Media accounts emerged of a disturbing act of political and racial violence clearly motivated by Trumpian rhetoric. A Colorado man has been charged with following (for 40 miles) and allegedly assaulting a television reporter of Pacific Island descent. “This is Trump's America now," the man said amid the alleged incident. “[A]re you even a U.S. citizen?…I'm a Marine and I took an oath to protect this country from people like you!" Once the assailant caught up to his victim, he allegedly put him in a headlock before others stepped in.

The incident follows other recent acts of right-wing violence and vigilantism, including a letter circulated in a rural Oregon community calling upon citizens to track and report people of color as suspected undocumented immigrants to be “rounded up.”

As Eric Larsen describes in “A Garden of Beasts,” this type of sporadic violence emerged amid Hitler’s rise in Germany. I summarized this earlier this month: “Early on in their stay, perhaps the most pressing issue the new Ambassador faces is the rise in sporadic violence against Jews, Jewish-Americans, and soon, Americans in general who refuse to signal their support for Hitler. The acts of violence and hate—punches, beatings, stabbings, violent mobs—creep into every day life. And local authorities do little to nothing to stop them. That onset of regular violence—random as to its timing and location, but systematic and targeted as to the perpetrators and victims—and its ultimate normalization, is a sign that something dark is overtaking German society. Suicides also increase, another ominous indicator.”