Donald Trump is a stochastic terrorist: a history
Threats against FEMA are just the latest consequence of Trump's dangerous rhetoric
Donald Trump is a stochastic terrorist. He uses dehumanizing and vilifying speech that increases the likelihood that his followers will violently and unpredictably attack the people he targets. This shouldn’t be controversial to say—on January 6, the whole nation watched as Trump sicced his supporters on Congress in the hopes of illegally remaining in power. He knew what would happen when he demonized his opponents, Democrat and Republican, before thousands of supporters, telling them to march “to the Capitol building” and “fight like hell.” He “gleefully watched” the scenes unfold on television as the building was surrounded, police officers were injured, and lawmakers fled.
Yet, according to some, it is Democrats who have to “tone down the rhetoric.” Following the assassination attempt at Trump’s Pennsylvania rally, the media was awash with statements blaming Joe Biden, “the radical left,” and, more recently, Kamala Harris, for using alleged inflammatory language that incited the shooter. Never mind that the rhetoric in question is the truth: Trump is a threat to democracy, as January 6 demonstrated. Trump is advancing fascist policies, as Project 2025 promises. And, as the following examples illustrate, Trump is also a stochastic terrorist.
FEMA
Hurricane Helene made landfall in the Big Bend region of Florida as a Category 4 storm on September 26, causing catastrophic flooding as it moved through Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Virginia. More than 250 people were killed, with nearly 100 still missing.
The federal government responded quickly, sending FEMA teams to affected areas to assist in recovery efforts, perform search and rescue missions, and deliver essential supplies like food, water, and fuel. To date, the government has approved nearly $2 billion in aid, including direct payments and expense reimbursements for disaster survivors.
Nevertheless, Trump immediately began spreading lies about the federal response, turning his followers against officials and putting them in danger. He claimed to be getting “reports” that the federal government was “going out of their way to not help people in Republican areas,” then falsely claimed that “Kamala spent all her FEMA money, billions of dollars, on housing for illegal migrants.”
Excerpt of Trump’s rally in Michigan, October 3:
The Harris-Biden administration says they don’t have any money. They’ve spent it all on illegal migrants…They stole the FEMA money, just like they stole it from a bank, so they could give it to their illegal immigrants that they want to have vote for them this season. You know they’re trying to get them on the voter rolls. We cannot let that happen. This is the worst response in the history of hurricanes…Vote for Trump and we will take care of the American people first.”
Needless to say, Trump’s claims are completely false. But his supporters believe every word. A little over a week ago, FEMA aid workers were forced to pause their mission and relocate from Rutherford County, North Carolina, after U.S. military personnel warned of finding “trucks of armed militia saying they were out hunting FEMA.”
Rutherford sheriff's officers later arrested William Parsons, 44, for allegedly threatening to harm FEMA workers. He was found parked outside a grocery store functioning as a storm relief site, armed with a handgun and an AR-style rifle. According to Parsons, he believed the lie that FEMA was withholding aid from people in need:
“I viewed it as if our people are sitting here on American soil, and they’re refusing to aid our people,” he said. “So we were going to go up there and forcefully remove that fence.”
Days later, in a remote part of eastern Tennessee, an armed group of people “surrounded” FEMA workers, “yelling and threatening them.” A volunteer with the International Alliance of Community Chaplains, an organization working side-by-side with FEMA at a local command center, recounted how she intervened and diffused the situation.
“They were all armed, open carry not guns drawn, but they had surrounded them and there was a lady there that was yelling and threatening them,” Elder said. She explained that she listened to their grievances about FEMA but explained that her organization was not associated with the federal agency. Elder said she felt the group was frustrated and she was able to hear them out but was firm in that the behavior wasn’t appropriate.
“People just need to be heard, and then some of that does take a skill that doesn’t take a confrontation,” Elder said. “I said, ‘hey I hear you. You can say there’s no volunteers but I’m standing right in front of you honey and I’m here and we’re helping.'”
Elder said once the group realized that FEMA wasn’t taking those donations and that the command center was run by volunteers, they left and surprisingly returned later with supplies to donate.
Just earlier this week, Trump was asked about the threats to FEMA and if his rhetoric was to blame. He refused to condemn the threats, repeating the claims that FEMA is doing a “poor job” and spent all of the hurricane relief money on immigrants.
Springfield, Ohio
Roughly midway between Dayton and Columbus lies Springfield, Ohio, a town of approximately 60,000 people. After decades of population decline, the area recently experienced an influx of immigration that revitalized the job market and filled hard-to-staff positions in produce factories and manufacturing plants.
Many of the immigrants settling in Springfield are from Haiti, an island nation in the Caribbean devastated by an earthquake in 2010, another in 2021, the assassination of its president, and an ongoing gang war that often claims the lives of innocent civilians—all exacerbated by crippling poverty, food insecurity, and a lack of basic resources. Every administration of the past 14 years has approved and extended Temporary Protected Status for Haitian nationals, allowing them to legally live and work in the U.S. until the federal government determines that conditions in Haiti have improved enough to safely return.
At some point during the summer, rightwing agitators and neo-Nazis began posting about Springfield being “flooded” with Haitian immigrants who were hunting and eating local birds, like geese and ducks. These claims were picked up by large social media accounts, like Libs of TikTok, eventually mutating into the completely false narrative that migrants in Springfield were butchering local pets. By September, Trump’s running mate J.D. Vance, a senator from Ohio, came across the stories and tweeted that “people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn’t be in this country.”
Then, Trump went on stage at the presidential debate and parroted the racist lie to a national audience, saying that Haitian migrants are “eating the dogs” and “eating the cats” in Springfield. What followed was weeks of violent threats, shutting down public services in the area and instilling fear in the migrant community. City hall was evacuated. Schools closed. Hospitals locked down. All based on a lie that Trump repeated despite city officials disproving the claim before the debate.
Let’s return to the inception of the “eating the pets” story. A neo-Nazi group active in Ohio called Blood Tribe has taken credit for creating and spreading the rumor with the intent of demonizing Haitian immigrants and “making sure” they “are all repatriated.” It follows a long tradition in America of dehumanization, a particularly powerful tool in maintaining the racial hierarchy of slavery and Jim Crow. And it is being deployed again in 2024 to frame immigrants as threats to public morality and safety, in the pursuit of winning an election.
El Paso and Buffalo
In 2019, a man drove over 600 miles to a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, to carry out a mass shooting targeting Latinos. He killed 23 people and injured 22 others. Three years later, a different shooter drove 200 miles to a grocery store in Buffalo, New York, to target Black people. He killed 10 people and injured three others. Both shooters left behind manifestos referencing the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory.
The Great Replacement theory is the idea that political elites—usually left-leaning—are purposefully seeking to increase the number of racial minorities in the country in order to displace the white—usually Christian, conservative—population. The increased immigration, the theory goes, combined with higher birth rates of non-white populations, will enable non-white people to take control of political and economic institutions and eventually eliminate America’s white population in what some call “white genocide.”
This idea used to be confined to the darkest fringes of the far-right, but the rise of Trump has brought the Great Replacement to the GOP mainstream. Compare the following statements:
El Paso shooter manifesto: “This attack is a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas…They are the instigators, not me. I am simply defending my country from cultural and ethnic replacement brought on by an invasion.”
Buffalo shooter manifesto: “Mass immigration and the higher fertility rates of the immigrants themselves are causing this increase in population. We are experiencing an invasion on a level never seen before in history. Millions of people pouring across our borders, legally.”
Donald Trump in 2018: “The US is ill-prepared for this invasion and will not stand for it. They are causing crime and big problems in Mexico. Go home!”
Donald Trump in 2019: “Humanitarian Crisis at our Southern Border. I just got back and it is a far worse situation than almost anyone would understand, an invasion! I have been there numerous times - The Democrats, Cryin’ Chuck and Nancy don’t know how bad and dangerous it is for our ENTIRE COUNTRY…”
Even after racist mass shooters used the same language, Trump not only continued to fear-monger about an “invasion”—he shifted to a more explicit endorsement of the Great Replacement. “A lot of these illegal immigrants coming in, they're trying to get them to vote,” Trump said at the presidential debate this summer, referring to the Biden administration. “[The immigrants] can't even speak English. They don't even know what country they're in practically. And these people are trying to get them to vote. And that's why they're allowing them to come into our country.”
Government officials
The only theme that might be more common in Trump’s repertoire than stoking fear and hate of immigrants is airing his own feelings of victimization. Perceived enemies are everywhere. They threaten him, his followers, and the entire “traditional” American way of life. And they must be punished, whether with prosecutions, jail time, or violence.
More often than not, these “enemies” are people who have the gall to criticize Trump: Democrats, the media, protestors, even judges. We heard him suggest that “second amendment people” assassinate Hillary Clinton eight years ago. We suffered through countless tweets accusing Democratic leaders of treason and calling for their immediate arrest during his presidency. We listened as Trump threatened to deploy the military to suppress racial justice protests in 2020. And, most recently, we read his promise to jail election officials if he wins in November.
Language like this has consequences. Nearly every person Trump targets has subsequently been threatened or attacked by his followers. For example, in 2018 a diehard Trump supporter named Cesar Sayoc mailed pipe bombs to Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Eric Holder, Maxine Waters, Cory Booker, and CNN, among others. Trump brought up all of them in a negative light, either in speeches, in interviews, or on social media, before Sayoc’s terror campaign.
During his trial, Sayoc’s lawyers blamed Trump and the rightwing mediasphere for their client’s actions, saying that in the “darkness” of mental illness, “Mr. Sayoc found light in Donald J. Trump.”
The defense filing draws a thread through Sayoc's "religious" viewing of Fox News programs like "Fox and Friends" and "Hannity," to his following of Trump supporters on social media and his connection to hundreds of right-wing Facebook groups, many of which "promoted various conspiracy theories, and more generally, the idea that Trump’s critics were dangerous, unpatriotic, and evil."
Sayoc was an avid follower of Trump's Twitter account and his federal public defenders point to Trump throughout the filing. "In his statements, Trump specifically blamed many of the individuals whom Mr. Sayoc ultimately targeted with his packages," they write.
Sayoc was not the only mentally ill person inspired to violent action by Trump’s rhetoric. Two years ago, David DePape beat Paul Pelosi, the husband of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D), with a hammer during a home invasion. DePape’s lawyers told the court that he believed that Nancy Pelosi was part of a plot to “steal votes from Donald Trump” and wanted to take her hostage. Trump spent years demonizing Nancy Pelosi and, in the aftermath of the hammer assault, mocked the couple for being victims of an assailant he inspired.
Then there was the time that Trump posted what he said was Barack Obama’s address on Truth Social; later that day, an armed man was arrested near the property, live-streaming himself looking for “entrance points” and a “good angle on a shot.” Or the time Trump repeatedly attacked Judge Tanya Chutkan, who is overseeing the January 6-related case against him. A woman was later charged with threatening to kill Chutkan and “anyone who went after former President Trump.” Or when Trump posted online attacks against New York District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who was investigating him for fraud, and urged his followers to “protest” his impending arrest. Bragg’s office received hundreds of threats in the following days, including a letter containing white powder with the message “ALVIN: I AM GOING TO KILL YOU!!!!!!!!!”
Notice a pattern?