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Is Donald Trump the victim of stochastic terrorism? A strange inversion has taken place

How can Trump, in the eyes of the Left, be the victim of political violence? (Anna Moneymaker/Getty)

How can Trump, in the eyes of the Left, be the victim of political violence? (Anna Moneymaker/Getty)


July 17, 2024   6 mins

In the monochrome universe of American progressive politics, where a phalanx of experts, hacks and NGOs constantly issue dire warnings about existential threats to democracy from the far-Right while determinedly looking the other way when it comes to threats from the far-Left or Islamists, the attempted assassination of Donald Trump was never supposed to happen. For how can Trump, the demonic inciter of terrorism, the dog-whistler of insurrection and deplorable enemy of the state, be the victim of political violence? It doesn’t add up.

For years now, extremism and disinformation experts have been warning about the dangers of Trump’s demagogic and deranged rhetoric, insisting that the former president has helped create “a new era of political violence” in America. Indeed, some have called Trump a “stochastic terrorist”, an obscure term that refers to indirect incitement to terrorism by public figures. “If you’re not familiar with [the] term ‘stochastic terrorism’,” David Corn wrote in Mother Jones back in May, “now is a good time to bone up, for the leading Republican candidate is a stochastic terrorist.” “Stochastic terrorism,” he explained, “is defined by conflict and law enforcement experts as the demonisation of a foe so that he, she, or they might become targets of violence.” According to Corn, “As Donald Trump has faced multiple criminal indictments, he and/or his minions have viciously assailed prosecutors, judges (and their families), and even jurors, and these expressions of vitriol place a target on the back of each of these people.” On this reading, Trump is a kind of satanic puppeteer who radicalises the hearts of damaged men and turns their minds toward murder. To channel Wittgenstein, Trump’s pen or rather his mouth is a mighty AR-15.

By contrast, the demagogic and deranged rhetoric of Trump’s political enemies on the Left – that he’s a fascist who must be stopped to save democracy — has largely escaped the notice of the experts, in large part because they themselves, as partisans of the Democratic Party, have been guilty of trading in it. Stochastic terrorism for thee but not for me.

A strange inversion occurred in the immediate aftermath of the attempted assassination of Trump: progressives stopped talking about stochastic terrorism, while the Right, who were once deeply and rightly suspicious of the concept, wholeheartedly embraced its underpinning theoretical assumptions.

“A strange inversion occurred in the immediate aftermath of the attempted assassination of Trump.”

Trump’s newly appointed running mate J. D. Vance, for example, sought to dispel the notion that Trump’s would-be-assassin was a deranged lone wolf who came out of nowhere. “Today is not just some isolated incident,” he wrote on X/Twitter, continuing: “The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.” Tulsi Gabbard similarly insisted that “the assassination attempt on President Trump is a logical consequence of repeatedly comparing him to Adolf Hitler,” reasoning that “if Trump truly was another Hitler, wouldn’t it be their moral duty to assassinate him?” Meanwhile, over in the Netherlands, Geert Wilders warned that “the hate rhetoric from many Leftish politicians and media, who label Right-wing politicians as racists and Nazis is not without consequences. They are playing with fire.”

This is quite a paradigm shift on the Right, where not so long ago the notion of stochastic terrorism and the related idea that speech could itself be a form of violence was held up to broad and intense ridicule. Consider, for example, the concerted efforts on the part of Democrats to forge a causal link between Tucker Carlson and the Buffalo massacre in May 2022, where an 18-year-old white supremacist called Payton Gendron murdered 10 African Americans in a grocery store. According to his detractors, Carlson had used his show to promote the “great replacement” theory and had thus paved the way for Gendron, who, as his 180-page manifesto makes clear, believed that terrorism against “the replacers” was a necessary defence against “white genocide”. Carlson, in response, sought to distance himself from Gendron, describing him as a “mental patient”; his manifesto, he said, was “a rambling pastiche of slogans and Internet memes” that “is not recognisably Left-wing or Right-wing”. He also rejected the implication that, as he put it, “because a mentally ill teenager murdered strangers, you cannot be allowed to express your political views out loud”. None of this was enough to placate Carlson’s detractors, who called for him to be “deplatformed”, and in very short order the new concept of stochastic terrorism had firmly memed itself into the online discourse of the liberal-Left.

Christopher Rufo has similarly faced and sought to rebut accusations of stochastic terrorism. In an op-ed for Scientific American, published in November 2022, Bryn Nelson insinuated that Rufo’s critical commentary on drag queens participating in book readings was a form of “stochastic terrorism” that works by “weaponising disgust” against sexual minorities and those who support them. Responding to this, Rufo wrote that “nothing in my reporting on Drag Queen Story Hour encourages violence”. “Under the concept of ‘stochastic terrorism’, logic, evidence, and causality are irrelevant,” he noted, concluding: “That concept is built on a lie. It deserves to be exposed and discredited.”

You don’t of course need to be a Republican to baulk at this concept; you just need to have a half-decent bullshit detector that tells you when a perfectly decent proposition — that rhetoric can justify and thereby enable a course of action — is cynically manipulated by partisans for the purposes of ritual condemnation and censorship.

The idea that Carlson or Rufo, who have never called for violence and whose politics and gilded lives are held in contempt within the nihilistic subculture of the violent far-Right, are driving and legitimising that subculture is not only ludicrous on its face. It also serves to minimise the moral agency of far-Right killers and deflect attention away from what may have actually motivated them. Gendron’s chief inspiration, for example, was not Carlson but Brenton Tarrant, another far-Right terrorist who in March 2019 murdered 51 Muslims at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand.

And yet in the wake of Trump’s attempted assassination, Republicans have now seemingly gone full Talia Lavin, arguing that the demonising rhetoric around Trump helped incubate and legitimise the murderous hate of his would-be-assassin. Lavin, a disgraced former New Yorker  fact-checker-turned-journalist-activist, wrote a piece for Rolling Stone on the Buffalo massacre in which she argued that its root causes were located not in the pathologies of a lone individual but in the wider political culture of mainstream Republicans. “There’s no such thing as a lone wolf,” she declared. “There are only those people who, fed a steady diet of violent propaganda and stochastic terror, take annihilatory rhetoric to its logical conclusion.”

In expounding on this point, Lavin’s purpose wasn’t to understand the interior world of Payton Gendron and how he came to act on the ideas that inspired him, but rather to demonise Republicans by flatly asserting that Gendron was one of them and that they were responsible for his murderous actions. You will notice that the same polemical purpose animates conservatives who blame Democrats for enabling Trump’s would-be-assassin. In one particularly telling exchange  on X/Twitter, Rufo all but acknowledged this: “The people who have been pushing this must be held to account. Fired. Blackballed. Ostracised. Stripped of their titles. Pushed into bankruptcy. They should never work in this business again.” This comment was captioned above the cover of a recent edition of The New Republic, showing an image of Trump resembling Adolf Hitler, and a Washington Post article titled, “Yes, it’s okay to compare Trump to Hitler.” Responding to a comment that “There’s no indication yet of the motive of the shooter”, Rufo wrote: “It doesn’t matter. This kind of rhetoric was wrong yesterday. It’s wrong today. And it will be wrong tomorrow. It rationalises this kind of violence. It is extraordinarily irresponsible and now we can see the underlying stakes.”

But it emphatically does matter, and while Rufo is right to point out that inflamed rhetoric can rationalise violence, it isn’t yet clear, much less proven, that the inflamed rhetoric of Democrats served to rationalise the violence of Trump’s would-be-assassin, a 20-year-old from Pennsylvania called Thomas Matthew Crooks. We know how he did it, but we don’t know why he did it and without knowing what was going on inside his mind in the period leading up to his attack, it is irresponsible of Rufo to hurl around accusations that were they levelled against him, as they have been, he would regard as unfair and unwarranted.

The psychology of political violence is a complex and maddeningly opaque business. We still don’t know, for example, why Stephen Paddock carried out a mass shooting — the deadliest in US history — at Las Vegas’s Mandalay Bay in 2017, killing 60 people. “In my career of mayhem evaluation,” wrote Graeme Wood, “I have found that a manifesto, or indeed a coherent motive, is a courtesy many mass killers fail to pay.” According to a recent report in The New York Times, Crooks “does not appear to have left behind any written statement that could easily explain his motivations or provide clues to any external connections or influences”. Perhaps, like Paddock, Crooks’s motives will remain forever unknowable, although it’s still too early to tell.

Despite, or perhaps because of, the opacity that surrounds Crooks, speculation about his actions and motives is rife on social media. But if conservatives want to be taken seriously, they should resist fuelling it and they certainly shouldn’t indulge in a discourse on stochastic terrorism that they know to be unserious and that can be readily marshalled against their own side.


Simon Cottee is a senior lecturer in criminology at the University of Kent.


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El Uro
El Uro
4 months ago

I should note that the leftists and the MSM have succeeded in one thing. They show incredible ingenuity in creating new terms into which they can fit any content. “Stochastic terrorism” is a perfect example. Those who use it are super smart, super educated and commoners should trust them as apostles

J Bryant
J Bryant
4 months ago

“Stochastic terrorism”, really?
“Stochastic” has a well-established definition (it means random; involving a random variable) which has little to do with “stochastic terrorism”. But, as usual, the Left appropriates a fancy word to give their argument more substance than it deserves. We learned the outcome of this strategy during the covid pandemic: trust the science, where the science is whatever people who use fancy words says it is. And we learned the long-term consequences of that pretentious claim to actual scientific knowledge.
Here’s an insight in plain English: the Left have demonized (literally demonized) Trump for eight years, and now someone took the logical step of trying to slay the demon. No fancy words or deep analysis required. The Left inspired hatred of Trump over almost a decade and triggered an assassination attempt. It’s time for them to accept responsibility for their actions.
As for Prof. Cottee, go back to academia. They’ll give you twenty cents for every ten-cent word.

Fafa Fafa
Fafa Fafa
4 months ago
Reply to  J Bryant

You’re just annoyed that you had to repeatedly look up words which you would know had you payed attention in middle school.

Lancashire Lad
Lancashire Lad
4 months ago
Reply to  Fafa Fafa

*paid*

El Uro
El Uro
4 months ago
Reply to  Lancashire Lad

🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂

Christopher Barclay
Christopher Barclay
4 months ago
Reply to  Fafa Fafa

It is the people who use the phrase ‘stochastic terrorism’ who don’t know what the word ‘stochastic’ means. I hoped you enjoyed J Bryant illuminating your ignorant self.

Nathan Sapio
Nathan Sapio
4 months ago
Reply to  Fafa Fafa

You must be thinking of “scholastic”…

Middle school knowledge and all…

Martin M
Martin M
4 months ago
Reply to  J Bryant

The Left has demonised Trump? It seems that Trump’s (now) VP pick called him “America’s toothbrush moustached German man whose name begins with H” not all that long ago. It seems that it wasn’t just those on the Left who demonised Trump.

Tyler Durden
Tyler Durden
4 months ago
Reply to  Martin M

Given his age, Vance seemed to have been just another silly young person back then. But the orchestrators of the terrorism against Trump are far from being Millennial.

Billy Bob
Billy Bob
4 months ago
Reply to  Tyler Durden

So somebody some the right calling Trump a certain German wartime leader is fine, whereas somebody from the left doing the same is basically responsible for some nut job trying to bump him off?

Terry M
Terry M
4 months ago
Reply to  Billy Bob

One Republican called Trump Hateler. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of Donkeys and their MSM sycophants call Trump Hateler every day for 9 years. And you think that makes things even? Partisan fool.

Warren Trees
Warren Trees
4 months ago
Reply to  Terry M

That shows how powerful the media can be when they are in lockstep with each other. Even the average Joes of the world are now realizing they’ve been fed a buffet of bullsh*t for 8 years.

Allison Barrows
Allison Barrows
4 months ago
Reply to  J Bryant

Add to this the fact that the would-be assassin was on the roof for 30 minutes and the Secret Service knew it. Police knew it. Rally-goers saw him crawling around up there and repeatedly pointed him out to law enforcement. The detail around Trump included three useless women a foot shorter than the president. Why, when all of this was known, was Trump allowed to take the stage?
“Stochastic” my *ss.

Samuel Ross
Samuel Ross
4 months ago

True. The odds that a gaping security hole was left wide open, and that a piece of filth randomly decided at the SAME TIME to take advantage of it, beggars all belief.

Samuel Ross
Samuel Ross
4 months ago
Reply to  J Bryant

Well said, J Bryant. Words are like deeds, and have consequences in our world and lives.

Samuel Ross
Samuel Ross
4 months ago

Those who use big words often do so to disguise their ignorance and small minds. I find that the uselessly complex phrase “stochastic terrorist” fits this category.

Basically, using hateful speech can impel others to hateful action. This was true yesterday, is true today, and will be true tomorrow. Full stop.

The Dems and their ilk, men and women of small minds and cold hearts, have been calling Republicans in general and Trump in particular, Hitler, Nazis, and the like.

Small surprise a pimple-faced piece of filth took their words to heart …..

Jim Veenbaas
Jim Veenbaas
4 months ago

I agree with the author that we don’t know what motivated the assassin. To say he was trying to save democracy is idle speculation. However, I don’t think you can compare the rhetoric used by Republicans and Democrats. The most obvious difference is no one in the Republican Party is calling Biden a threat to democracy. On the other hand, this is almost the entirety of the Dem campaign messaging.

Democrat ideas have also become mainstream – because it dominates all the institutions. The regime media, the cultural industry, academia, big tech and NGOs have all supported and amplified this message.

I get what the author is saying, but the magnitude and implications of the messaging is completely different IMO.

Matt Woodsmith
Matt Woodsmith
4 months ago
Reply to  Jim Veenbaas

This was my feeling reading the article, but you’ve put it more coherently that the comment I was about to make!

Ethniciodo Rodenydo
Ethniciodo Rodenydo
4 months ago
Reply to  Jim Veenbaas

It is another case of false equivalence

T Bone
T Bone
4 months ago

This entire thesis is accurate but I don’t know how Republicans can possibly respond to the Repressive Tolerance of Democrats without using their own “enlightened academic” terms to point out that Democrats are projecting.

Democrats call Republicans a “threat to Democracy” implying their deep reverence for an American tradition because they know that a disproportionate number of Republicans cherish the Constitution more than they do.

They call Republicans lawless despite many mainstream Democrats spending years trying to tear apart the American justice system.

They call Republicans traitors despite their disproportionate disdain for the flag and fealty to “other ways of knowing” which totally conflict with traditional American values.

They do not like the traditional American way of life. They’ve made that clear. They’re many things but upholders of tradition they are not. They’ve sought to tear it all down.

Its all Projection. Trump was millimeters away from death. I don’t call for the firing of any Democrat late night host or mainstream journalists but they shouldn’t get a pass on their absurd conspiratorial rhetoric. For these people to call anyone a “Conspiracy Theorist” is so absurd that a simple word like hypocrisy doesn’t do it justice.

Steven Carr
Steven Carr
4 months ago

If you claim that millions of people will die because of Trump’s climate policies, is it surprising that some nutcase might decide to act?

Victor James
Victor James
4 months ago

Yes, leftists were desperate for a lone nutter to assassinate Trump.

But, it didn’t happen. It seems obvious this person was part of an organised assassination attempt.

Also, conservatives respected by who? Leftists? lol the very last things conservatives need to do is pander to the the frothing hate filled lunatics on the left.

Kirk Susong
Kirk Susong
4 months ago
Reply to  Victor James

“It seems obvious this person was part of an organised assassination attempt.”
It seems obvious this person was part of a disorganized assassination attempt. Whether he shared this lack of organization with others is far from obvious.

Tyler Durden
Tyler Durden
4 months ago

Effectively the Democrats have used the federal government and justice system to terrorise Trump over the last 8 years and that seems to have set a precedent for wider society. There has just been another attached reported at the Rep Nat Conf.
Sadly, in Britain, Trump Derangement System is equally as potent and it is socially accepted and widely unchallenged to wish for such attempts to be successful.

Chris Maille
Chris Maille
4 months ago

Anyone who uses the term ‘white supremacist’ in a non-ridiculing way doesn’t deserve my attention. Even if the concept may convey some basic reality based truth, the term has been abused to death by freedom hating authoritarians.

Victor James
Victor James
4 months ago
Reply to  Chris Maille

’White supremacist’ is a racist term of abuse, designed to attack ordinary white people with concerns.

Billy Bob
Billy Bob
4 months ago

So what we’ve learned is that both sides are tremendous hypocrites.
The left have spent the last few years claiming that words are akin to violence while the right have brushed it off as nonsense.
Now somebody has taken a pot shot at Trumpy Boy suddenly the right have decided words are dangerously inciting and the left are trying to downplay the very idea they’ve been championing

Point of Information
Point of Information
4 months ago
Reply to  Billy Bob

Precisely. It continues to astonish the rest of the world how much the United States’ two parties, and their supporters, mirror each other while apparently hating everything about each other. Both claim stolen elections. Both advocate locking the other up. Both claim the other side is a threat to democracy.

And now both subscribe to the nonsense term “stochastic terrorism” which is code for “I don’t think free speech should be allowed for people who say things I don’t agree with”.

Really, other than being a member of a group who hates the other side, what is supposed to be the difference – in actual policies please – between the two?

Brendan O'Leary
Brendan O'Leary
4 months ago
Reply to  Billy Bob

The “words are violence” crowd were mostly student-age and using that in the context of petty criticisms and “micro-aggressions”.
The calls about Trump from senior political figures were more like “somebody has to stop this man or we’re all in danger”

Both are drivel and not good reasons to curtail free speech in my opinion, but they are not equivalent.

Warren Trees
Warren Trees
4 months ago
Reply to  Billy Bob

Well it’s progress to see that you at least acknowledge the plank in your own eye.

Billy Bob
Billy Bob
4 months ago
Reply to  Warren Trees

Just to clarify, which side are you accusing me of blindly supporting, as I’ve been accused of being a rabid follower of both?

Samuel Ross
Samuel Ross
4 months ago
Reply to  Billy Bob

Billy, that comment just made me dumber by the reading of it.

Billy Bob
Billy Bob
4 months ago
Reply to  Samuel Ross

And the intelligence wasn’t particularly high to start with was it!
What parts do you disagree with? Do you not think the anti woke crowd are just as pathetic and snowflakey as their woke counterparts? Do you agree with people losing their job for making tasteless jokes around the attempted assassination?

J B
J B
4 months ago

Did Biden previously mumble the equivalent of “Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?…”

Terry M
Terry M
4 months ago

Sorry, it does NOT matter whether Crooks was inspired directly by the left’s Hitler talk. The extreme demonization of Trump, repeatedly and broadly by Dem politicians, radical activists, and, yes, the mainstream media (I’m looking at you NYTimes, CNN, MSNBC, WaPo, NPR) as someone beyond the pale and not worth drawing breath has created an atmosphere where people like Kathy Griffin can carry around Trump’s severed head (fake) and be applauded for it.
And it is of a piece: Several Republican congressmen were shot at during softball practice. Brett Kavanaugh had armed protestors at his home. Rand Paul was attacked and several ribs broken. Thousands of antifa/BLM protestors burnt buildings, terrorized diners and homeowners, and ambushed and killed police. And Trump has now been shot. And you think that’s not much different, much worse than calling Rosie O’Donnell a fat pig?

Samuel Ross
Samuel Ross
4 months ago
Reply to  Terry M

For Dems, words are violence, if you’re Republican, but violence is nothing, if you’re a Dem.

Dougie Undersub
Dougie Undersub
4 months ago

The author misses the obvious point that Republicans are now shouting “stochastic terrorism” not because they (necessarily) believe in the concept but because the Democrats, having run with it for so many years, cannot now rebut it.
It’s just a tactic.

John Witwer
John Witwer
4 months ago

Hollywood denying that movie violence encites violence. “Stochastic” violence for thee but not for me.

laurence scaduto
laurence scaduto
4 months ago

“…Stochastic terrorism and the related idea that speech could itself be a form of violence…”? That’s not a related idea; it’s a giant leap. And a direct challenge to our right to free speech. How do such silly ideas gain traction in our society?

Alex Lekas
Alex Lekas
4 months ago

The left spent quite a bit of time trying to equate speech with violence when its sacred cows were involved.

Alex Lekas
Alex Lekas
4 months ago

Let’s see: about 8 years of “he’s worse than Hitler.” There are few good ways that this can turn out, though it was comedic to watch all the people who previously accused Trump of all sorts of horrible things suddenly praying for his recovery. The left does not believe its own BS.

Michael Clarke
Michael Clarke
4 months ago

One of the features of the N. IRL Troubles was that one side would accuse the other of saying “X” or doing “Y” to great media fanfare only for the accusing side to be caught out committing the same sin. It was as regular and as predictable as clockwork.

michael harris
michael harris
4 months ago

I read this piece out of curiosity to find out what the word ‘stochastic’ (which I had just about heard of) meant.
I am still none the wiser though it seems that stochastic terrorism is an impressive shorthand for incitement to violence which stops just short – and just short of indictability.

Kirk Susong
Kirk Susong
4 months ago

This seems like “whataboutism” as they used to call it. The scale, volume, breadth, and vitriol of Democrat rhetoric about Trump exists on a completely different scale from anything Republicans have said about Democrats. To compare them as likely to have similar effects on the weak-minded is misleading and incorrect.
PS. It’s “balk” not “baulk.”

Nathan Sapio
Nathan Sapio
4 months ago

In the US, entertainment and the vast majority of news and opinion in the US slang left to far left, and can reasonably be estimated to have a reach of 100M to 250M.

News and opinion that are conservative can be reasonably estimated to have a reach of 10M to 50M.

Left voices explicitly denounce dissenting voices and view them as contemptible, worthy of ignoring laws in order to destroy. They explicitly instill victimhood and deep seated grievance. They remove moral boundaries. They excuse violence. They overstate their fears in order to create cataclysmic worry and paint their opponents as enemies of the worst order- comparing them to hated figures of the past who are commonly used as examples in ethical hypotheticals to support proactive murder in order to prevent future widespread as suffering.

Right voices historically argue for liberty, orientation towards a higher power and under legal order, and for many becoming one because of shared values. In the last 15 years… They just complain about what the left is doing.

So the widespread, pervasive sentiment is one that is toxic, actively radical, and based on dissolving order and twisting people up into knots (for a pack of a better term).

What do you think the consequences to that are?

Mike Adam
Mike Adam
4 months ago

Lone wolf killers are likely driven by existential despair at the lack of meaning in their lives. Shoot kids in a school or in a mall, or a leading politician or celebrity gives their life meaning – albeit negative and often fleeting. They made a mark. A better question for another day would be whether our current society creates excess existential despair.
As for the weaponisation of the acts of the deranged by politicians and media, the main line of criticism should be that they engage in name calling to distract from actual arguments. They are so busy calling each other names that they do not even articulate the issues we face, let alone the choices we need to make.
By all means compare Trump to Hitler, but please tell me exactly what he has done, or said he will do, that supports this assertion. Meanwhile the steps taken by the Democrats to crush democracy in their own party in first choosing Biden (by jerrymandering rules) and then removing him in a coup are that most hated of things: documented facts. No need to invoke name calling.