Heather Heyer was murdered in 2017 by a white nationalist rally participant in Charlottesville. Since then, mass shootings in Poway, Gilroy, and El Paso and elsewhere have been each linked to white nationalist beliefs.

Among the many, many people demanding that stonewalling Republicans step up with action, rather than words, in the face of the latest several mass shootings are Democratic presidential candidates. But at least two of them are also being blunt in (correctly) identifying Donald Trump's own rhetoric as a driving force in white nationalist terrorism. (The El Paso gunman's manifesto explicitly cited Trump's oft-repeated claims of an "invasion" by migrants as motivation—and mimicked Trump's "fake news" complaints about the free press, among numerous such similarities.)

"We need to call out white nationalism for what it is—domestic terrorism" and we "need to call out the president himself for advancing racism and white supremacy," tweeted Sen. Elizabeth Warren. Trump "is a racist and he stokes racism in this country, and it does not offend our sensibilities, it fundamentally changes the character of this country and it leads to violence," said Beto O’Rourke.

O'Rourke responded bluntly when asked by CNN host Jake Tapper whether Trump was himself a white nationalist. "Yes, I do." Sen. Bernie Sanders demanded Trump "stop that racism and that xenophobia immediately."

Sen. Kamala Harris expressed fury at Senate inaction, agreeing that Republican lawmakers are "complicit" in spreading white nationalism.

The acknowledgement of Trump's own rhetoric is a necessary one. It is not merely that white nationalist terrorism is rising, in the Trump era; white nationalist terrorism is rising because Trump, as campaign tool and tool for governance, relentlessly promotes white nationalist rhetoric and conspiracy theories about non-whites. From his initial political forays premised on birtherism, the conspiracy theory that the first non-white American president was secretly a national of a foreign country, he moved effortlessly to declaring that the Mexican government was "sending" rapists to the United States, moves to block immigrants from majority-Muslim countries outright and, most vigorously, a campaign relentlessly demonizing migrant families as, in words parroted by the El Paso domestic terrorist, an "invasion."