78% of Americans say aggressive language from elected officials makes violence against targeted groups more likely

A majority of Americans believe that heated or aggressive rhetoric from politicians can lead to violence.

A report published by the Pew Research Center on Wednesday found that 78% of Americans believed such rhetoric from elected officials makes violence against targeted groups more likely. A similar majority, 73% of those surveyed, believed elected officials should avoid heated language because it encourages violence.

Though no leaders were mentioned in that survey question, the resulting report broadly focuses on the public’s opinion of political discourse under Donald Trump.

Among those surveyed, 55% said Trump had changed the tone and nature of political debate for the worse. Given a list of positive and negative sentiments, ranging from “hopeful” to “concerned”, a large majority said the president’s statements often or sometimes made them “concerned”, “confused” and “embarrassed”.

The most popular positive reaction, from 54% of those polled, was “entertained”.

Research has shown that Trump’s election is likely to have made those who hold racist beliefs more comfortable with their views. Many have argued that the president’s rhetoric has ignited hate among his supporters, leading to events like a far-right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017 in which a counter-protester was killed and a massacre at a synagogue in Pittsburgh in October 2018.

In a manifesto sent to the New Zealand prime minister, the gunman who killed 51 people in attacks on mosques in Christchurch in March called Trump “a symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose”.

In response, the acting White House chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, told Fox News Sunday: “The president is not a white supremacist. I’m not sure how many times we have to say that.”

Recent studies have nonetheless pointed to an increase in crimes against some groups following Trump’s White House run and election victory. After years of falling, hate crimes have risen in the last three years. One analysis from the Washington Post found that counties that hosted a Trump rally in 2016 saw a 226% increase in hate crimes. Student surveys from Virginia found higher rates of bullying and teasing in areas that voted for Trump.

Experts are reluctant to draw direct correlations between Trump’s rhetoric and an increase in hate crimes, given the complexity of such offences and the motivations behind them. But they agree that charged language can lead to violence.

“There’s a lot of research that shows people take the lead from that kind of rhetoric as justification for their own acts of violence,” said Jack McDevitt, director of the Institute of Race and Justice at Northeastern University.

“They get to justify it by the fact that the mayor, governor or president is articulating what they believe.”

Susan Benesch is a faculty associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Security at Harvard and the executive director of the Dangerous Speech project. Benesch coined the term “dangerous speech” – meaning rhetoric that is used to turn one group of people violently against another – after years of studying speech used to instigate atrocities like the Holocaust.

At the heart of dangerous speech, she said, is fear that a group of people is facing an existential or moral threat from another group.

Benesch said she had observed dangerous speech from Trump, one example being his reading at rallies of a poem, The Snake. Trump read the story of a woman who takes in a snake which ends up fatally biting her multiple times on the campaign trail, often as an anti-immigration parable.

“He absolutely uses the language of threat,” Benesch said. “He describes non-citizens as ‘invaders’ and as an ‘invasion’ – that is highly characteristic language of dangerous speech.”

The most effective way to decrease dangerous speech, Benesch said, is to have people call it out when it happens on their own side.

“It will be only when people have enough courage and love of country to call out dangerous rhetoric on their own side that we will see norms shifting in the right direction,” Benesch said.

“It’s a very difficult thing to do.”