Illustration by Mother Jones; Tasos Katopodis/Getty

It wasn’t surprise. Instead, call him the month of October reveal.

In the final days of the 2024 election, Donald Trump’s campaign’s abhorrent rhetoric gained national attention when a speaker made a racist joke about Puerto Rico at the ex-president’s rally on October 27 at Madison Square Garden. The event was an inevitable high point for the Trump campaign, a six-hour spectacle of division and bigotry during which several speakers launched racist and misogynistic attacks on Kamala Harris. It concluded with Trump on the podium delivering the same grandstanding he has used at dozens of rallies this year: paint a wildly exaggerated image of national decadence, promoting baseless conspiracy theoriesAnd stir up fear and anger about an alleged “invasion” of America by murderous migrants.

Such themes have been central to Trump’s policies since he entered the presidential race nearly a decade ago. As he has taken these tactics to new extremes in recent months, law enforcement and national security sources I spoke with said warned of A growing danger of far-right political violence inspired by Trump’s message.

It’s not theoretical. It builds on a long history of violence associated with Trump’s rhetoric, which in 2021 led a bipartisan group of top national security experts to take the extraordinary step of labeling Trump a terrorist leader – this who is a de facto terrorist leader. leader of a violent extremist movement in the United States.

Given that another central tactic of Trumpism is attempting to cover up the truth and gloss over anything that could be harmful, now is a good time to revisit some of the major violence coinciding with Trump’s incitement. I have been documenting these grim events for over six years.

As I reported in an investigation started in the summer of 2018, White supremacist attacks have become deadlier during Trump’s tenure in the White House. The violence took place against a backdrop of a surge in far-right plots and threats, according to police sources I spoke with at the time. This included a wave of threats specifically targeting journalistswhom Trump and his allies have repeatedly called “the enemy of the American people.” Two devastating mass shootings – one at a Pittsburgh synagogue and another at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas – involved perpetrators who focused on an “invasion” of migrants, a central theme also highlighted at the time by Trump . THE echoes of Trump’s rhetoric in the case of El Paso were particularly striking, as I detailed again recently:

The shooter had traveled to the border town 650 miles away. In police custody, he said the police, he had come to kill Mexicans. Some writings he posted online said his attack was “a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas” and that his mission was to “defend my country against the cultural and ethnic replacement caused by an invasion.” He cited an extremist ideology known as the “Great Replacement.”

These were not obscure ideas. The shooter wrote that he agreed with a recent mass shooter in New Zealand who married them. He also knew that some of these themes were being championed at the time by President Donald Trump. With the help of Fox News ExpertsTrump was stoking fear and hatred over an alleged “invasion” crossing the US southern border – the message was at the heart of Trump’s 2019 re-election campaign, a focus of its ads And speech an ominous warning of a national demise.

At the end of the shooter’s speech posted online, he sought to validate his attack with a pseudo-clever twist, suggesting his views predated those of Trump in the White House. “I know the media will probably call me a white supremacist anyway and blame Trump’s rhetoric,” he wrote. He then used Trump’s own rhetoric as a weapon of support: “The media is infamous for its fake news. »

Notably, Trump supporter Tucker Carlson, who has long supported Great Replacement Themesagain alludes to ideology in his caustic speech at the Madison Square Garden rally. And Trump’s biggest backer, Elon Musk, also pointed out at the bottom of the campaign final straight line.

Most infamously, of course, Trump’s incitement led to the brutal insurrection at the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021. The former president and his allies have spent years since then try to erase the truth about trump indelible role by motivating this unprecedented attack on American democracy.

Many Republican Party leaders have consistently helped deny, justify, and cover up Trump’s incitement of political violence, and some have done so since. adopted his tactics. Others, including House Speaker Mike Johnson, have I just played dumb. As one national security source recently told me, “Silence is a form of participation in itself.”

Trump continues to weave his virulent threads of demagoguery into a grand conspiracy theory claiming the election will be “stolen” from him. As I reported In late October, the further escalation of his extreme rhetoric was accompanied by an increase in violent threats reflecting his message. With the results of the 2024 vote looming, the question now becomes where this defining characteristic of Trumpism might take us next.