It’s easy to forget what happens before a crime. Let’s not do that.

Let’s begin with a story about a friend of mine. We’ll call her Lisa.

Lisa was born in 1962, to poor parents in New York City. Her father left when she was a small child, and she moved with her mother to a town near Miami. She lived a normal enough childhood with her mother, finished high school, and eventually tried going to college. She dropped out after only a few classes.

She stayed afloat for the next thirty years, doing one thing or another. Poor, but not totally destitute thanks to good economic times, Lisa was able to make ends meet — but her life never went much of anywhere. She faded into the background, like so many millions of others, and her life kept a quiet, steady pace for decades.

But as the years passed, the economy shifted. It got harder to provide for herself, especially without a college education. The stability of Lisa’s life, which was never all that solid to begin with, began to crack. What small luxuries she had went first: food got blander, clothes got more worn, small repairs went undone. But that wasn’t enough. She turned to petty crime, shoplifting and ‘returning’ stolen items for cash. She had her first run-ins with the law during the 90s, while in her early 30s.

But soon, even that wasn’t going to be enough. It came down to paying her rent or paying her utilities. Those of you who have lived through such a decline know the strain it can place on you, and Lisa wasn’t the most disciplined person at the best of times. She added another tick to her criminal record for threatening a customer service rep from her local electric company over the phone.

Lisa kept getting older, and things kept getting worse. She started abusing controlled substances around age 40 at the turn of the millennium. Eventually, she got caught, and slapped with a light possession charge. Along with this came a revocation of her driver’s license, but she continued to drive, tacking on yet another charge for that a few years later.

She lived on credit in the borrow-happy years of the late aughts, but the 2008 recession finished off her already weakened financial status. Lisa filed for bankruptcy shortly afterwards, reporting less than $10,000 in income and more than $20,000 in debts. At age 50, she was forced to move back in with her mother — also bankrupt — after losing her home to foreclosure.

She stayed there for a few years, but even that wasn’t stable. At 53, Lisa is living out of a van, showering at a local gym or along the Florida beaches. She’s been stuck there for years, with no real chance of rebuilding her life: she’s getting rather old, has no resources left to help her, and has little prospect of ever finding good work again.

It’s a sad story, isn’t it? You can imagine that this is a trajectory that applies to any number of people who happen, by accident of fate, to come from unhealthy homes and have a screw or two loose in their head. Maybe they’re just not very bright, maybe they don’t have much motivation, maybe their emotional control sucks, but in any event, I’ve described a woman you would pity if you met her.

Unfortunately, I haven’t actually described my friend Lisa, because she doesn’t exist. No, what I’ve written above is almost word for word the biography of Cesar Sayoc, the alleged “magabomber” who sent pipe bombs to a dozen or so critics of President Donald Trump, including former Presidents Clinton and Obama, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and numerous other major figures in the Democratic Party. Aside from a name and pronouns, and a little bit of filling in the blanks, I’ve just repeated the events of his life as reported by major news outlets.

What Sayoc allegedly did was, obviously, horrible. And it is horrible for the President to egg this sort of thing on — and make no mistake, he is egging it on. For example, President Trump only a few days ago praised Rep. Greg “Body-Slam A Reporter” Gianforte for…well, body-slamming a reporter on the eve of his Montana special election last May. There will be (has been?) a lot of ink spilled by my fellow liberals about the Republican Party’s complicity with this sort of rhetoric, and rightly so.

That, however, is not what I’m here to talk about.