In journalism, you can sometimes feel trapped in one of the smaller faster-spinning cogs of an information machine that never slows. Readers might experience this phenomenon through its palliatives – as, for example, a book by a leader writer or political editor who steps from frenetic years in the inner wheels on to a larger slower-moving part of the contraption and tries to make sense of its cycles. Or through a foreign correspondent who, after a long posting in which he or she has witnessed intensively the daily life of a country or region, offers a spacious survey of the people and place across time, trying to put recent events into history’s weave.

The little agile cogs are necessary to the machine, but unless journalists seek out, and point the rest of us towards, those who labour on the bigger belts with less speed but often richer findings – the academics, the scientists, the public sector planners – we miss much.

In 2016 the authors thought that if their theory was right 'we will see a spike in white supremacist violence'

I had that trapped feeling recently as we all watched El Paso suffer predictable consequences of a president’s appeals to hate and racism, followed soon after by Donald Trump’s canting about eschewing hate and racism. He has used this manoeuvre before – after Charlottesville for instance. He went to El Paso like he went to Pittsburgh, a faux mourner.

After Trump’s White House address – delivered with deft insincerity by reading from a teleprompter in such a way as to disown the words being uttered – the New York Times caused consternation with the headline “Trump Urges Unity vs. Racism”. The paper swiftly revised, explained, regretted.

My aim is not to discomfort the NYT; all media err sometimes. I want to highlight one of the big slow wheels to which attention was presciently drawn a few days before the 2016 presidential election. Noting that Trump had a 33% chance of winning, the US-based blog Lawfare, which consistently manages to tap the rich thinking and experience of experts in varied specialist fields, pointed to the “large literature on the process of radicalisation and countering violent extremism” and applied it to Trumpism.

Quinta Jurecic and Benjamin Wittes argued that Trumpism is “a movement that exists within an electoral system but which has a deeply ambivalent relationship with the democratic norms of that system, a movement which both formally rejects violence yet manages also to tolerate and encourage it”.

Summarising the literature, they wrote: “The radicalising subject goes through a series of steps, with each step drawing him or her closer towards extremist beliefs and sometimes mobilisation towards violence as well.” The individual’s social ties play a part, including, particularly, social media.

Nazis and white supremacists, previously talking only to each other without ways to reach large audiences, embraced Trumpism and were not repudiated. “So all of a sudden, huge numbers of people are potentially subject to the influence of peer groups they didn’t even know they had. More perniciously still, the radicals get to approach this very large new audience through the cleansing lens of an apparently mainstream political candidate and party. That Trump supporter taught [at a rally] to shout “Lügenpresse” [“lying press”] presumably didn’t know that he was screaming a Nazi slur; he was just following Trump’s lead, and the lead of those around him, in jeering at the ‘dishonest media’.”

In 2016 the authors thought that if their theory was right “we will see a significant spike in white supremacist violence over the next few years. The Trump campaign has provided a baseline undemocratic ideation to hundreds of millions of people and also provided a platform through which extremists, both violent and non-violent, can recruit and cultivate. If our collective understanding of the process of violent radicalisation is correct, the result will be blood.”

In 2019 Trumpism is enhanced by incumbency, its 2020 campaign is underway, and there is blood. But we also have thinkers outside the disorienting whirl of the news cycle and the Twitter stormfronts. If journalists seek them out and give them voice, fear will gradually be supplanted again by hope.

• Paul Chadwick is the Guardian’s readers’ editor