A policeman walks to the corner of the building and, distracted by his phone, clashes into an italian coming from the other side. Both fall on their asses confused. Then, out of nowhere, a hooded person appears and starts to attack an italian. A policeman stands up and pulls them apart, asks a hooded man what this is about. Looking geniunely frustrated, they answer: ‘I saw you and him, and I thought that it’s finally happening.’

There are a lot of variations of this anecdote* that, for me, puts it pretty great. A dire and exaggerated social situation creates a minority group of short-fused people who are just one inch from acting on their frustration and biases or\and even dreams, they just need a call to action or\and a guarantee they won’t be persecuted. And their orange monarch just mumbled something in his rant, accidentially this time unlike the Jan 6 coup attempt, and it enabled them to act. In spite of the nurturing the MAGA cult does to this group, they aren’t enough to cause a snowballing effect just yet, but the ripple effect of his another random bullshit rant shows they are listening and can do covert, sneaky shit to other humans after just a whistle. It’d take a long time for the US to recover from trumpism.

* I believe the original one was about the nationalistic Black Hundreds and how they, enabled by tsarist police and the wealthy, started a string of chaotic pogroms, torching houses and hurting\killing hundreds of thousands.