When Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, was asked on Friday about the shooting in Kansas and whether Trump’s rhetoric could have contributed to that or other violence, he said: “Obviously, any loss of life is tragic, but I’m not going to get into, like, to suggest that there’s any correlation I think is a bit absurd.”

But the correlation is not absurd. Untangling the motives of any individual who commits an act of violence is hard; but in aggregate, crimes form patterns, and become predictable. I cannot claim to know the president’s intentions, but I do know that he is saying and doing things that will reliably lead to people dying. Unfortunately, I am in a position to explain why. I wish I did not have to.

In mid-September 2001, a Dallas man named Mark Stroman was reeling from the attacks on his country. He was nursing many of the things that would later show up in Purinton: a dangerous relationship with intoxicants, family pain, drift in his work life, and grandiose visions about doing for his country what his country was not man enough to do for itself. Stroman went on to shoot three South Asian immigrants working at three different Dallas mini-marts, two of whom died. I ended up reporting on the case and writing a book about Stroman and his surviving victim, a Bangladeshi immigrant who later forgave him and fought to save him from execution in the name of Islam and its teachings about mercy.

I learned many things about Stroman from my reporting—reviewing thousands of pages of court files, interviewing his friends and associates, meeting his daughters and ex-wife, reading his words in letters and blog posts from Death Row. Among my discoveries was that a self-proclaimed “American terrorist” like Stroman could not, in any honest sense, be said to have acted alone. An act such as his could only be understood as dependent on concentric circles of enablement, including from people who would find his writings and actions abhorrent. Stroman depended on ideas and language he borrowed, and often literally plagiarized, from his social betters in the media and politics: ideas and language that gave his raw, shapeless emotions a sense of purpose and a narrative.

Stroman was known to have obsessively consumed television news after 9/11, watching replay-after-slo-mo-replay of the planes hitting the towers. The news would soon spit out a new term, “enemy combatants,” to label people being rounded up in a new Global War on Terror. This new category justified torture and other inhumane treatment that would otherwise be illegal under the Geneva Conventions. The government’s phrase seemed to inspire Stroman’s self-justifying moniker for himself: he was an “allied combatant”—a patriotic, white-hat version of the man who fights for his people, but from the outside. If they can do it, why not I?