As Donald Trump campaigns to be a dictator for one day, he’s asking: “Are you better off now than you were when I was president?” Great question! To help answer it, our Trump Files series is delving into consequential events from the 45th president’s time in office that Americans might have forgotten—or wish they had.

It was no surprise. Instead, call it the October reveal.

In the final days of the 2024 election, ugly rhetoric from Donald Trump’s campaign drew major national attention when a speaker made a racist joke about Puerto Rico as part of the ex-president’s Oct. 27 rally at Madison Square Garden. The event was an inevitable culmination for the Trump campaign, a six-hour pageant of divisiveness and bigotry that featured multiple speakers launching racist and misogynistic attacks on Kamala Harris. It concluded with Trump at the podium delivering the same demagoguery he has used in dozens of rallies this year: painting a wildly exaggerated picture of national decay, promoting baseless conspiracy theories, and stoking fear and anger about an alleged “invasion” of America by murderous migrants.

Such themes have been at the dark heart of Trump’s politics ever since he entered the presidential race nearly a decade ago. As he has taken these tactics to new extremes over the past few months, law enforcement and national security sources I’ve spoken with have warned about a growing danger of far-right political violence inspired by Trump’s messaging.

This is not theoretical. It’s based on a lengthy history of violence associated with Trump’s rhetoric, which by 2021 led a bipartisan group of top national security experts to take the extraordinary step of labeling Trump, effectively, a terrorist leader—the de facto head of a violent extremist movement within the United States.

Given that another central tactic of Trumpism is to try to cover up the truth and push anything damaging down the memory hole, the time is ripe to revisit some of the major violence coinciding with Trump’s incitement. I’ve been documenting these grim events for more than six years.

As I reported in an investigation begun in summer 2018, white supremacist attacks grew deadlier during Trump’s tenure in the White House. The violence unfolded amid a surge in far-right plots and threats, according to law enforcement sources I spoke with then. That included a wave of menace specifically targeting journalists, who Trump and his allies smeared repeatedly as “the enemy of the American people.” Two devastating mass shootings—one at a synagogue in Pittsburgh and another at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas—involved perpetrators who were focused on a migrant “invasion,” a core theme also emphasized back then by Trump. The echoes of Trump’s rhetoric in the El Paso case were particularly stark, as I detailed again recently:

The gunman had driven to the border city from 650 miles away. In custody, he told police he’d come to kill Mexicans. Some writings he’d posted online said his attack was “a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas” and that his mission was “defending my country from cultural and ethnic replacement brought on by an invasion.” He cited an extremist ideology known as “The Great Replacement.”

These were not obscure ideas. The gunman wrote that he agreed with a recent mass shooter in New Zealand who had espoused them. He also knew some of these themes were being championed at the time by President Donald Trump. With help from Fox News pundits, Trump was whipping up fear and hatred of an alleged “invasion” coming across America’s southern border—the message was central to Trump’s reelection campaign in 2019, a focus of his ads and speeches warning ominously of a national demise.

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

Notably, Trump backer Tucker Carlson, who has long pushed Great Replacement themes, alluded to the ideology again in his caustic speech at the Madison Square Garden rally. And Trump’s biggest financial backer, Elon Musk, has also been emphasizing it down the campaign homestretch.

Most infamously, of course, Trump’s incitement provoked the brutal insurrection at the US Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. The former president and his allies have spent the years since then trying to erase the truth about Trump’s indelible role in motivating that unprecedented attack on American democracy.

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

Trump continues to weave his virulent strands of demagoguery into a grand conspiracy theory alleging the election will be “stolen” from him. As I reported in late October, the further escalation of his extreme rhetoric has been accompanied by a rise in violent threats reflecting his messaging. With the 2024 voting results imminent, the question now is where this defining feature of Trumpism may take us next.

Donald Trump’s rhetoric during his 2024 campaign has been the darkest in modern memory. He has emphasized grievance and demagoguery ever since he first ran for president, most infamously with his build-up to the January 6 insurrection. But in recent months he has gone to new extremes. In numerous speeches and media appearances, he has peddled false conspiracy theories about the two assassination attempts against him and stoked fear and anger nonstop about an alleged “invasion” of murderous migrants, who he claims are “poisoning the blood of” America and “conquering” cities and towns nationwide.

Throughout the election homestretch, Trump has woven these virulent strands into his core message about a supposed grand conspiracy by Democrats to steal the White House from him. Trump and multiple top surrogates have spent months asserting that his political opponents “even tried to kill him” as part of this plot—a canard Trump further amplified when he returned for a second rally at the site in Butler, Pennsylvania, where a gunman opened fire in mid-July.

During a speech in Atlanta, Trump reiterated lies about Democrats conspiring to use undocumented migrants to transform America. “It’s so sinister,” he said, “but they want to sign these people up to vote, and if they do that, this country is destroyed. We’d become a dumping ground for the entire world.” Trump has drawn on such “Great Replacement” themes—an extremist ideology embraced by multiple mass shooters—ever since he was in the White House. And Trump’s biggest financial backer, Elon Musk, is now also advancing this theme, speaking at Trump rallies and posting with massive reach on his social media platform, X.

Most news media rarely, if ever, frame Trump’s rhetoric for what it is: methodical, sustained incitement. Proving a direct connection between Trump’s incendiary messaging and acts of violence can be all but impossible—a gap of plausible deniability that is central to the method of stochastic terrorism, as it’s known to national security experts. Nonetheless there is a long history of Trump’s rhetoric correlating strongly with subsequent menace and violence: a surge in threats targeting journalists as “the enemy of the people,” a Trump supporter attacking an FBI field office after Trump raged against the raid on Mar-a-Lago, threats to kill FBI agents over a “stolen election” and the Hunter Biden case.

The intensifying demagoguery from Trump this election season has caused high concern among threat assessment and law enforcement experts, as I’ve been reporting since June. Fortunately, their worst fears about the kind of catastrophic violence it might provoke have yet to be realized. But according to two senior federal law enforcement sources I spoke with in recent weeks, Trump’s extremism has been accompanied by a rise in violent threats reflecting his messaging.

According to these sources, multiple cases of threats have involved individuals citing or parroting Trump’s ongoing claims about violent migrants invading and taking over the country. Trump’s continual focus on that alleged menace has produced a noticeable hardening effect, one source told me: “We see that the longer it’s talked about, the more it becomes perceived as fact.” Other cases have included talk of “payback or revenge” against Trump’s political adversaries for the assassination attempts, including threats focused on elected officials.

“It’s really poisonous, and it’s giving justification to people who are on the edge to take extreme actions.”

Trump’s hyperbole at recent rallies has included macabre descriptions of alleged rape and murder by migrants, such as telling his supporters, “they’ll cut your throat.” After his rally last Saturday in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, most media coverage focused on his lewd comments about golf legend Arnold Palmer’s genitals, but less noted was that Trump also conjured a specter of war against migrants: “We will not be invaded, we will not be occupied, we will not be conquered. That’s what they’re doing. This is an invasion into our country of a foreign military.”

He has continued to blame Vice President Kamala Harris for this non-reality: “She’s letting vicious gangs take over whole communities,” he inveighed at a rally on Monday in Greenville, North Carolina. “She’s bussing and flying them in by the millions.”

A threat assessment expert who consults for federal law enforcement told me that the fear and contempt generated by such rhetoric is potent, and can be interpreted by some people as permission to commit violence. “It’s really poisonous, and it’s giving justification to people who are on the edge to take extreme actions.”

In September, the town of Springfield, Ohio, endured waves of paralyzing bomb threats and other harassment after Trump and his running mate, JD Vance, spread lies about Haitian immigrants supposedly stealing and eating neighbors’ pets. Risk for violence escalated in the southeastern US when Trump and his allies seized on the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, falsely accusing FEMA and the Biden administration of abandoning victims. These repeated lies were debunked by state and local leaders, including Republicans, but that didn’t stop Trump. “They spent their money on illegal migrants,” he declared again at Monday’s rally in Greenville. “They didn’t have any money left for North Carolina.”

Trump has continued to tell this lie in his stump speech—even after a Trump supporter armed with multiple guns was arrested in western North Carolina in mid-October for allegedly threatening to harm FEMA workers. That and other armed threats disrupted the agency’s efforts to help hurricane victims.  

Risk for violence around Election Day remains a high concern and a focus for law enforcement, the sources confirmed to me. As one longtime election official in Georgia explained this week to the Wall Street Journal: “People have had four years of just marinating in all sorts of different conspiracy theories, and we worry they’ll come in looking for a problem. Then you got, ‘Hey everyone come down to the polling place,’ and mobs showing up, maybe armed, and it can really snowball very quickly.” 

The temperature also has been rising with adversarial partisan crowds, as seen in Pennsylvania on Sunday in the vicinity of a McDonald’s where Trump posed briefly as a fry cook. Concern will extend well beyond Election Day, through a period of uncertainty about voting results that is likely to follow—and that undoubtedly will be further weaponized by Trump and his allies using baseless claims of fraud, sand-in-the-gears litigation, and beyond.

National security and threat assessment experts told me after the January 6 insurrection that quashing the violent extremism unleashed by Trump requires a fundamental change in what political leaders treat as acceptable rhetoric. But through the years of Trump’s continuing grip on the Republican Party, that standard has trended in the wrong direction, with many Republican politicians excusing or even joining in on Trump’s tactics.

With Election Day fast approaching, no Republican member of Congress or high-profile figure in the party is speaking out forcefully against Trump’s dark rhetoric. House Speaker Mike Johnson and others stick to misdirection or feigned ignorance, if they address the matter at all. As one threat assessment source told me: “Silence is its own form of participation.”

For much of 2024, Donald Trump has used demagoguery against migrants to campaign for the White House. In numerous recent speeches and media appearances, he has continued to inveigh about an alleged “invasion” coming across America’s southern border. He has falsely claimed that hordes of violent and “insane” foreigners have been taking over “hundreds” of cities and raping and killing “thousands of Americans.” His repeated vows to deport millions of undocumented immigrants draw roars of approval at his rallies.

Inflaming Americans’ fears about immigration and border security was a hallmark of Trump’s presidency and previous campaigns—and his extreme rhetoric, as I’ve previously reported, has marked spasms of violence, including a horrific mass shooting in 2019 in El Paso, Texas. Earlier this month, he and his running mate, JD Vance, magnified racist lies about Haitian immigrants supposedly stealing and eating pets in Springfield, Ohio—provoking a wave of fear, bomb threats, and major disruption in that community.

Now, in the final weeks of the presidential campaign, Trump’s rhetoric about migrants has grown even darker and more foreboding. In three campaign speeches since Friday, he conjured disturbing images of mayhem and death and spoke of the nation as if it’s on the brink of destruction. With no basis in reality, he blamed this cartoonishly grim portrait of American carnage on his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris.

“She let our American sons and daughters be raped and murdered at the hands of vicious monsters. She let American communities be conquered,” Trump said at a rally in Michigan on Friday, emphasizing, “They’re conquering your communities.”

“They’ll walk into your kitchen,” Trump said of migrants. “They’ll cut your throat.”

“These migrants,” Trump said the following day in Wisconsin, “they make our criminals look like babies. These are stone-cold killers. They’ll walk into your kitchen, they’ll cut your throat.”

In a lengthy diatribe that followed, he falsely claimed that Harris had “let in 425,431 people convicted of the worst crimes.” (This was one of several ways in which Trump wildly distorted data recently released by US Homeland Security that covers a 40-year period.) He declared that these were legions of criminals who “Kamala set loose to rape, pillage, thieve, plunder and kill the people of the United States of America.”

“Lock her up!” shouted someone in the crowd.

Trump further railed against Harris as being “mentally disabled” and supposedly responsible for tens of thousands of murderers pouring into the country. “I’ve been saying this for three years,” he went on, soon adding: “She’s letting in people who are going to walk into your house, break into your door, and they’ll do anything they want. These people are animals.”

Later in the speech, he again highlighted alleged violence by “illegal aliens” and declared: “I will liberate Wisconsin from this mass migrant invasion of murderers, rapists, hoodlums, drug dealers, thugs, and vicious gang members. I will liberate our nation.”

Trump even used an impromptu moment to dehumanize migrants in ugly terms. He claimed that English was fast disappearing from the schools in Springfield, Ohio, and warned that if Harris is elected president, towns in Wisconsin and all over America “will be transformed into a third-world hellhole.” As he continued, a fly apparently landed on the podium.

“Oh, there’s a fly,” he said, shooing it away, his tone turning sardonic. “I wonder where the fly came from.”

The crowd erupted with laughter.

“See, two years ago I wouldn’t have had a fly up here,” he said, grinning. “You’re changing rapidly.”

He delivered more of the same on Sunday in Pennsylvania: “The massive number of savage criminal aliens that Kamala Harris has allowed to invade our country, this is an invasion.” He further claimed, “Last week a lot of people came in from the Congo, a big prison in the Congo in Africa. Welcome to the United States.”

“Send ’em back!” a person in the crowd yelled angrily.

This was all building to a specter of national demise—an invasion, Trump claimed, that will be larger than half the size of the current US population.

“Wait till you see what’s going to happen,” he said. “Oh, and if I don’t get in, it’s going to be the worst thing that this country has ever suffered…you’ll have 150, 200 million coming, you will have, this country will no longer be recognizable.”

That rhetoric is indistinguishable from the “Great Replacement” ideology that motivated the mass shooter who attacked in El Paso when Trump was in the White House.

“Dehumanizing a population—whether it’s Trump smearing migrants for spreading flies, ‘eating the dogs,’ or ‘poisoning the blood of our country’—increases the likelihood of violence.”

As I have reported previously, dehumanizing a population by instigating feelings of contempt and disgust—whether it’s Trump smearing migrants for spreading flies, “eating the dogs,” or “poisoning the blood of our country”—increases the likelihood that his extremist followers will be inspired to commit acts of violence. The danger from this type of incitement, documented in behavioral science research, has been rising with Trump’s rhetoric, according to threat assessment and national security experts I’ve spoken with in recent weeks. “There’s nothing normal about any of this,” as one source put it. “We’ve already seen where this goes, and it can easily go there again.”

While America faces profound challenges with immigration, a top issue for voters, Trump’s depictions are as demonstrably false as they are deeply troubling. Immigrants commit crime at lower rates than native-born Americans, extensive research shows. The nation has experienced a sharp decline in violent crime under the Biden-Harris administration, according to FBI data. And in recent months, migrant encounters at the border dropped to the lowest level in four years.

It is important to recognize that Trump’s demonizing rhetoric is clearly by design. He is well known for improvising and wandering off on long tangents that turn bizarre and incoherent. But much of the incendiary rhetoric above was written into Trump’s speeches. He read most of it from a teleprompter.

When I reported in August on this demagoguery from Trump, I contacted three of his senior campaign advisors separately, asking them for comment about experts’ concerns that the ex-president’s rhetoric could provoke further violence. None of those Trump advisors responded, nor did they reply to my follow-up inquiries for this story.

For much of 2024, Donald Trump has used demagoguery against migrants to campaign for the White House. In numerous recent speeches and media appearances, he has continued to inveigh about an alleged “invasion” coming across America’s southern border. He has falsely claimed that hordes of violent and “insane” foreigners have been taking over “hundreds” of cities and raping and killing “thousands of Americans.” His repeated vows to deport millions of undocumented immigrants draw roars of approval at his rallies.

Inflaming Americans’ fears about immigration and border security was a hallmark of Trump’s presidency and previous campaigns—and his extreme rhetoric, as I’ve previously reported, has marked spasms of violence, including a horrific mass shooting in 2019 in El Paso, Texas. Earlier this month, he and his running mate, JD Vance, magnified racist lies about Haitian immigrants supposedly stealing and eating pets in Springfield, Ohio—provoking a wave of fear, bomb threats, and major disruption in that community.

Now, in the final weeks of the presidential campaign, Trump’s rhetoric about migrants has grown even darker and more foreboding. In three campaign speeches since Friday, he conjured disturbing images of mayhem and death and spoke of the nation as if it’s on the brink of destruction. With no basis in reality, he blamed this cartoonishly grim portrait of American carnage on his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris.

“She let our American sons and daughters be raped and murdered at the hands of vicious monsters. She let American communities be conquered,” Trump said at a rally in Michigan on Friday, emphasizing, “They’re conquering your communities.”

“They’ll walk into your kitchen,” Trump said of migrants. “They’ll cut your throat.”

“These migrants,” Trump said the following day in Wisconsin, “they make our criminals look like babies. These are stone-cold killers. They’ll walk into your kitchen, they’ll cut your throat.”

In a lengthy diatribe that followed, he falsely claimed that Harris had “let in 425,431 people convicted of the worst crimes.” (This was one of several ways in which Trump wildly distorted recently released data from US Homeland Security covering a 40-year period.) He declared that these were legions of criminals who “Kamala set loose to rape, pillage, thieve, plunder and kill the people of the United States of America.”

“Lock her up!” shouted someone in the crowd.

Trump further railed against Harris as being “mentally disabled” and supposedly responsible for tens of thousands of murderers pouring into the country. “I’ve been saying this for three years,” he went on, soon adding: “She’s letting in people who are going to walk into your house, break into your door, and they’ll do anything they want. These people are animals.”

Later in the speech, he again highlighted alleged violence by “illegal aliens” and declared: “I will liberate Wisconsin from this mass migrant invasion of murderers, rapists, hoodlums, drug dealers, thugs, and vicious gang members. I will liberate our nation.”

Trump even used an impromptu moment to dehumanize migrants in ugly terms. He claimed that English was fast disappearing from the schools in Springfield, Ohio, and warned that if Harris is elected president, towns in Wisconsin and all over America “will be transformed into a third-world hellhole.” As he continued, a fly apparently landed on the podium.

“Oh, there’s a fly,” he said, shooing it away, his tone turning sardonic. “I wonder where the fly came from.”

The crowd erupted with laughter.

“See, two years ago I wouldn’t have had a fly up here,” he said, grinning. “You’re changing rapidly.”

He delivered more of the same on Sunday in Pennsylvania: “The massive number of savage criminal aliens that Kamala Harris has allowed to invade our country, this is an invasion.” He further claimed, “Last week a lot of people came in from the Congo, a big prison in the Congo in Africa. Welcome to the United States.”

“Send ’em back!” a person in the crowd yelled angrily.

This was all building to a specter of national demise—an invasion, Trump claimed, that will be larger than half the size of the current US population.

“Wait till you see what’s going to happen,” he said. “Oh, and if I don’t get in, it’s going to be the worst thing that this country has ever suffered…you’ll have 150, 200 million coming, you will have, this country will no longer be recognizable.”

That rhetoric is indistinguishable from the “Great Replacement” ideology that motivated the mass shooter who attacked in El Paso when Trump was in the White House.

“Dehumanizing a population—whether it’s Trump smearing migrants for spreading flies, ‘eating the dogs,’ or ‘poisoning the blood of our country’—increases the likelihood of violence.”

As I have reported previously, dehumanizing a population by provoking feelings of contempt and disgust—whether it’s Trump smearing migrants for spreading flies, “eating the dogs,” or “poisoning the blood of our country”—increases the likelihood that his extremist followers will commit acts of violence. The danger from this type of incitement, documented in behavioral science research, has been rising with Trump’s rhetoric, according to threat assessment and national security experts I’ve spoken with in recent weeks. As one source put it, “We’ve already seen where this goes, and it can easily go there again.”

While America faces profound challenges with immigration, a top issue with voters, Trump’s depictions are as demonstrably false as they are deeply troubling. Immigrants commit crime at lower rates than native-born Americans, extensive research shows. The nation has experienced a sharp decline in violent crime under the Biden-Harris administration, according to FBI data. And recently, migrant encounters at the border dropped to the lowest level in four years.

It is important to recognize that Trump’s demonizing rhetoric is clearly by design. He is well known for improvising as he talks and wandering off on long tangents that turn bizarre and incoherent. But much of the incendiary rhetoric above was written into Trump’s speeches. He read it from a teleprompter.

When I reported in August on this demagoguery from Trump, I contacted three of his senior campaign advisors separately, asking them for comment about experts’ concerns that Trump’s rhetoric could provoke further violence. None of the them responded, nor did they reply to my follow-up requests for this story.

In the aftermath of the bloodshed on Wednesday at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia, state authorities arrested Colin Gray, whose 14-year-old son, Colt Gray, allegedly shot four people to death and injured nine others before surrendering to police. The father is charged with four counts of involuntary manslaughter, eight counts of cruelty to children—and, most significantly, two counts of second-degree murder.

The murder charges are unprecedented, the most severe ever filed against the parent of a school shooter. Late Thursday, the director of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation said at a news conference that the charges against Colin Gray are “directly connected with the actions of his son” and that the father “knowingly allowed him to possess the weapon.”

Authorities have not provided further details about evidence they may have, but according to news reports, Colin Gray owned the type of AR-15 that his son allegedly used in the attack. And Colt Gray had been “begging for months” for mental health help but had received none, according to an aunt of his who spoke to the Washington Post. (Colt Gray has been charged with four counts of murder and will be tried as an adult, authorities said.)

For more than a decade, I’ve studied and reported on the American epidemic of mass shootings. Over the past several years, and particularly since early 2024, a dramatic shift has taken shape: a reckoning for the parents of school shooters. Today, with more than 400 million guns and a lack of political will to regulate them more effectively nationwide, it may be that America has begun to find another route—a legal end-run of sorts—to bring accountability for these events of catastrophic gun violence.

The arrest of the school shooter’s father in Georgia comes just seven months after James and Jennifer Crumbley, the parents of a 15-year-old school shooter in Michigan, were convicted of involuntary manslaughter—also a first. What is publicly alleged so far about the role of Colin Gray appears to echo the case of the Crumbleys, who were found to have ignored their son’s mental health crisis and supplied him with the gun he used to commit his attack at Oxford High School, where four died and seven were injured.

The prevailing theme has long been that no one can see the violence coming, the parents included. But that theme no longer holds.

It is a near certainty that in the days and weeks ahead, more details will emerge about warning signs given off by the school shooter in Georgia, one of 20 states now requiring plans for violence prevention in public schools. School shootings are almost always preceded by such warning signs. Significant questions also loom about what may have been done regarding concerns about Colt Gray by law enforcement or the school district, after anonymous tips about threats posted online put him on the radar of the FBI and local authorities in 2023.

Another parental role—starkly different—came into public view this spring, when we published my two-year investigation, “Lessons From a Mass Shooter’s Mother,” in Mother Jones and aired a companion audio investigation on our radio show Reveal. These chronicle the experience of Chin Rodger, whose son Elliot Rodger committed mass murder in the California college town of Isla Vista in 2014. Chin Rodger hadn’t been able to recognize her deeply troubled son’s suicidal and homicidal warning behaviors, but she had gone to great lengths to get him help and care before his attack. Years later she began working with violence prevention experts at the FBI and beyond, sharing myriad details about her son’s life with them—and eventually with the public—in hopes of raising awareness about warning signs and helping avert future violence.

As I wrote in the story: “The public rarely hears from parents of mass shooters apart from brief statements of sorrow in the aftermath. The prevailing theme has long been that no one can see the violence coming, the parents included. But that theme no longer holds, especially in light of a recent tragedy that could remake the legal landscape.”

There I was referring to the new criminal precedent established with the Crumbleys—one with the potential to expand, it now appears, with the case in Georgia. The recurring mass murder of school kids and their teachers drives intense public calls for finding culpability among parents (and others), which may well be warranted in some cases. But this nascent trend of criminalizing parents is not without possible pitfalls, including, legal experts have said, for mothers and fathers of minority children exposed disproportionately to gun violence.

Another notable development in the past several years has been a trend of civil liability for gun manufacturers who market their AR-15s and other firearms aggressively to America’s youth. In early 2022, Remington, the company that made the AR-15 used in the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre, agreed to a landmark $73 million civil settlement with victims’ families. In late 2022, the family of a 10-year-old victim in Uvalde, Texas, filed suit against Daniel Defense, the maker of the AR-15 used in the massacre at Robb Elementary School, accusing the company of using militaristic marketing appeals to target “young male consumers.”

The devastation in Georgia this week is far from the first to involve a shockingly young perpetrator. The shooter at Oxford High School in 2021 was only one year older, just 15 at the time. Other cases going back in time, documented in our mass shootings database and in my book on prevention, Trigger Points, have involved shooters as young as 13 and 11 years old.

In January 2023, a 6-year-old child brought a pistol to school in Virginia and shot his first grade teacher—a case in which the mother was later imprisoned for gun-related federal crimes. (The child used the mother’s unsecured firearm; her prosecution involved drug use and lying related to the gun purchase.)

What happened in Georgia this week serves as a particularly stark reminder: In America, a teenager can easily get his hands on a military-grade rifle and use it to gun down his classmates and teachers. Why we have this problem—and tens of millions of AR-15s in civilian hands—is complicated and arises from a recent history that many Americans know relatively little about.

Another reminder about this problem worth repeating is that, despite popular opinion, it is not an unsolvable one. Now, deterrence for gun-owning parents may be a growing part of a broader solution.

Ever since the July 13 assassination attempt against Donald Trump, the former president and his allies have promoted unfounded conspiracy theories and blamed Democrats directly for the violence. The effort appears highly coordinated: From JD Vance to Trump’s sons and MAGA Republicans in Congress, many have used the same rhetoric to declare that Trump’s political opponents sought to have him murdered at his campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. No one has furnished any evidence to support that claim. And while Trump himself was relatively quiet in this regard during the initial aftermath, he has since been pouring fuel on the fire, starting with a campaign speech on Aug. 5 in Atlanta, where Vance introduced him by emphasizing that Trump’s opponents had “even tried to kill him.”

Trump took the narrative to the next level in a softball interview with TV host Dr. Phil that aired this week. The first quarter of the hour-long conversation focused on Trump’s brush with death as a divine miracle, which was a major theme of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee just days after the attack. “It has to be God,” Trump said to Dr. Phil about surviving the shooting. He went on to claim that the assassination attempt could’ve ended up like the 2017 massacre on the Las Vegas Strip, where hundreds of people were gunned down.

Later in the interview, Trump returned to the shooting unprompted, focusing blame on President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris.

“I think to a certain extent it’s Biden’s fault and Harris’ fault. And I’m the opponent. Look, they were weaponizing government against me, they brought in the whole DOJ to try and get me. They weren’t too interested in my health and safety,” he claimed without evidence. He further suggested that they played a role in undermining his security: “They were making it very difficult to have proper staffing in terms of Secret Service.”

“I’m not saying they wanted you to get shot,” Dr. Phil said, “but do you think it was OK with them if you did?”

“I don’t know,” Trump replied. “There’s a lot of hatred.” (Biden, Harris, and other Democratic leaders condemned the shooting in the aftermath and Biden phoned Trump to offer prayers and support—a call Trump said was “very nice” in a leaked conversation with RFK Jr.)

Trump then reiterated the same claim he made in his Aug. 5 speech: “They’re saying I’m a threat to democracy,” he told Dr. Phil. “They would say that, that was [a] standard line, just keep saying it, and you know that can get assassins or potential assassins going…Maybe that bullet is because of their rhetoric.”

The deceased 20-year-old gunman was a registered Republican voter, as noted throughout national media coverage—and as I reported in the days and weeks after the attack, there appears to be no solid evidence that he was driven by partisanship or ideology. A sweeping FBI investigation, including analysis of his digital devices and interviews with more than 450 people, has found no clear motive, according to congressional testimony from FBI Director Christopher Wray. FBI officials reiterated those findings on Wednesday in a call with reporters. They suggested that the gunman, who also considered attacking a Biden event, was seeking infamy and selected the Trump rally as a “target of opportunity.” (I reported five days after the attack about the emerging indicators of this behavioral profile—a common one among political assassins, as I documented in my book, Trigger Points.)

The provocative rhetoric from Trump and his allies isn’t just unfounded but also carries a disturbing risk: Threat assessment and law enforcement leaders have told me that the messaging is fueling the danger of political violence headed into the election. Sources also told me that Trump’s political incitement more broadly—increasingly focused on a supposed grand conspiracy to steal the election from him—has made potential violence from MAGA extremists a top concern. As one source put it, “they’re piling on the idea that the opposition is so out to get Trump that they even tried to kill him, and therefore retaliation is justified.” Another described how conspiracy theories about the Trump shooting give extremist groups “a really big plot point” for retaliatory violence.

The “J 13 Forum,” a faux congressional hearing held by Trump allies at the Heritage Foundation, leaned into speculation and innuendo.

The blame narrative from Trump and his allies also expanded this week when Republican Reps. Cory Mills of Florida and Eli Crane of Arizona convened an “independent” hearing they called the “J 13 Forum” at the Heritage Foundation (home of Project 2025). They and several colleagues conducted congressional testimony-style interviews with participants including former Secret Service agent and right-wing media personality Dan Bongino, and former Blackwater CEO and Trump political operative Erik Prince. Many key questions indeed still loom about the catastrophic security failure that occurred in Pennsylvania; ongoing investigations by the FBI, Homeland Security, and a bipartisan congressional task force will last many months, if not years. Nonetheless, the “J 13 Forum” leaned into speculation and innuendo about what could explain the disaster, with Mills suggesting from the outset that a nefarious plot would inevitably be uncovered.

“You will see at this stage, where I think that criminal gross negligence and purposeful intent will be indistinguishable,” he said.

The faux congressional hearing included various unsubstantiated claims about the tactical response to the gunman in Butler and heated rhetoric from Bongino about the alleged role of DEI policy at the Secret Service. At one point, Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida prompted Prince to highlight the risk of a foreign terrorist team carrying out such an assassination attempt on US soil. “I’m very concerned,” Prince responded. “I don’t think they have any idea what’s coming at them.”

Notably, Mills has been involved in the blame narrative from the start—he was among the Trump allies using the same attack lines in the initial aftermath. “What about the rhetoric said by President Biden, when he said it’s time to put Trump in the bullseye?” Mills asked on Fox’s Varney & Co. five days after the shooting. (Biden went on to apologize for that previous word choice, despite the fact that it clearly was taken out of context by Mills and others in the aftermath.) With that setup, Mills landed his allegation: “They tried to silence him. They tried to imprison him. And now they’ve tried to kill him.”

On the morning of August 3, 2019, a 21-year-old man walked into a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, and opened fire with a semiautomatic rifle. He murdered 23 people and injured 22 others. Most who died were Latino, including eight people from Mexico.

The gunman had driven to the border city from 650 miles away. In custody, he told police he’d come to kill Mexicans. Some writings he’d posted online said his attack was “a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas” and that his mission was “defending my country from cultural and ethnic replacement brought on by an invasion.” He cited an extremist ideology known as “The Great Replacement.”

These were not obscure ideas. The gunman wrote that he agreed with a recent mass shooter in New Zealand who had espoused them. He also knew some of these themes were being championed at the time by President Donald Trump. With help from Fox News pundits, Trump was whipping up fear and hatred of an alleged “invasion” coming across America’s southern border—the message was central to Trump’s reelection campaign in 2019, a focus of his ads and speeches warning ominously of a national demise.

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

Today, Trump is running again using the same potent demagoguery he wielded during his presidency and prior campaigns. Five years to the day after the massacre in El Paso, he held a rally in Atlanta with running mate JD Vance, and, over the course of an hour, warned a half dozen times about hordes of murderous foreigners overrunning America.

“Forty or fifty million illegal aliens will invade our country during the next four years if they’re in,” Trump said of his Democratic opponents at the outset. He soon continued: “Many of them that are coming in are from prisons and jails and mental institutions, insane asylums.” He taunted media covering the rally as he referenced the fictional serial killer Hannibal Lecter, a provocation he now uses to depict migrant “insanity” and brutality.

He went on to vow he would “stop the invasion” and expanded on the peril: “These people are so violent and vicious…These are the worst people anywhere in the world coming into our country. They’re coming in at levels that nobody’s ever seen before.”

“We’ve already seen where this goes and it can easily go there again,” one threat assessment source told me.

Audience reaction was relatively subdued as Trump recited these lines from a teleprompter, perhaps because they are such a familiar fixture of his speeches. But deep into this speech, the next escalation played differently. The danger, Trump now further alleged, came from a grand conspiracy against him, one involving migrants. He warned that his political opponents who “hate our country” are “actually trying to get them to sign up and vote.” Then came the climax: “It’s so sinister,” he said, “but they want to sign these people up to vote, and if they do that, this country is destroyed. We’d become a dumping ground for the entire world, and we’re not going to take it anymore.”

A close listener could hear echoes of Jan. 6, 2021, when Trump invoked loss of country and the danger of inaction against an election that he falsely claimed was stolen from him. Now, in his telling, that conspiracy promised to use legions of evil foreigners against him and his supporters.

The crowd cheered, beginning to stir more as Trump recounted a recent murder of a university student at the hands of a Venezuelan man illegally in the country. “Kamala Harris let in the savage monster who murdered Laken Riley,” Trump declared. He railed against “migrant crime” and falsely claimed that “thousands” of Americans were being killed in this way.

He continued: “If Harris wins, a never-ending stream of illegal alien rapists, MS-13 animals, and child predators will flood into your communities. If I win, on day one we will begin the largest deportation operation in American history.”

The crowd roared at this signature line from his speech.

“We have no choice,” Trump said.

Who was listening? Perhaps some disturbed young man there in the crowd, or elsewhere watching Trump live on YouTube—perhaps someone who might feel enraged, like the El Paso mass shooter surely did when he wrote down the lie that Democrats “intend to use open borders, free healthcare for illegals, citizenship and more to enact a political coup by importing and then legalizing millions of new voters.”

Shortly after Trump’s speech in Atlanta, I talked to a longtime threat assessment source with expertise in counterterrorism and far-right extremist groups. His response was blunt when I noted that no major media focused their coverage on Trump’s inflammatory language, almost as if all that rhetoric was just business as usual.

“There’s 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 really disturbs me how politicians in his party won’t stand up and say one word against it now. The country really needs that. We’ve already seen where this goes and it can easily go there again.”

The use of Trump’s rhetoric to justify racist and organized political violence began early in his presidency. Strained denials of that reality crumbled for good with the horrific events at the US Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. This June, I reported again on Trump’s years of incitement against his many perceived enemies, a method known to national security experts as stochastic terrorism. The results, as I’ve reported, grow even worse when a high-profile figure emphasizes themes of contempt and disgust.

Security and law enforcement sources told me that topping the list of concerns now for election-year violence are threats stemming from white supremacist groups and Trump’s MAGA movement. After the assassination attempt against the ex-president in mid-July, sources told me that the promotion of conspiracy theories and false blame on Democrats by Trump allies could provoke retaliatory attacks.

At the Aug. 3 rally in Atlanta, JD Vance doubled down on that very blame, declaring in his speech that Trump’s political opponents “tried to kill him.” Meanwhile, a new intelligence report from the FBI and Homeland Security focused on the upcoming Democratic National Convention highlights similar concerns about retaliatory violence.

I contacted three people with the Trump campaign asking specifically for comment on these warnings about political violence: spokespersons Brian Hughes and Steven Cheung, and Trump senior advisor Alina Habba. None of them responded.

America faces immense challenges with immigration, a top issue for voters. It is precisely that reality Trump seeks to exploit.

Trump shows no signs of stopping the incitement. Last Thursday, in a rambling speech to reporters assembled for a press conference at Mar-a-Lago, he again emphasized that America was under invasion by millions of migrants “from prisons, from jails, from mental institutions, insane asylums.” They are flooding in “from all over the world,” he claimed. “Prisons are being emptied into our country.”

He delivered more of the same at a rally on Friday in Montana: “Fifty million of them… they’re destroying our country, they’re ruining our country… migrants praying on our women and our girls.”

Fear and loathing, dressed up as just another stump speech.

Trump’s incitement focused on migrants is not mutually exclusive with the fact that America faces immense challenges with immigration, a top issue for voters. It is precisely that reality Trump seeks to exploit. In early 2024, Congress was poised to pass a bipartisan border security bill, with President Biden ready to sign it. Trump killed the deal. No one bothered trying to hide why he pressured Republicans to do his bidding: He wanted immigration to remain his political weapon.

“The fact that he would communicate to Republican senators and Congress people that he doesn’t want us to solve the border problem, because he wants to blame Biden for it, is really appalling,” Republican Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah told reporters in January, the deal dead.

Republican Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma, who helped author the legislation, later revealed how “a popular” media commentator had threatened him: “If you try to move a bill that solves the border crisis during this presidential year,” that Trump ally told him, according to Lankford, “I will do whatever I can to destroy you. Because I do not want you to solve this during the presidential election.”

What else might follow when the leader of a major political movement smears a population as a menace to public health and safety and even national survival?

Trump’s relentless fear-mongering against migrants underscores how he has always seen immigration and the border as essential to his political power. There is zero doubt that his current trajectory—begun nearly a decade ago when he announced his first campaign and inveighed against Mexican criminals and “rapists”—will continue to the November election.

Most news media are no longer paying any of this much attention. But that carries risk of the public forgetting about the violence that has already occurred. More broadly, shouldn’t we be asking: What else might follow when the leader of a major political movement smears a population as a menace to public health and safety and even national survival?

According to one of Trump’s own senior national security advisers in the White House, Trump was informed explicitly and repeatedly about how his rhetoric had been used to justify acts of violence. Credible evidence of his awareness—and his demonstrated unwillingness to respond meaningfully against the violence—suggests that, for him, more bloodshed will be welcome.