What is the risk of violence as Trump's legal challenges multiply?

 Yesterday was a day ending in -y, which apparently now means that former President Donald J. Trump was indicted for some of his many brazen, public crimes.  He will not be convicted because juries are like Soylent Green.  They are made out of people.  Rather than rehash banalities, I am concerned this morning with larger and more difficult questions-- those of political violence.  The United States is/are on a dangerous precipice.  Prior to the 2020 election, despite being far from a leftist (and indeed, disgusted with academia's leftist dysfunction), I counted myself among the alarmist faction in political science.  I pointed to Donald Trump's repeated refusals to state that he would accept the results of the election, I warned that if he lost, he would do anything and everything to try to steal the election, up to and including violence.  As Trump's legal challenges fell under the weight of their own stupidity, I commented that I dramatically overestimated Trump's legal team's intelligence, preparation, and capacity.  Then, January 6 was small compared to the scenarios that concerned me.  In short, while I knew and publicly warned that Trump would try what he tried to do, I was surprised at his inefficacy, and indeed, that the violence, as disturbing as it was, was not far worse.

That's me.  Always looking on the bright side of life!

So yes, I saw those turns coming, but I expected them to be worse than they turned out to be.  Let us now consider.  Donald Trump is facing multiple criminal trials.

He would love nothing more than nationwide riots, in which armed militias of his supporters committed horrific acts of violence, terrorism and insurrection which resulted in the declaration of Donald J. Trump as the First Emperor of America, installed in his Mar-a-Lago Imperial Palace.  George Washington said no.  Trump would sacrifice anything for it.

That does not mean it will happen.  Consider what has not happened and is not happening now.  When Donald Trump was first indicted-- and you never forget your first, right?-- we held our breath wondering if violence would follow.  It did not.  That did not mean we should not take precautions or concern ourselves with the possibility, nor that we should not now.

However, we must now ask the more challenging question.  What is the probability of future violence by Trump's most devoted and more crazed followers in response to these trials?  Note that I do not pose the question as a simple dichotomous choice, but rather, a probabilistic assessment.  One could make it even more realistic and challenging by ascribing probabilities to different levels of violence.

This matters.

After all, the social world does not generally operate by Newtonian or otherwise deterministic laws.  Thus, describing the world cannot be done through deterministic statements.  This frustrates those who want simplicity, and often leads to inadvertent or even willful misinterpretation.  Suppose, for example, I assert that there is a probability of .8 that an event will happen.  That is different from an assertion that it will happen.  If required to bet at crossbow bolt-point, I would bet that it would, but that is not what I said.  I said that the probability was .8, which is different from the statement that it will.  By .2.

If the event happens, was I right?  I might claim so, but I cannot because my claim was not that the event would but rather, about the probability, which cannot be tested without repeated iterations so that I can compare the frequency with which the event occurred to .8.

By the same token, the event not happening does not mean I was wrong.

Testing my claim requires repeated events and large-N analysis.  Which is annoying for people who care about one-time events and want simple answers, but important for those of us who study patterns and think probabilistically.

Considering that, what is the probability of any given level of violence moving forward?

Here are some observations from the history of politically-motivated violence in the US.

First, we have the occasional problem of lone nutjobs.  As time passes, the probability of a lone nutjob acting on any given side asymptotically approaches 1.  Recall, after all, that the nutjob who shot Steve Scalise was a Bernie-bro.  Lone nutjobs are both.  They are lone, and nutty.  The probability of a lone nutjob within any particular timeframe, though, is low, and whether or not that will increase is difficult to know.  We saw the psycho in Utah.  There may be more.  We do not know how many.

Yet the security precautions being taken around courthouses and government buildings are not in anticipation of the lone nutjob, but rather, the violent mob.

Violent, destructive mobs happen.  They happen in the United States.  One descended on the Capitol on January 6, 2021.  During the summer of 2020, many of the "mostly peaceful protests" were not that.  They were violent mobs.  The death toll from those protests stands, by most counts, at 19, which is higher than January 6, and the property damage is difficult to calculate.  The second-order effect, when you consider additional homicides caused by the police pullbacks, make it even scarier.

Is anyone watching Oakland right now?

Violent, destructive mobs happen.  Yet they do not happen spontaneously.  They must be initiated, and then someone responds.  Both components are important.

As we think through these components, note first that nobody is initiating events likely to produce violent mobs surrounding Trump's indictments.  Yet, anyway.  Despite Trump's escalating rhetoric, what is he not doing?  Planning organized protest rallies intended to turn into angry marches to government buildings holding official proceedings.  Nor is anyone else with the organizational capacity.  Without the organizational planning and messaging, nobody is going to show up.  The old line goes, what if you planned a party and nobody showed up, but nobody will show up without that planning.

This leads to the next question.  What happens if someone does the planning?  Here, we turn to some political science, and specifically, Dennis Chong's Collective Action and the Civil Rights Movement.  Chong built from a key observation in social science first made by Mancur Olson in The Logic of Collective Action.  Consider the circumstances in which your contribution to a collective good will have no effect on whether or not that good is provided, and no one can force you to contribute.  Your rational move is not to contribute.  That way, if enough others contribute, you get the benefit anyway without having paid the cost, and if others don't contribute, you didn't waste anything.  That's the very short version of the free-rider problem.  Hopefully, you studied it at some point.  It is basically the prisoner's dilemma at scale.

Anyway, Chong applied it to protest movements, and specifically, to the Civil Rights Movement.  He argued that early leaders reduce the costs and risks of contributing, thereby building the movement.  It's all about reducing those costs and risks.

Now, consider how law enforcement responded to January 6.  One of the common critiques of the early prosecutions was that they went after the foot-soldiers rather than the organizers, but from the Chong perspective, I'm fine with that.  Chong argued that the early organizers of the Civil Rights Movement reduced the costs of participation for those who joined later, allowing them to participate at a lower cost.  However, if the foot-soldiers are not shielded from prosecution, then the organizers cannot reduce the cost of participation.  Sure, yeah, call for a protest, but if they are afraid to show up because they know that they'll be hung out to dry, they won't show up.

Should the violent protesters from the summer of 2020 be prosecuted just as harshly?  Yup.  Are you horrified by the death toll from the Maui wildfires?  So am I.  Now what about the deaths from excess homicides in just one major city from the police pulling back and handing the place over to criminals?

But back to the topic at hand.  What is the risk of Trump inciting violence at any given level in response to his legal challenges?  Trump, himself, is already facing so many charges that what's one more?  Sure, add incitement, but no judge will have the courage to jail him during trial.  Not even Chutkan.  However, as long as he thinks he can beat the charges, either by jury nullification, or delay followed by winning/stealing the election and self-pardon plus Georgia shenanigans, why bother?

January 6 was a last resort.  He is not there.  That's what his resort would be in the hypothetical case of conviction, which I find unlikely.  If he were convicted, hell yes he'd try it.  But before?  Why bother?

The other complication, then, is that with so many January 6 prosecutions of foot-soldiers, even if Trump tried now, how much violence would occur?  After a conviction, maybe, but now?  Why?

Mob violence is not spontaneous.  Might it happen in response to Trump's legal challenges?  Perhaps, but the risks appear low, except in the unlikely event that Trump is convicted.  The greater problems appear to me to be the erosion of truth, the Republican Party's continued devotion to a pathological liar and inveterate career criminal, and the nation's inability to adapt, but any electoral system requires functioning parties, and right now, we don't have any functioning parties.

Miles Davis, "Riot," from Nefertiti.