In 1992, a 24-year-old man in Lockport, New York, wrote a letter to the editor of his small local newspaper. The Gulf War veteran looked at the country’s future and saw little reason for optimism. “What is it going to take to open the eyes of our elected officials?” he wrote. “America is in serious decline!”

The letter’s author expressed outrage at economic and social conditions in the country. “Crime is so out of control,” he wrote. “Criminals have no fear of punishment.” He complained that the middle class “has all but disappeared,” that taxes “are a joke,” and that politicians “are out of control.” He did not believe that electoral politics could cure what ailed America: Politicians routinely broke their campaign promises and proposed solutions that only made things worse.

He also hinted at far darker views that shaped his worldview. “Racism on the rise?” he wrote. “You had better believe it! Is this America’s frustrations venting themselves? Is it a valid frustration? Who is to blame for the mess? At a point when the world has seen communism falter as an imperfect system to manage people; democracy seems to be headed down the same road. No one is seeing the ‘big’ picture.”

The letter ended with a grim warning. “We have no proverbial tea to dump, should we instead sink a ship full of Japanese imports?” he asked. “Is a civil war imminent? Do we have to shed blood to reform the current system? I hope it doesn’t come to that. But it might.” Three years later, the letter’s author parked a rental truck filled with fertilizer outside the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City and detonated it. The explosion killed 168 people, including 19 children inside a day-care center on the building’s first floor.

Rhetoric like Timothy McVeigh’s is not uncommon on fringes of American political discourse. Now it’s also coming from the White House. “As I learn more and more each day,” President Donald Trump wrote on Twitter on Tuesday night, “I am coming to the conclusion that what is taking place is not an impeachment, it is a COUP, intended to take away the Power of the People, their VOTE, their Freedoms, their Second Amendment, Religion, Military, Border Wall, and their God-given rights as a Citizen of The United States of America!”