Fault Lines examines the rise of hate in the United States and the toll it is taking on communities across the country.

In the first week after Donald Trump won the US presidential election, the United States saw a sharp rise in hate crimes and people being attacked because of their race, ethnicity or religion.

The hate crimes have manifested in multiple ways, including graffiti on places of worship, schools and even homes, racist taunts and white supremacist rallies.

The media like to say it's Trump's fault, or it was Trump who caused this. I would say that Trump is a megaphone that we picked up. Eli Mosley, white nationalist and rally organiser

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPL) reported over 1,000 incidents constituted as hate crime in only one month after the presidential election in November 2016.

Many analysts attribute this to the divisive rhetoric Trump himself used during the campaign that seized upon racial tensions in the country. These tensions were simmering under the surface but are now out in the open.

This rhetoric intensified throughout the campaign and continued post election with "a pledge to ban Muslims from entering the US, calling immigrants from Mexico rapists, attacking the family of a US soldier killed in Iraq, mocking a disabled New York Times reporter" and other similar occurrences.

"This is a first step toward making a realisation of something that Trump alluded to earlier in the campaign, which is, this is the first step towards taking America back," said former KKK leader David Duke at a gathering of white supremacists last August in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Moments later, James Fields, also a white supremacist, drove his car through a crowd of anti-racist demonstrators, killing a young woman and injuring dozens of others during a rally by various far-right groups, in the most recent and high-profile manifestation of hate crime.

Trump blamed the incident on "both parties" claiming "there are two sides to a story" in what seemed to be an attempt at equating the actions of white supremacists to the actions of those protesting them.

Fault Lines examines how hate is playing out across Trump's America and the toll it is taking on communities across the country.

Source: Al Jazeera