Mother Jones illustration; Tasos Katopodis/Getty

It was no surprise. Instead, name it October Reveals.

In the final days of the 2024 election, Donald Trump’s ugly campaign rhetoric gained major national attention when a speaker made a racist joke about Puerto Rico at the former president’s Oct. 27 rally at Madison Square Garden. The event was an inevitable climax for the Trump campaign, a six-hour pageant of division and bigotry that featured several speakers who launched racist and misogynist attacks on Kamala Harris. It ended with Trump at the podium offering the same demagoguery he has used at dozens of rallies this year: painting an exaggerated savage the image of national decay, promoting baseless conspiracy theoriesand causing fear and anger about an alleged “invasion” of America by murderous migrants.

Such themes have been at the dark center of Trump’s politics since he entered the presidential race nearly a decade ago. As he has taken these tactics to new extremes in recent months, law enforcement and national security sources we spoke with have warned about a increasing danger of far-right political violence inspired by Trump’s messages.

This is not theoretical. It builds on a long history of violence associated with Trump’s rhetoric, which by 2021 led a bipartisan group of top national security experts to take the extraordinary step of effectively labeling Trump a terrorist leader — de facto. the head of a violent extremist movement within the United States.

Given that another central tactic of Trumpism is to try to cover up the truth and shove anything harmful down the memory hole, it’s time to revisit some of the major violence that coincides with Trump’s incitement. I’ve been documenting these grim events for more than six years.

As we reported in an investigation that began in the summer of 2018, attacks by white supremacists have become more deadly during Trump’s tenure in the White House. The violence unfolded amid a wave of far-right plots and threats, according to law enforcement sources I spoke to at the time. That included a wave of threats specifically targeting journalistswhom Trump and his allies have repeatedly vilified as “the enemy of the American people.” Two devastating mass shootings — one at a synagogue in Pittsburgh and another at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas — involved perpetrators who focused on an “invasion” of migrants, an underlying theme Trump also emphasized at the time. The echoes of Trump’s rhetoric in the case of El Paso they were particularly harsh, as I detailed again recently:

The gunman drove to the border town from 650 miles away. In custody, he said the police came to kill mexicans. Some writings he had posted online said his attack was “a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas” and that his mission was “to defend my country from cultural and ethnic displacement caused by an invasion.” He cited an extremist ideology known as the “Great Replacement.”

These were not obscure ideas. The gunman wrote that he agreed with a recent mass shooter in New Zealand who hugged him. He also knew that some of these themes were supported at the time by President Donald Trump. With help from Fox News punditsTrump was stoking fear and hatred of an alleged “invasion” coming across America’s southern border — a message central to Trump’s 2019 re-election campaign, a the focus of its advertisements and speeches ominously warning of national extinction.

At the end of the shooter’s screed posted online, he sought to validate his attack with a pseudo-intelligent twist, suggesting that his views preceded Trump in the White House. “I know the media will probably call me a white supremacist anyway and blame Trump’s rhetoric,” he wrote. He then used Trump’s own rhetoric as supporting ammunition: “The media is notorious for fake news.”

In particular, Trump supporter Tucker Carlson, who has long insisted Great replacement themeshe alluded to ideology again in his caustic speech at the Madison Square Garden rally. And Trump’s biggest financial backer, Elon Musk, he kept pointing it out down campaign homestretch.

Most infamously, of course, Trump’s incitement caused the brutal insurrection at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. The former president and his allies have spent the years since trying to erase TRUTH about Trump’s indelible role in motivation that unprecedented attack on American democracy.

Numerous Republican Party leaders have consistently helped deny, justify, and cover up Trump’s incitement to political violence, and some have done so ever since. adopted his tactics. Others, including House Speaker Mike Johnson, have just played badly. As one national security source recently told me, “Silence is its own form of participation.”

Trump continues to weave his virulent threads of demagoguery into a grand conspiracy theory that claims the election will be “stolen” from him. Like me reported in late October, the further escalation of his extreme rhetoric was accompanied by an increase in violent threats reflecting his messages. With the results of the 2024 vote imminent, the question now is where this defining feature of Trumpism might take us.