice" when taking suspects into custody. "When you see these thugs being thrown into the back of a paddy wagon,
you just see them thrown in, rough. I said, Please don’t be too
nice."
And: "When you guys put somebody in the car and you’re protecting their head
you know, the way you put their hand over [their head]. Like, Don’t hit their head and
they’ve just killed somebody, don’t hit their head. I said, You can
take the hand away, OK?" In Trump's America, police have the president's permission to rough up "thugs."
Trump's rhetoric is reliably demeaning of people of color. In an Oval Office meeting to negotiate immigration reform with lawmakers, Trump said he didn't want persons from "
shithole countries." He was specifically referring to Haiti and Africa. Trump happily marries racial animus with politics. He said that Rep. Elijah Cummings's Baltimore district, which is majority black, is a "
disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess" where "
no human being would want to live." Trump has tweeted various kinds of political attacks hundreds or thousands of times, but whenever he tweets about "infestation" it always involves black and brown people.
Republican Congressman Will Hurd of Texas, the only black Republican in the House, recently announced he'll not be seeking re-election. Hurd called Trump's tweets about the four congresswomen of color "
racist and xenophobic." He said that Trump's rhetoric makes it more difficult for him to engage with the minority communities he represents. "This makes it harder in order to take our ideas, and our platform, to communities that don't necessarily identify with the Republican Party," Hurd said.
Writing in National Review, conservative columnist David French wonders about spineless Republicans in Congress, who passively acquiesce in the president's hatefulness. "Do they not understand the message the leader of their party is sending — especially to America’s nonwhite citizens? Do they not understand that racial malice as a political strategy isn’t just an ultimately losing proposition but also deeply divisive, picking at the scabs of America’s deepest political, cultural, and spiritual wounds?"
"Trump is fully employing malice as a political strategy," French says. "It’s not clever. It’s not shrewd. It’s destructive and wrong."
There is a counter-model for presidential conduct and rhetoric which is illuminating. Hate crimes against Muslims soared around the September 2001 terrorist attacks. But six days later President
George W. Bush said that "the face of terror is not the true faith of Islam," and thereafter Bush consistently
referred to Islam as a religion of peace. Anti-Muslim hate crime reports dropped by two-thirds the next day and for the calendar year 2002 as well. This is what presidential leadership looks like.
Unfortunately, that model of presidential leadership does not currently exist. America is deeply divided, and Trump fuels the divisive hatred and elevates the country's most violent fringe elements. "Never in my political lifetime has an American president had less moral standing to address a national threat,"
laments conservative columnist Michael Gerson after the recent shootings. For his part, Gerson knows a thing or two about Bush, and the contrast between the presidents. Gerson was Bush's head speechwriter.
Copyright (C) 2019 James Michael Brennan, All Rights Reserved
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