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In light of the tragic events that transpired at the US Capitol building on January 6, 2021, it is imperative to examine the effect of Donald Trump’s rhetoric on his supporters. The 2016 Trump campaign held more than 300 rallies, with attendance ranging from a few hundred supporters to tens of thousands of devotees. Fiery speeches at these rallies often used contentious language that sometimes closely mirrored narratives of prominent US white nationalists and far-right extremist groups. White nationalists frequently celebrated Trump’s candidacy and election to the presidency, including Richard Spencer, who addressed an audience of far-right supporters in Washington, DC, just days after Trump’s election, saying, “Hail Trump, hail our people, hail victory” (Lombroso and Appelbaum 2016).
Although organizations (e.g., Anti-Defamation League 2018) postulated that the substantial rise in reported hate incidents across the United States since his election in part are the result of Trump-related white-nationalist enthusiasm, empirical analysis evaluating this link has been minimal. Our research examines whether Trump’s rallies resulted in increased reported hate incidents and is more prudent than ever before for both scholars and security-oriented practitioners. Specifically, we contend that Trump’s inflammatory and divisive rhetoric, frequently used at rallies during his presidential campaign, animated white supremacists and stimulated additional hate crime and bias incidents. We used reported hate activities from 2016 and a list of all Trump rallies during this period to analyze the role that these campaign rallies had on the variation of reported bias incidents across the United States. Our research found that counties that hosted a Trump campaign rally were significantly more likely to witness a spike in reported hate incidents in subsequent months.
LITERATURE REVIEW
Presidential rhetoric and its effects have been a critical research area in political science for decades (Cohen 1995; Eshbaugh-Soha and Peake 2011; Wood 2021; Zarefsky 2004). Whereas much of this research focuses on the role that presidential rhetoric has on altering public opinion and affecting agenda setting, a growing body of scholars—particularly following the election of Donald Trump—is interested in the effects that presidential rhetoric may have on broader political processes (Rubin 2020; Sanchez 2018; Schneiker 2020). Stuckey (2020, 386) argued that to study presidential power effectively, scholars must examine not only presidential speeches and tweets but also the uptake...