monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

A study published on Friday appears to confirm what news reports suggested long ago: President Trump’s campaign rallies were associated with a rise in violence when they came to town.

A city that hosted a Trump rally saw an average of 2.3 more assaults reported on the day of the event than on a typical day, according to the study, led by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and published in the journal Epidemiology. The authors found no corresponding link between assaults and rallies for Mr. Trump’s Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton.

“It appeared to be a phenomenon that’s unique to Donald Trump’s rally,” said Christopher Morrison, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania and the lead author of the study.
It may come as little surprise that the rallies were associated with increased violence, as the often volcanic clashes between Mr. Trump’s supporters and opponents were widely covered at the time.

In March 2016 alone, a Trump rally in Chicago was called off after violent clashes broke out, while an anti-Trump protester was punched at a rally in North Carolina and another was punched and kicked at a rally in Arizona. The following month, several Trump supporters were assaulted at a California rally.

Mr. Trump himself repeatedly seemed to endorse attacks on his detractors, too.

“Maybe he should have been roughed up,” he said of one protester who was reportedly punched and kicked in November 2015. “I’d like to punch him in the face, I’ll tell ya,” he said of another a few months later. He even offered to pay legal fees for his supporters if they became too aggressive.

The supporters also often aimed offensive and violent rhetoric at Mrs. Clinton, suggesting she be killed.

To determine whether those words and news reports corresponded with an actual shift in violence, the researchers compiled a list of 31 Trump rallies and 38 Clinton rallies held in cities with assault data available online.

They compared the number of assaults reported on the day of the rally to the number reported on the corresponding day of the week, for each of the four weeks before and after the event.

On a typical day, cities saw an average of 19.4 assaults, they found. On the day of a Trump rally, that number rose to 21.7.

The pattern held even when the researchers controlled for the influence of factors like population size, data sources and the day used for the comparison.

The researchers offered two explanations for the increase in assaults. Either they were the result of clashes at or near the rallies, or they occurred elsewhere in the cities after the aggressive mood on display by Mr. Trump, his supporters or his opponents had spread through “social contagion.”

There were some limitations to the findings, the authors noted. They may not apply to the rallies or cities that weren’t studied, and a greater police presence during the rallies may have made it more likely for an assault to be reported.

and McCabe is gone

2 days before he was scheduled to retire

It is such a disgrace I have no words.

LONDON — As the upstart voter-profiling company Cambridge Analytica prepared to wade into the 2014 American midterm elections, it had a problem.

The firm had secured a $15 million investment from Robert Mercer, the wealthy Republican donor, and wooed his political adviser, Stephen K. Bannon, with the promise of tools that could identify the personalities of American voters and influence their behavior. But it did not have the data to make its new products work.

So the firm harvested private information from the Facebook profiles of more than 50 million users without their permission, according to former Cambridge employees, associates and documents, making it one of the largest data leaks in the social network’s history. The breach allowed the company to exploit the private social media activity of a huge swath of the American electorate, developing techniques that underpinned its work on President Trump’s campaign in 2016.

Assaults Increased When Cities Hosted Trump Rallies, Study Finds

Democratic heads roll after video shows agitators planted at Trump rallies

Robert Creamer, founder of Democracy Advocates and the husband of Rep. Janice D. Schakowsky, Illinois Democrat, stepped down from the campaign Tuesday, a day after Scott Foval was fired from his post as national field director of Americans United for Change.

Hidden Camera Video Shows Democrats Sent Agitators To Trump Rallies

Quote:

and McCabe is gone

2 days before he was scheduled to retire

It is such a disgrace I have no words.

It is such a disgrace I have no words.

Do you think that if the Trump rallies weren't being met by violent, obscenity hurling protesters the participants would have been walking the streets looking for people to assault?

Firing Of Andrew McCabe Said To Be “One of Many” To Follow As POTUS Trump Continues To Drain The Swamp

Further speculation is also pointing to formal charges being brought against McCabe and others for the roles they played in attempting to illegally influence the 2016 Election outcome – influence that is alleged to directly include both Hillary Clinton and former President Barack Obama.

McCabe's abuse of his authority was a disgrace and he deserved to be fired and lose his pension.

So McCabe is an innocent scapegoat while the Attorney General, Inspector General, the FBI Office of Professional Responsibility and the Department’s senior career official are all sycophantic enablers?

Quote:

Do you think that if the Trump rallies weren't being met by violent, obscenity hurling protesters the participants would have been walking the streets looking for people to assault?

Do you think that if Trump's campaign hadn't had all those contacts with Russians anyone would have demanded an investigation by the FBI?

I think your question is more pertinent if we try to find out why violent, obscenity hurling protestors were attracted to the Trump rallies in the first place. Do you think that without a bunch angry people screaming "Build the Wall!" and "Lock Her Up!" those protestors would have been walking the streets looking for people to assault?

Mob violence can be a social contagion, stimulated in this case by Trump supporters and Trump opponents. There was a level of hostility and anger not often seen in presidential campaigns. Even the people supporting and protesting Wallace's campaign managed to conduct themselves more appropriately. So I think it's okay to look at Trump's campaign — and at Trump himself — when we look for a fuller explanation.