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By David French

Opinion Columnist

When I saw Donald Trump walk into the Republican National Convention on Monday night, with his ear still bandaged from the wound he suffered on Saturday, I had two thoughts at once.

First, I could see Trump’s obvious exhaustion and emotion, and I had compassion for him. If you’ve ever had a near-death experience, you know that it can have dramatic emotional effects. No one should have to endure such terror.

At the same time, I retained my conviction that he should not be president of the United States. He was and remains a morally corrupt and dangerous man. And by keeping hold of both our compassion and our convictions, we can navigate this hateful and polarized moment in American life.

We do not yet know the shooter’s motive for attempting to assassinate Trump (he reportedly was collecting information on President Biden as well), but we do know that we’re living in a time of extraordinary tension and menace. On Wednesday, The Atlantic’s McKay Coppins published a powerful reported piece, called “America’s Political Leaders Are Living in Fear.”

Coppins focused on threats and acts of violence directed at national political figures, including Gabby Giffords, Brett Kavanaugh, Mike Pence and Mitt Romney, but that same reality applies to local political figures. Reuters has published deeply reported analyses of threats against election workers and school board members. And while MAGA is reeling from the attack on Trump, its own extremists are responsible for a pervasive campaign of threats and intimidation against Trump opponents nationwide.

While it’s virtually impossible to trace any given threat or act of violence to a specific politician’s rhetoric — and wannabe assassins often strike for reasons that have nothing to do with politics — we can feel in our bones the rising tensions in our nation, and we know that overheated political rhetoric is playing its part in turning us against one another. After all, if enough people believe that an election was stolen or that democracy itself is dying, some percentage of those people may take matters into their own hands.

In the days leading up to Jan. 6, 2021, for example, the potential for violence was obvious. In December 2020, I remember hearing the popular evangelical writer Eric Metaxas tell Charlie Kirk, the founder of Turning Point USA, that the 2020 election outcome was “like somebody has been raped or murdered.” “This is like that times a thousand,” he said.

Metaxas was but one voice of many. The drumbeat of catastrophic rhetoric from right-wing politicians and media figures led me to write, in December 2020, that we were encountering “a form of fanaticism that can lead to deadly violence.” And it did.

Many of this newsletter’s readers may have heard of the term “stochastic terrorism.” The best concise definition I’ve read comes from an Australian academic and researcher named Todd Morley. Writing in the Small Wars Journal, he defined it as “a quantifiable relationship between seemingly random acts of terrorism........

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