The president, says RepSwalwell, “is the greatest recruiter that white nationalists have ever had”
, when a man who suffers from a traumatic brain injury assaulted a child for not removing his hat during the national anthem, his attorney argued, “His commander in chief is telling people that if they kneel, they should be fired, or if they burn a flag, they should be punished,” so he didn’t recognize the assault as a crime.
The El Paso shooting has amplified a long-festering national conversation about the real-world impact of the president’s rhetoric. The suspect in the massacre, a 21-year-old white man, is believed to have authored a manifesto posted online shortly before the shooting that claimed he was trying to prevent a “Hispanic invasion of Texas”—rhetoric that is virtually indistinguishable from what Trump has said on Twitter and during campaign rallies.
Trump and his allies have dismissed any suggestion that his words contributed to the violence, arguing that mental illness is to blame or pointing to the weekend’s other shooting in Dayton, Ohio, in which the shooter expressed support for Democrats. But “individuals don’t just wake up one day and decide that they are going to commit an act of terrorism,” saidan attorney who works on international terrorism cases.
And the more Trump talks, the more the risk of radicalization grows. “Continued rhetoric along these lines, without it being addressed directly and refuted, runs the risk of encouraging more people of marginal psychological stability who have bought into an ideology of hate and racism and misogyny, and moving them along a pathway to violence,”an associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, told me.
Take for example when Trump entertained the notion of gunning down immigrants at a May campaign rally in Florida. “How do you stop these people?” he mused, to which an audience member shouted, “Shoot them!” Trump and his audience laughed it off. “That’s only in the panhandle you can get away with that stuff,” Trump said. “Only in the panhandle.” A supporter of sound mind might shrug off Trump’s remarks as a joke.
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