Vance Boelter, Hennepin County Jail.

Early Saturday morning, June 14th, 2025–the morning of Trump’s birthday gift to himself in the form of a military parade–Minnesota State Representative Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark were murdered in their Brooklyn Park home by a gunman impersonating a police officer. Seven miles away in Champlin, Senator John Hoffman and his wife were shot multiple times and barely survived what Governor Tim Walz called “a politically motivated assassination.”

The killer left behind a manifesto listing other Democratic officials. Police found it in his abandoned vehicle—a catalog of targets that reads like a direct transcription of Donald Trump’s political hit list.

This wasn’t random violence.

This was the inevitable result of Trump’s systematic campaign to turn language into a weapon of political warfare. For nearly a decade, Trump has been running what amounts to a terrorist recruitment operation, using mass media to produce lone-wolf killers who will do his dirty work while keeping his own hands clean.

The Minnesota murders prove the operation is working exactly as designed.

The Rhetoric Factory

Trump didn’t stumble into violent language—he engineered it. Since 2015, he has systematically escalated his rhetoric, testing which formulations produce the most violent responses from his followers.

Every rally, every tweet, every interview functions as a laboratory experiment in political terrorism.

The progression is unmistakable, and it’s been happening right in front of us. It started with “Lock her up!” chants against Hillary Clinton, establishing that political opposition equals criminality. Then it escalated to describing immigrants as “vermin” who “poison the blood” of America—language lifted directly from Nazi propaganda.

By 2024? Trump was routinely promising “retribution” against his enemies and describing political opponents as “human scum” who deserve elimination.

Watch the pattern. Each escalation tests slightly more extreme boundaries while maintaining just enough ambiguity to avoid prosecution. Trump has perfected what terrorism scholars call “stochastic terrorism”—using mass media to provoke random acts of violence that are statistically predictable but individually unpredictable.

The genius of this approach is its plausible deniability. When violence occurs, Trump claims he meant something else entirely. He’s not directly ordering anyone to kill Democrats—he’s just creating the psychological conditions where killing Democrats appears not only justified but necessary.

Manufacturing Killers

What Trump has built is a systematic process for transforming........

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