The Most Dangerous Time in 2024 Will Be Just After the Election

The term “stochastic terror” became a big part of American political discourse following the attempt to undo the 2020 presidential election by way of mob violence at the U.S. Capitol. At the time, national security expert Juliette Kayyem explained in a prescient piece in the Atlantic, and in an interview on the Amicus podcast, that stochastic terror happens “when a leader uses his platform to motivate and incite violence in a way in which the violence is much more likely to occur, but who does it and where it’s done is utterly random.” Last week, as candidate Donald Trump promised pardons for the Jan. 6 insurrectionists, threatened a judge, and posted a video of a mocked-up President Joe Biden hog-tied in the back of a truck, Kayyem shared new thoughts on Trump, domestic terror, and how to think about political violence through a counterterrorism and national security lens. On this week’s Amicus, Kayyem, who is faculty chair of the homeland security program at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and the author of The Devil Never Sleeps: Learning to Live in an Age of Disasters, talked about how what we once considered Trump’s flirtation with stochastic terror has morphed into incitement of vigilante violence, and how the Biden administration needs to be thinking right now about preparing for that. In her new piece, also published in the Atlantic, Kayyem details what that can look like. Our conversation about the new threats from the former president and the need to prepare for them has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Dahlia Lithwick: The last time you and I were on this show together, we talked about Trump and stochastic terror. It was right after Jan. 6. And here we are, it’s three years later and the former president is now the Republican nominee for president, and he has thus far evaded all criminal prosecution. His campaign seems to mostly be focused on staying out of jail, and he seems to be, as you’ve been tweeting, pretty regularly directing his followers to commit acts of violence, as he makes very explicit plans to commit acts of violence should he regain office. So everything we believed about stopping this sequence of events from happening right here, right now, seems to have gained a lot of traction, but no results.

Juliette Kayyem: So this was not inevitable. If I was naïve the last time we spoke in January of 2021, it was in believing for that brief moment that the isolation of Donald Trump would hold. I wrote a piece conceiving of Trump as a leader of a terrorist organization and then conceiving of the fight against him as a counterterrorism effort. And it was viewed as, “Oh, who talks like that?” then. We didn’t know everything that had gone on with Jan. 6, but it was just a way of thinking about what he does—he uses this language, he tries to hide from it. At least, then he tried to hide from it and pretend he wasn’t inciting, saying it was a joke, saying he didn’t really mean it, using vague language. But it was clear what he was doing.

And we forget that isolation was a combination of: the GOP was isolating him, it was “Biden is president,” it was the prosecutions of hundreds, now, of his minions, it was the trials or cases that are going on.

I don’t want to give too much credit to [Mitch] McConnell, but I do think McConnell folding—he originally had condemned Trump, and now says he’s going to endorse him—was a more significant moment in U.S. history than we credit. I think McConnell had the ability to get the elders and others to behave and to continue Trump’s isolation. So he [Trump] then realizes he’s scot-free. He then creates this narrative of victimization.

I don’t view the legal fight and all the legal cases in terms of results. Is he guilty? Is he not guilty? Is it delayed? Is it not delayed? I think of it in terms of calling it out. I think the more we can do through all sorts of different platforms in which you’re just trying to weaken the overall hold that he has—not on his supporters, we’ll never get them—but on the American public.
But despite his support in the polls, what I’m amazed at is that he has nothing left but violence. Where violence was once the background noise, now it’s at the forefront. He can’t hide it anymore, and now he just totally owns it. It’s not stochastic terrorism anymore. It’s incitement. It’s not, “What did Trump mean when he said it’s going to be wild?” Now it’s a picture of Biden with a bullet in his head. There’s a difference. So I actually stopped using the term [stochastic terrorism]. To me it’s just pure incitement and we must prepare. We’re results-oriented in this election. What is about to happen and what is happening leading up to November, and then November to January, is like nothing we’ll ever see again.

The former president posts this image of President Biden, and he’s hog-tied on the tailgate of a truck like he’d been kidnapped, and your tweet was: “All Trump has left as a strategy is violence.” We have moved past stochastic terror. This is a call to violence. I’m thinking about two things I want you to reflect on. One is, you have always said—when there were threats that there was going to be violence and vigilantism outside the courthouses at some of Trump’s civil trials—you’ve been on record saying there isn’t an infrastructure for this. There’s some lone nutters, but if all those prosecutions of the low-hanging fruit from Jan. 6 taught us anything, it’s that there aren’t quite so many people who think, “Hey, you know, I’ll just saddle up and go kill someone.” Because there have been consequences. The other thing I think you’re saying is that if the 2022 election taught us anything, it’s that people kind of like democracy. They like the rule of law, and so you’re going to hit, pretty quickly, a ceiling of people who want to be incited to violence and act on it. 

That’s exactly right. A counterterrorism campaign is measured differently than, say, “Is he popular in the polling?” And we can debate the polling and how strong it is, or what it’s telling us, but you measure an ideology by simply asking: “Is it gaining strength or is it weakening?” And if you just look at violent extremism—look, there’s a lot to be nervous about. I’m not Pollyanna, but people get a high saying that the threat is much bigger than it is. I’m just looking at the numbers. Trump is unable to get crowds in the way he used to. He’s unable to launch the kind of violence, I think in his head, he anticipates. And so what you’re seeing is that he has to push the envelope. … What’s happening is he’s responding to the lack of response. That’s how I view this. And this is where I beg my legal friends, too: The counternarrative cannot simply be, “Well, the court will get him.” It’s not going to work. It’s not going to work politically, and it’s not going to work legally. We know that now. There’s lots of smart legal people saying, “This is the case, this is the one!” And I’m like, “Really? because I’ve been hearing that for four years and it’s not the case.” What I see is there is a strong counterterrorism, pro-democracy impulse. That is why Trump is going down this path. So when I say, “All Trump has as a galvanizing force is violence or the threat of violence,” it’s because that’s all that’s left. He’s not trying to recruit anymore. I’m seeing metrics in my world, the lawyers see their metrics. They don’t like the delays, the losses. But I’m not looking at polls. I’m just looking at the violent extremism.

So I want to stay on the incitement for one more beat. Last week was kind of harrowing because we’ve got Trump leveling what looked like actual threats, actual incitement against Judge Juan Merchan overseeing the criminal case in Manhattan. Those vague, like, “I’m just joking!” threats against the judge’s adult daughter. We’ve got a gag order, then an expanded gag order. This fury that we are seeing, “Why aren’t the courts doing something? They should put him in jail!” And your answer is simply: The justice system is not going to fix this.

No, at least not now. It may be after this election, but I said long ago, I think progressives and Democrats like me, we should be content—maybe not satisfied—but content enough if this ends with Trump completely isolated with his bozos in Florida, dying alone with wife No. 5. Because I think about measures of success. I’m in disaster management. The idea that the only measure of success is him in an orange suit is ridiculous. First of all, democracy has many swords. It can’t just be, “The law is gonna save us.” It’s going to be citizenry, it’s going to be smart reporters reporting on this. It is going to be financial, as we’re starting to see. It’s going to be people simply walking away from the madness. And I guess the last metric is, how do I measure that this thing isn’t growing? Well, the Proud Boys are gone. The Oath Keepers are gone. As someone who comes out of counterterrorism, they’re not getting bigger. They’ve turned on each other. They can’t raise money. You can’t recruit if everyone thinks you’re going to end up in jail. But whether this is a failure of our democracy or just the nature of democracy, this one fell swoop of victory against this guy is just not the way to think about it.

When you say, “Holy shit! There are some scary things that are going to happen between November and January,” can you walk us through that?

So there’s three periods I worry about: Now until November. This we know already because we’ve been promised it, which is going to be violence or the threat of violence as the extension of the electoral process. That’s going to focus on election workers, judges, and others. We’re already seeing this; he’s already trying to do this. We’re not seeing anything organized—it’s the randoms. The randoms can be scary, but it’s not a movement that is unmanageable. So that just means greater efforts to protect courthouses and judges. It involves federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies, including intelligence-sharing, including threat assessments. Now, the good news is, this is likely confined to six states. It’s going to be Arizona and North Carolina and Georgia and Michigan and a few other swing states.

Period two is between Election Day and when someone is called. If it’s not called the first day, that’s going to be insane. Biden is in charge of the federal apparatus; governors have their own law enforcement statuses, and we’d better be ready for that. We’d better be ready to take states to court that are using state law enforcement in violation of due process and the protection of laws of equal access. We need Biden to own this.

The third period is who wins. So let’s say it’s Trump. Do the institutions hold? I doubt it. I think that this is a once-in-a-lifetime election, a once-in-a-nationtime election. If Biden wins, then we have to anticipate that Trump only has two narratives left. One is: He’s in jail. The other is: He’s the victim. He’s going to pick the latter. The one way that you create this narrative is to create a lot of mayhem. And that scenario, we’re not talking about enough. I know it’s hard for people to imagine, but Biden could very much win. Trump continues to be Trump, and the only thing he has is to bring it all down, right? We know that, and we know that right now. So how do we protect ourselves through a variety of means?

The Jan. 6 report, which is 800 pages, is most famous for its accounting of what happened on Jan. 6. It actually has a series of really interesting recommendations at the end. Some of them are legal, in terms of enhanced sentencing, but others are about intelligence-sharing and other efforts Biden really could own that we really ought to be ready for. I have long felt that if the National Guard had been out on the Hill, if the intelligence had been shared about what they thought the threat environment was—remember, we knew by the night before [Jan. 6], the number of people coming—90 percent of those people would’ve dispersed. And actually maybe the Oath Keepers, those guys are such wusses, they might’ve been nervous. It was the failure to anticipate it that allowed it to move on.