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

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.

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.