After a disturbed young man attempted to assassinate Donald Trump at a rally in July, his allies quickly pinpointed the culprit: Democrats’ criticism of Trump. His opponents’ rhetoric, they said, is so inflammatory that it was bound to incite violence. “Everybody’s rhetoric just needs to change,” said Eric Trump. It was time to “turn the temperature down in this country,” said House Speaker Mike Johnson. When two months later an armed man laying in wait at Trump’s golf course was confronted by the Secret Service, JD Vance said “the left needs to tone down the rhetoric, and needs to cut this crap out.” The would-be shooter, said Trump himself, “believed the rhetoric of [President Joe] Biden and [Vice President Kamala] Harris, and he acted on it.”
Yet after these appeals for a calmer political debate, with each passing week Trump is turning the rhetoric up. It’s difficult to tell if Trump believes this is a clever strategy or if, as the election nears, he is simply becoming less restrained, revealing his purest impulses in all their odiousness. Whatever the reason, his most recent rallies reveal a candidate seemingly intent on being more provocative, more angry, more hateful, and more supportive of violence than ever before.
Targeting Trump’s enemies for threats and violence is now woven deeply into his movement.
Over the weekend, the former president’s attacks on Vice President and Democratic nominee Kamala Harris became even more unhinged. At a rally in Wisconsin, Trump called her “a very dumb person,” claimed she was “mentally impaired” and that she “was born that way.” Even by his standards, it was a remarkably lurid attack on the competence of an opponent who soundly defeated him in the recent debate.
Similarly, while it’s true that Trump has long fantasized about violence that might be committed against criminals, immigrants or his political foes (“I’d like to punch him in the face,” he said about a protester in 2016), lately his rhetoric has gotten even more intense. In the same Wisconsin rally, for instance, his usual description of immigrants as murderers included this vivid description: “They make our criminals look like babies. These are stone-cold killers. They’ll walk into your kitchen, they’ll cut your throat.” Of course, this is the fault of Kamala Harris, who is “letting in people who will walk into your house,” he said. “They’ll do anything they want. These people are animals.”
At another rally the next day, Trump presented a new solution to all crime: more violence. “If you had one really violent day,” he said, the problem would be solved. “One rough hour — and I mean real rough — the word will get out and it will end immediately.”
While some social media users likened this suggestion to “The Purge,” the movie series in which all crime is legalized for one day per year, Trump in fact was talking about government violence directed at members of the public, without any constraints of civil liberties and laws. If only we could unleash law enforcement for “one really violent day,” people would be sufficiently terrorized that all crime would cease.
This is one part of a broader vision Trump has always had, in which America is saturated in threats and violence, which must in turn be met with even more threats and violence, from both the government and vigilantes, against those he and his supporters despise. Targeting Trump’s enemies for threats and violence is now woven deeply into his movement; if he singles you out, you can expect to live in fear, and the collateral damage is wide. We need look no farther than Springfield, Ohio, a city full of his running mate JD Vance’s constituents. After the two running mates began telling repugnant lies about Haitian immigrants there supposedly eating pets, the town was deluged with bomb threats, leading to school closures and evacuations.
The lesson Trump seems to have taken from previous elections is that fear and hate are political winners. One local business owner, a Republican who voted twice for Trump, said publicly that the 10% of his employees who are Haitian immigrants are excellent and conscientious workers. In response, reported The New York Times, he faced “death threats, a lockdown at his company and posters around town branding him a traitor for hiring immigrants.” That series of events has become so common we no longer see it as remarkable: obviously if Trump targets you, or even if you’re an ordinary person who contradicts him publicly, your life will be upended with threats and harassment. Where do they get the idea that that’s how they should treat their political opponents? It’s no mystery. The stakes in this election, Trump tells them, are not merely consequential but positively apocalyptic. “If Kamala is re-elected, your town, and every town just like it,” he says, “will be transformed into a third-world hellhole,” with all the attendant rape, murder and throat-cutting. If you believed that was true, wouldn’t violence be a reasonable response? The lesson Trump seems to have taken from previous elections is that fear and hate are political winners, and the only thing he did wrong in 2016 and 2020 was to be too restrained in fomenting both. Five weeks remain until the election, and we have every reason to believe Trump will be “real rough,” as he puts it, every day between now and then. If all his rhetoric produces is the lusty cheers of a base that thrills to the prospect of violence — and is told that they have a part to play in meting it out — we should count ourselves lucky.
Paul Waldman is a journalist and author focused on politics and culture. 
