In the morning On August 3, 2019, a 21-year-old man entered a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, and opened fire with a semi-automatic rifle. He killed 23 people and wounded 22. Most of the dead were Latino, including eight of Mexican descent.
The gunman drove to a border town 650 miles away. While in custody, he told police he was there to kill Mexicans. In some of his online posts, he said his attacks were a “response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas” and that his mission was to “defend my country from cultural and ethnic replacement by invasion.” He cited an extremist ideology known as “mass replacement.”
These were not vague ideas. The gunman agreed with the recent mass shooting in New Zealand, writing that the shooter supported it. He also knew that some of these themes were championed by then-President Donald Trump. With the help of Fox News pundits, Trump stoked fear and hatred of an “invasion” across America’s southern border. This message was at the heart of Trump’s 2019 reelection campaign, and his ads and speeches focused on ominous warnings of national decline.
At the end of the sniper’s tirade posted online, he attempted to justify his attacks with a fake, clever twist, suggesting that his views were superior to those of Trump in the White House. “I know the press is going to call me a white supremacist and denounce Trump’s rhetoric anyway,” he wrote. He then used that as ammunition to support Trump’s own rhetoric: “The press is notorious for fake news.”
Today Trump He is again using the same powerful demagoguery he wielded during his presidency and previous campaigns. Exactly five years after the El Paso massacre, he and his running mate, JD Vance, held a rally in Atlanta, warning six times in one hour that a horde of murderous foreigners was sweeping through the country.
Trump initially said of his Democratic rivals that “40 million or 50 million illegal immigrants are going to invade our country in the next four years.” He quickly added that “many of these immigrants are coming from prisons, jails, mental institutions, mental institutions.” He mocked the media covering his rallies and referred to the fictional serial killer Hannibal Lecter, a taunt he uses to describe the “madness” and brutality of immigrants.
He vowed to “stop the invasion” and detailed the danger: “These people are so violent, so evil… These are the worst people coming into our country from anywhere in the world. They are coming in at levels that no one has ever seen.”
“We’ve already seen where this goes, and it could easily go there again,” one of the threat assessment sources told me.
When Trump recited this line from a teleprompter, the audience’s reaction was relatively muted, perhaps because it was a familiar line in his speeches. But as the speech progressed, the next escalation unfolded differently. Trump now claimed that the danger came from a vast conspiracy against him, including immigrants. He warned that his political opponents who “hate our country” were “actually trying to get them to register and vote.” And then came the climax. “It’s so evil,” he said, “but they want to get these people to register and vote, and if they do, this country is going to be destroyed. We’re going to be the garbage dump for the world, and we can’t take it anymore.”
If you listen closely, you can hear echoes of Trump’s January 6, 2021, speech when he called for the nation to lose and the dangers of election inaction. He falsely claimed the election was stolen. Now, in his narrative, the conspiracy promises to use a host of evil foreigners against him and his supporters.
The crowd cheered, and became even more excited when Trump brought up the recent murder of a college student by a Venezuelan who had entered the country illegally. “Kamala Harris let in the savage monster who killed Laken Riley,” Trump declared. He blamed “immigrant crime” and falsely claimed that “thousands” of Americans were being killed this way.
He continued: “If Harris wins, you’re going to have an endless stream of illegal alien rapists, MS-13 animals, and child predators flooding into your communities. If I win, I’m going to start the largest deportation operation in American history on day one.”
The crowd roared at the signature line of his speech.
“We have no choice,” President Trump said.
Who was listening? Perhaps a nervous young person in the crowd, or someone else watching Trump live on YouTube, who might have been outraged when the El Paso mass shooter wrote a lie about how Democrats were trying to “perform a political coup by importing and legalizing millions of new voters using free healthcare, citizenship, etc. for illegal immigrants.”
Not long after At Trump’s Atlanta speech, I spoke with a longtime threat assessment source with expertise in counterterrorism and far-right extremist groups. When I pointed out that none of the major media outlets were covering Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric, his response was blunt, as if all the rhetoric was just routine.
“There is absolutely nothing normal about any of this,” the source said. “We have the First Amendment and he can say whatever he wants. That’s our democracy. But it’s really disturbing that politicians in his own party are not standing up and saying one word against it. This country really needs that. We’ve already seen where this is going, and it could easily go there again.”
Trump’s use of rhetoric to justify racist and organized political violence began early in his presidency. That pent-up denial of reality was completely shattered by the horrific events at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. In June of this year, I reported again on Trump’s years of incitement of various perceived enemies, a method known to national security experts as probabilistic terrorism. As I have reported, the results are even worse when celebrities emphasize themes of contempt and disgust.
According to security and law enforcement sources, threats from white supremacist groups and Trump’s MAGA movement are at the top of the list of concerns about election-year violence. After the assassination attempt on the former president in mid-July, sources say Trump allies are spreading conspiracy theories and false accusations against Democrats, which could lead to retaliatory attacks.
At a rally in Atlanta on August 3, JD Vance doubled down on that charge, declaring in a speech that Trump’s political opponents were “trying to kill him.” Meanwhile, a new intelligence report from the FBI and Department of Homeland Security highlights similar concerns about retaliatory violence, with a focus on the upcoming Democratic National Convention.
I reached out to three people on the Trump campaign for specific comment on the warnings about political violence: press secretary Brian Hughes and Stephen Cheng, and Trump senior adviser Alina Harbaugh. None responded.
America faces enormous challenges on immigration, the issue that matters most to voters, and that is precisely the reality Trump is trying to exploit.
Trump shows no sign of stopping his inflammatory rhetoric. In a rambling speech to reporters gathered for a news conference at Mar-a-Lago last Thursday, he again stressed that the United States is being invaded by millions of immigrants from “prisons, prisons, mental institutions, mental hospitals.” They are coming from “all over the world,” he claimed. “The prisons are being emptied into our country.”
He echoed that sentiment at a rally in Montana on Friday: “Fifty million people… They’re destroying our country. They’re ruining our country… Immigrants are praying for our women and girls.”
Fear and disgust were packaged as just another campaign speech.
Trump’s incitement The focus on immigration is not mutually exclusive to the fact that America faces enormous challenges on immigration, the issue that matters most to voters. It is precisely this reality that Trump is trying to exploit. In early 2024, Congress was poised to pass a bipartisan border security bill, and President Biden was ready to sign it. Trump killed the deal. No one has tried to hide why he pressured Republicans to do his bidding. He wanted immigration to remain his political weapon.
“The fact that he told Republican senators and congressmen not to fix the border issue, because he wanted to blame Biden, is absolutely horrific,” Sen. Mitt Romney, a Utah Republican, told reporters after the talks collapsed in January.
Oklahoma Republican Senator James Lankford, who helped write the bill, later revealed that a “popular” media commentator threatened him. According to Lankford, the Trump ally said, “If you try to pass a bill to solve the border crisis in this election,” “I will do everything I can to destroy you, because I don’t want you to solve this problem in this election.”
What happens when the leader of a major political movement labels certain residents a threat to public health, safety, and even the survival of the nation?
Trump’s relentless fear-mongering about immigrants shows that he has always viewed immigration and borders as essential to his political power. There is little doubt that his current trajectory, which began nearly a decade ago when he first announced his campaign and denounced Mexican criminals and “rapists,” will continue through November’s election.
Most news media no longer pays much attention to this, but that risks making the public forget the violence that has already occurred. More broadly, shouldn’t we be asking: What happens when the leaders of major political movements push the public to believe that they are a threat to public health and safety, and even to the survival of the nation?
According to one of Trump’s top national security advisers in the White House, Trump has been explicitly and repeatedly informed of how his rhetoric is being used to justify acts of violence. The credible evidence of his awareness and his unwillingness to meaningfully respond to the violence suggests that he welcomes more bloodshed.
