Trump must be held liable as a stochastic terrorist
The former president’s dog whistles have long incited and enabled domestic terror.
By MATEO JIMÉNEZ
Like many of us, I am very worried about Tuesday’s election. Whether Kamala Harris or Donald Trump wins, our country will be headed in drastically different directions. With the never-ending news cycle that exists today, I often find myself confused about the reality of the country. While I have my own fears about another Trump presidency, I am equally as worried about a Harris victory — not necessarily about the actions she may take as president but more about the inevitable backlash from Trump and his supporters.
While Trump has never been one to hold back his words, I have been especially disturbed by his rhetoric since he lost the 2020 election. On Jan. 6, 2021, something that seemed impossible happened: Trump’s supporters stormed the Capitol building and delayed the certification of the election.
In the lead-up to this, Trump held a speech at the Ellipse in Washington, D.C. where he told his worried supporters, “[w]e fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”
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As his defense in court, Trump’s lawyers argued that he did not incite the Jan. 6 attacks on the Capitol because a subsequent part of his speech told supporters to march “peacefully and patriotically” to the building.
Essentially, Trump benefits from plausible deniability. The problem is that Trump started to plant seeds of doubt about the election long before the certification on Jan. 6, 2021, and even long before the election on Nov. 3, 2020.
To me, it was blatantly obvious that Trump incited his supporters to storm the Capitol, but he could very easily get away with it because his exact words did not say so.
Since then, I have wondered what to call this phenomenon as I watch Trump and his new vice presidential nominee, JD Vance, perpetuate this same doubt in other issues. Most recently, Vance has perpetrated a false claim that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio were stealing the residents’ pets and eating them. This was later parroted by Trump on the debate stage, even though Springfield officials repeatedly debunked this claim before Trump even took the stage.
(Chloe Xia / Daily Trojan
What is the direct result of this fear? Terror. As a result of the claims, more than 30 bomb threats were made to schools, government buildings and the homes of Springfield officials. It is beyond disturbing that a former president who is seeking reelection is responsible for this.
Kurt Braddock, an assistant professor of public communication at American University specializing in violence and terror, calls this phenomenon stochastic terrorism. Stochastic, in simple terms, means unpredictable: something is statistically possible and likely to happen, but it cannot be predicted with certainty.
Braddock explains in an interview with Vox that terrorism is a “very low base rate phenomenon,” and the likelihood of someone participating in it is a fraction of a fraction of a percent. However, he warns that “when you’re reaching millions and millions of people [the way Trump does], you start to approach complete likelihood that at least one person will interpret what that person said as a call to violence.”
Amid the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, Trump tweeted “when the looting starts, the shooting starts,” and three months later, Kyle Rittenhouse — a 17-year-old Trump supporter — shot three Black Lives Matter protesters, resulting in two deaths.
I am, unfortunately, bracing for more acts of stochastic terror like this. As of last week, Trump wrote on his Truth Social account, “Pennsylvania is cheating, and getting caught, at large scale levels rarely seen before. REPORT CHEATING TO AUTHORITIES. Law Enforcement must act, NOW!” For clarification, officials have yet to find any legitimate signs of election fraud in Pennsylvania or anywhere else, let alone on a mass scale.
The direct result of the fear Trump has planted in his supporters is stochastic terror. In fact, the FBI has noted in anticipation of Tuesday’s election that “[t]hreats to election workers — including letters containing white powder, online harassment and threats … have recently increased.”
It is terrifying enough that a convicted felon is capable of running for president; it is equally as terrifying that his words have bred the political climate we exist in. Regardless of the outcome of Tuesday’s election, we can only hope that the will of American votes will be heard, not threatened. No one person should yield the power Trump wishes to, and election officials and Congress must do their part to ensure an election without interference.
