“What we call it is walking them to the edge,” Fulton said. “You have the president of the United States taking these people to the edge, and the second that something happens he’s going to turn around and go, ‘Well, I didn’t tell them to do that.’ It gives him that plausible deniability, and that’s what’s scary.”

The longer this all goes on, Fulton said, the more dangerous it becomes. If people are kept at a heightened state, there’s a larger possibility that someone will snap. They might think it’s their patriotic duty to act.

“You can’t keep people on the edge for that long,” Fulton said. “A lot of these guys think that they’re like defending the United States. They think they’re patriots. That is powerful. Patriots go to war for their country all the time… When you start mixing that, you end up with really, really bad shit happening.”

There’s plenty of instances of Trump fans being inspired by his rhetoric and committing violence. Trump “super fan” Cesar Sayoc, who mailed poorly made explosive devices to Trump critics in 2018, is in federal prison.