With the election less than two months away, at rallies, in interviews, and on social media Trump continues to reiterate old complaints: the 2020 election was stolen from him; the deep state is out to get him—and, he has implied, he will respond by jailing those deep state opponents; disloyal civil servants stabbed him in the back—and, he has intimated, he will repay them by firing thousands of non-partisan bureaucrats; undocumented immigrants are stealing jobs, illegally voting, slaughtering innocent Americans. And so on. During the September 10 debate with Harris, he leaned into the debunked notion that immigrants in Ohio were stealing pets to eat. He refuses to commit to accepting the election result if he loses (though he recently announced that he will not be running in 2028 if he does). He reposts on social media other users’ comments about televised military tribunals for his enemies.

Time and again, Trump has ramped up the language of violence and intimidation. And in recent months, some of that anger and violence has boomeranged back at Trump—witness the most recent assassination attempt on September 15, 2024. Each day that Trump inflames the national discourse, so, as was the case with George Wallace’s hateful campaigns more than a half century ago, violence becomes more normalized within the political process.

Having written about Trump and the cult-like MAGA movement for the past nine years, I wish I could say that the fever has broken and that the combination of extremist and irrationalist rhetoric the GOP presidential candidate relentlessly pumps out into the ether no longer holds sway with enough people to propel him back into the White House. But, according to a rash of recent polls that show Trump’s popularity remains stable and that he is still competitive in the presidential election (for the more than 45% of the voting public that tell pollsters they plan to vote for Trump........

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