While Donald Trump was denying any culpability for inspiring the mass shooter in El Paso, Texas, attorneys for another right-wing terrorist, Cesar Sayoc, were arguing the exact opposite. “In this darkness, Mr. Sayoc found light in Donald J. Trump,” attorneys for Sayoc wrote in a court filing for the defendant, who was sentenced Monday after pleading guilty to sending pipe bombs to prominent critics of the president. “He became obsessed with ‘attacks’ from those he perceived as Trump’s enemies” and “decided to act out—to send a message, to try to intimidate and scare Trump’s perceived enemies.” A Trump “superfan,” Sayoc “began to consider Democrats as not just dangerous in theory, but imminently and seriously dangerous to his personal safety.”
The Trump Defense, such as it was, did not convince Judge Jed S. Rakoff. In explaining his decision to give Sayoc 20 years behind bars, as opposed to the lifetime sentence recommended by prosecutors, Rakoff said Sayoc’s support for Trump was “something of a sideshow.” Design flaws in Sayoc’s pipe bombs convinced him that Sayoc had intended to scare, not kill his targets. But the Sayoc case is part of a broader pattern of attorneys invoking President Trump’s influence and rhetoric in defense of their clients in criminal cases.
There have been at least a half-dozen such cases in the media over the last three years. In another high-profile case last November, an attorney representing Patrick Eugene Stein, one of three men convicted of plotting to bomb Somali refugees, argued that his client should receive a more lenient sentence because he was inspired by then-candidate Trump. “The court cannot ignore the circumstances of one of the most rhetorically mold-breaking, violent, awful, hateful, and contentious presidential elections in modern history,” attorneys Jim Pratt and Michael Shultz wrote. Similar defenses have been used in other cases that haven’t garnered the same level of media attention, as well: an attorney for a Los Angeles man who posted anti-Muslim threats on a mosque’s Facebook page argued that his client used “similar language and expressing similar views” to “campaign statements from then-candidate Donald Trump”; when a Florida man similarly made a threatening call to a mosque, his attorney noted the “very distinctly political climate” and cited the Trump travel ban; when a Penn State University student threatened to “put a bullet” in an Indian man on campus, his attorney argued he was motivated by “a love of country” and cited Trump “running for president of the United States saying that, ‘We’ve got to check people out more closely.’”
The Trump Defense has only become more salient since the president took office. Last year, a man accused of groping a woman on a flight told FBI agents, “the president of the United States says it’s okay to grab women by their private parts.” Earlier this week, when a man who suffers from a traumatic brain injury assaulted a child for not removing his hat during the national anthem, his attorney argued, “His commander in chief is telling people that if they kneel, they should be fired, or if they burn a flag, they should be punished,” so he didn’t recognize the assault as a crime.
The El Paso shooting has amplified a long-festering national conversation about the real-world impact of the president’s rhetoric. The suspect in the massacre, a 21-year-old white man, is believed to have authored a manifesto posted online shortly before the shooting that claimed he was trying to prevent a “Hispanic invasion of Texas”—rhetoric that is virtually indistinguishable from what Trump has said on Twitter and during campaign rallies.
Democrats have put the blame for the shooting, in part, at the president’s feet. “There’s no doubt that the president’s words feed a machinery of hatred in this country, which is inspiring people to take up arms against folks that look different from them,” Connecticut senator Chris Murphy told me. “Hate crimes had been going up for a long time, not just since Donald Trump became president, but this machinery of hate which became formalized in many ways during the Obama administration is real. And Trump has been that machinery’s spokesman for the last 10 years.” California congressman Eric Swalwell put it more bluntly. The president, he told me, “is the greatest recruiter that white nationalists have ever had.”
Trump and his allies have dismissed any suggestion that his words contributed to the violence, arguing that mental illness is to blame or pointing to the weekend’s other shooting in Dayton, Ohio, in which the shooter expressed support for Democrats. (Notably, authorities have not identified the Dayton shooter’s politics as a motivation in the attack, in contrast to El Paso.) But “individuals don’t just wake up one day and decide that they are going to commit an act of terrorism,” said J. Wells Dixon, an attorney who works on international terrorism cases. And as one of the most powerful people in the world, Trump’s words can carry substantial weight. “If you are someone who has an ax to grind or feels aggrieved or persecuted in your whiteness, for example, hearing the president say these things validates your feelings and it provides, in your own warped mind, an excuse to go out and act on your grievances.”
And the more Trump talks, the more the risk of radicalization grows. “Continued rhetoric along these lines, without it being addressed directly and refuted, runs the risk of encouraging more people of marginal psychological stability who have bought into an ideology of hate and racism and misogyny, and moving them along a pathway to violence,” Ronald Schouten, an associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, told me. “To the extent that people are already radicalized to extreme beliefs, one of my concerns is that reinforcement of those beliefs by prominent figures may move them to the next level—radicalization to violence—by offering justification for their violent fantasies and impulses.”
Take for example when Trump entertained the notion of gunning down immigrants at a May campaign rally in Florida. “How do you stop these people?” he mused, to which an audience member shouted, “Shoot them!” Trump and his audience laughed it off. “That’s only in the panhandle you can get away with that stuff,” Trump said. “Only in the panhandle.” A supporter of sound mind might shrug off Trump’s remarks as a joke. But, Schouten explained, “For these particular individuals at risk—and it is only a very small percentage of people—that is encouragement. That is a license. That is an endorsement of not only their feelings but their fantasized actions going forward. And for sure, the higher up that endorsement is coming from, the more substantive the impact.” And when that perceived encouragement is coming from the president of the United States, “Well, it is hard to unring that bell,” he added.
While the Department of Homeland Security has shied away from making a connection between presidential politics and the rise of right-wing terrorism, defense attorneys have to look at the entire picture. “When you are representing someone, you reach for every possible defense you can find,” explained Nancy Hollander, a criminal defense lawyer. “There is always a story,” said Dixon, who specializes in challenging unlawful detentions at Guantánamo. “And it is the defense lawyer’s job to learn that story and to communicate that to the decision makers—whether that is the FBI, the jury, whomever.”
A common thread among the mass shootings in El Paso, Christchurch, New Zealand, and Poway, California, is that the alleged killers bought into a racist conspiracy theory dubbed “the Great Replacement,” which falsely claims that white people are being “replaced” by immigrants or other ethnic groups. It is also a story that has been told, in a more diluted form, by Donald Trump and Republican lawmakers including Iowa congressman Steve King and Texas senator John Cornyn. “You could literally pull out excerpts from—I hate calling them manifestos—but the San Diego, the Christchurch, and now the El Paso manifestos, you can just crib from them the tropes and the narrative they are attempting to espouse and compare them, side by side, with comments from the president, in regards to immigrants to congresswomen of color to muslims to whomever,” said Nate Snyder, a former senior DHS counterterrorism official. “And you literally see, coming from him, that our southern border or other areas are under attack and are being invaded by others.”
The solution, Dixon argued, “is first and foremost for the president of the United States to stop spewing hatred and racism. That is an easy starting point to solve what is a very complex problem.” But the president has made no indication that he intends to address such concerns. On the contrary, Trump this week lumped white supremacism with “other kinds of supremacy” that are equally threatening, echoing his infamous remark about racist violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, that there were “very fine people on both sides.”
Of course, the dark truth of the Trump era is that this president has brought to the surface dark currents in the United States that used to be somewhat hidden. “It’s more than just the president speaks his words and somebody goes off and commits a crime. I think it is more endemic than that. These people have been out there; they have always been there,” Hollander told me. The real problem is that Trump “is giving them voice, he is telling them it’s okay.”
