Back in March, Peter Beinart published a deeply unsettling piece in The Atlantic called “The Violence to Come.” Anticipating Donald Trump as the Republican nominee, he issued a chilling warning that America was “headed toward a confrontation, the likes of which it has not seen since 1968, between leftist activists, who believe in physical disruption as a means of drawing attention to injustice, and a candidate eager to forcibly put down that disruption in order to make himself look tough.”

Believing leftist protesters would be a prominent ingredient in this powder keg made sense at the time. As Beinart noted, a Black Lives Matter activist was attacked and called racial slurs at a Trump rally in Alabama. After a demonstrator was ejected from a rally in Las Vegas, the candidate himself declared, “I love the old days. You know what they used to do to guys like that when they were in a place like this? They’d be carried out on a stretcher.... I’d like to punch him in the face.”

These weren’t isolated incidents. Two weeks after Beinart’s piece, Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo wrote an even more dire article titled “Someone Will Die.” Flagging further examples of racism, anti-Semitism, and violence at rallies, he wrote, “It is the kind of climate where someone will eventually get killed.”

And then, mercifully, it never happened. Many expected violence at the Republican National Convention, but that didn’t happen. Periodic assaults have continued at Trump rallies—many more than in previous elections, which should never be normalized—but the worst worries of half a year ago didn’t come to pass, and the fear largely subsided.

Until this past week.