Episode Details

A timeline of Trump Stochastic Violence and laws broken at the bottom ↓↓

There is a reason political violence in America keeps happening and nobody in power ever takes the blame.

It is not an accident. It is not random. It is not mental illness. It is a system. And it has a name.

In 2021, FBI behavioral analyst Molly Amman and forensic psychologist J. Reid Meloy published a formal analysis in the peer-reviewed journal Perspectives on Terrorism. Their paper studied how public figures use mass communication to produce acts of violence without ever giving a direct order. They analyzed the mechanics of it, the psychology underneath it, and the specific real-world events where it played out, including the January 6th insurrection at the United States Capitol.

They called it stochastic terrorism.

The concept is pretty straightforward.

A public figure with a large platform repeatedly demonizes a specific person or group. They use language that frames the target as a threat to everything the audience holds sacred.

They call them invaders, traitors, vermin, enemies of the people.

They do this over and over, day after day, to an audience of millions. And eventually, someone in that audience acts. The speaker never has to give the order. They just have to keep talking long enough for the math to work.

The word stochastic comes from probability theory.

It means random in its individual occurrence but statistically predictable across a large enough sample.

You cannot predict which person will act.

But you can predict with near certainty that someone will.

The speaker knows this. That is the point.

They get the violence they want while keeping their hands clean enough to deny responsibility.

The Rallies

Trump normalized calling for Violence.

And what had been a pattern became a machine.

In 2015, Trump launched his presidential campaign by calling Mexican immigrants rapists and criminals. Within months, two men in Boston beat a homeless Mexican-American man with a metal pipe and urinated on him. When police asked why, one of them said “Trump was right. All of these illegals need to be deported.” Trump’s response was to call his supporters “passionate.”

By early 2016, his rallies had become recurring scenes of violence. At an Iowa rally in February, Trump told the crowd that if they saw someone about to throw a tomato, they should “knock the crap out of them.” He promised to pay their legal fees. At a Las Vegas rally he said he wanted to punch a protester in the face. In St. Louis he talked about the old days when protesters would be “carried out on a stretcher.” At a rally in Michigan he told supporters “I’ll beat the crap out of you.” Supporters punched, shoved, and attacked protesters at event after event and it was all caught on camera. In Fayetteville, North Carolina, a supporter sucker-punched a protester being escorted out by police. Trump said he did not condone violence. Then he told his staff to look into paying the man’s legal bills.

In August 2016, Trump suggested that “Second Amendment people” could stop Hillary Clinton from appointing judges. Former Congresswoman Gabby Giffords, who survived being shot in the head at a political event, responded: “Unstable people with powerful guns and an unhinged hatred for Hillary are listening to you.”

The Language Escalates

The rhetoric never slowed down. It only got worse.

In 2017, after a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville turned deadly, Trump said there were “very fine people on both sides.” That same year he told a crowd of police officers not to be “too nice” when arresting people.

In 2019, he laughed when a rally attendee shouted about shooting asylum seekers at the border. That same year, a man drove