Opinion | It Isn’t Complicated: Trump Encourages Violence

His latest incitement fit a historical pattern, and one with “scary echoes,” as Daniel Ziblatt, who co-wrote the recent book “How Democracies Die,” told me. Trump combined lies about his political opponents — Democrats who need to be investigated (for made-up scandals) — with allusions to a patriotic, violent response by ordinary citizens. Latin American autocrats, including Hugo Chávez in Venezuela , have used this combination. So did European fascists in the 1930s.

The United States, thank goodness, does not have armed citizen militias carrying out regular attacks, as those other countries did. But our situation is still worrisome. “Violent talk can, at minimum, encourage lone-wolf violence,” Steven Levitsky, Ziblatt’s co-author and a Harvard political scientist, said. “It can also slowly normalize political violence, turning discourse and ideas that were once unsayable and even unthinkable into things that are sayable and thinkable.”

These risks are not just hypothetical. In 2017, a House candidate body-slammed a reporter who asked a probing question — behavior with no recent precedent. Trump praised the now-congressman, Greg Gianforte, for the assault. In the Bright Light Watch survey of political scientists late last year, only 49 percent said the United States did not tolerate political violence, a notable decline from earlier levels. Some respondents cited Gianforte.

Statistics on hate crimes are notoriously unreliable, but the evidence strongly suggests that they’re rising. The F.B.I.’s data shows an increase. The Anti-Defamation League reports a 73 percent rise in “extremist-related killings” during the last four years.

Not all attacks come from people who identify with the political right, obviously: The 2017 attempted mass murder of House Republicans on a baseball field is one horrific example. But most politically motivated attacks do indeed come from the right. Last year, 39 of the 50 extremist killings tracked by the A.D.L. were committed by white supremacists, and another eight were committed by killers espousing anti-government views.

Drawing a direct line from the purveyors of hateful rhetoric to any specific hate crime is usually impossible. And it’s usually a mistake to try. The motive for these crimes — be it in New Zealand last week or Pittsburgh last year — is typically a stew of mental illness, personal anger and mixed-up ideology. Trump doesn’t deserve to be blamed for any specific crime. But he does deserve blame for the trend.

It isn’t very complicated: The man with the world’s largest bully pulpit keeps encouraging violence and white nationalism. Lo and behold, white-nationalist violence is on the rise. You have to work pretty hard to persuade yourself that’s just a big coincidence.