Show Notes
A timeline of Trump Stochastic Violence and laws broken at the bottom ↓↓ There is a reason political violence in America keeps happening and nobody in power ever takes the blame. It is not an accident. It is not random. It is not mental illness. It is a system. And it has a name. In 2021, FBI behavioral analyst Molly Amman and forensic psychologist J. Reid Meloy published a formal analysis in the peer-reviewed journal Perspectives on Terrorism. Their paper studied how public figures use mass communication to produce acts of violence without ever giving a direct order. They analyzed the mechanics of it, the psychology underneath it, and the specific real-world events where it played out, including the January 6th insurrection at the United States Capitol. They called it stochastic terrorism. The concept is pretty straightforward. A public figure with a large platform repeatedly demonizes a specific person or group. They use language that frames the target as a threat to everything the audience holds sacred. They call them invaders, traitors, vermin, enemies of the people. They do this over and over, day after day, to an audience of millions. And eventually, someone in that audience acts. The speaker never has to give the order. They just have to keep talking long enough for the math to work. The word stochastic comes from probability theory. It means random in its individual occurrence but statistically predictable across a large enough sample. You cannot predict which person will act. But you can predict with near certainty that someone will. The speaker knows this. That is the point. They get the violence they want while keeping their hands clean enough to deny responsibility.
The Rallies Trump normalized calling for Violence. And what had been a pattern became a machine. In 2015, Trump launched his presidential campaign by calling Mexican immigrants rapists and criminals. Within months, two men in Boston beat a homeless Mexican-American man with a metal pipe and urinated on him. When police asked why, one of them said “Trump was right. All of these illegals need to be deported.” Trump’s response was to call his supporters “passionate.” By early 2016, his rallies had become recurring scenes of violence. At an Iowa rally in February, Trump told the crowd that if they saw someone about to throw a tomato, they should “knock the crap out of them.” He promised to pay their legal fees. At a Las Vegas rally he said he wanted to punch a protester in the face. In St. Louis he talked about the old days when protesters would be “carried out on a stretcher.” At a rally in Michigan he told supporters “I’ll beat the crap out of you.” Supporters punched, shoved, and attacked protesters at event after event and it was all caught on camera. In Fayetteville, North Carolina, a supporter sucker-punched a protester being escorted out by police. Trump said he did not condone violence. Then he told his staff to look into paying the man’s legal bills. In August 2016, Trump suggested that “Second Amendment people” could stop Hillary Clinton from appointing judges. Former Congresswoman Gabby Giffords, who survived being shot in the head at a political event, responded: “Unstable people with powerful guns and an unhinged hatred for Hillary are listening to you.”
The Language Escalates The rhetoric never slowed down. It only got worse. In 2017, after a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville turned deadly, Trump said there were “very fine people on both sides.” That same year he told a crowd of police officers not to be “too nice” when arresting people. In 2019, he laughed when a rally attendee shouted about shooting asylum seekers at the border. That same year, a man drove ten hours from the Dallas area to a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, and murdered 22 people. His manifesto used the phrase “Hispanic invasion of Texas.” That language did not come from nowhere. It came directly from Trump’s rallies and tweets. He never met Trump. He never rec
More from The Lucas Bean Show
There is a particular kind of man who shows up to political rallies in body armor he bought online, drives a truck that has never hauled anything, and screams about strength while falling apart the moment someone disagrees with him. He is not hard to spot. He is the loudest person in any room he enters. He is also, according to decades of research, the most frightened. The video that accompanies this piece covers sociologist Robb Willer’s research on masculine overcompensation: the finding that men whose masculinity is threatened respond with exaggerated displays of dominance, aggression, and toughness. The effect is consistent and measurable. It shows up in attitudes toward war, attitudes toward gay people, and even in what kind of car a man wants to buy. But the research goes much deeper than one study, and the implications stretch far beyond a rally.
There’s a familiar ritual that happens every time an authoritarian movement begins to collapse. The supporters disappear. Not physically. Psychologically. They scrub the evidence, rewrite the timeline, and emerge on the other side with a story they’ve rehearsed just enough to almost believe. “I never really supported him.” “I just voted against the Democrats.” “I don’t talk about politics anymore.” This is happening right now across America. The yard signs are coming down. The hats are going into drawers. The Facebook posts are being deleted. And millions of people who spent a decade loudly and publicly cheering for cruelty are quietly trying to exit the building before someone turns the lights on. The companion video to this piece says what needs to be said plainly: they’re not confused. They’re lying. They know what they did. They know what they defended. And they’re trying to erase the evidence before accountability arrives. This Substack examines why that matters, why it won’t work this time, and what history tells us about populations that try to pretend they were never part of the thing they spent years supporting.
Most political analysis starts with policy. Voters chose this candidate because of the economy, immigration, healthcare, taxes. And for most voters in most elections, that’s probably true. But Donald Trump is not most candidates. And the question that keeps surfacing isn’t why people agree with him. It’s why they love him more every time he does something cruel. The mockery. The insults. The attacks on disabled reporters, Gold Star families, and women. Behavior that would end any other political career has somehow become the foundation of his. In 2021, psychologist Matthew Yalch at Palo Alto University published a study in PLOS ONE titled “Dimensions of pathological narcissism and intention to vote for Donald Trump.” And what he found should make everyone uncomfortable, including the people it describes.
In February 2025, researchers at the University of Amsterdam published a study in Social Science & Medicine that should have rewritten every conversation about why people join the far right. They tracked over 40,000 people across nine countries, with data spanning fifteen years. They controlled for income, education, immigration attitudes, and political ideology. They wanted to know what actually predicts whether someone will support the populist radical right. The answer wasn’t immigration. It wasn’t economics. It wasn’t religion. It was loneliness. Lonelier individuals were consistently more likely to support radical right movements, with the association holding across all fifteen years of Dutch data and appearing across multiple European countries. The researchers noted that the effect sizes were comparable to the known health correlates of loneliness, meaning that the connection between loneliness and far-right support was statistically as meaningful as the connection between loneliness and heart disease, high blood pressure, and depression. A 2021 RAND Corporation study of former extremists and their families confirmed this from the other direction. Half of the former extremists surveyed said feelings of marginalization drove them toward radicalization, with most citing isolation and loneliness specifically. Individuals reported that the social benefits of joining extremist organizations, the friendship, the camaraderie, the sense of finally belonging somewhere, were among the most powerful forces keeping them in. These people didn’t join a movement because they were convinced by policy arguments. They joined because someone finally made them feel like they weren’t alone. And that tells us more about what MAGA actually is than any analysis of tariffs or border policy ever could.
A woman stood up at a political rally and asked a sitting congressman to create a federal law that would force her adult daughter to let her see her grandchildren. Not a therapy session. Not a family mediator. Not a phone call to her daughter asking what went wrong. A federal law. That single moment contains more psychology than most textbooks. Because what she revealed, in front of cameras and a cheering crowd, wasn’t a grandmother’s heartbreak. It was a narcissist’s playbook when someone finally tells them no. How a boundary becomes a theft. In 2002, psychologist Roy Baumeister at Case Western Reserve University published a theory that combined two existing psychological frameworks into something new. The first was narcissism, the personality structure built around an inflated self-image that requires constant validation. The second was psychological reactance, a concept developed by Jack Brehm at the University of Kansas in 1966, which describes the motivational state people enter when they perceive their freedom as restricted. Brehm found that when people believe a choice or behavior has been taken from them, they experience an intense drive to restore it, often wanting the restricted option more than they did before it was restricted. Baumeister’s insight was that narcissism supercharges reactance. When an ordinary person encounters a boundary, they may be disappointed, but they can process it. When a narcissist encounters a boundary, they don’t experience disappointment. They experience theft. The boundary isn’t perceived as another person’s valid choice. It’s perceived as something that belongs to them being taken away. And they feel entitled to take it back by whatever means necessary. Baumeister called it narcissistic reactance. This grandmother didn’t process her daughter’s boundary as a painful but legitimate decision by an autonomous adult. She processed it as her property being stolen. Those grandchildren aren’t people her daughter is protecting. In her mind, they are hers. Access to them is her right. And no one, not even their own mother, gets to take what’s hers.