“All Bets Are Off the Next Few Weeks” A extremism expert watching the Trump fringes now has never been more worried.

"You're getting what you asked for. Could have been constructing the PARADISE, but no, had to argue for OUR limitations. Hope I'm wrong..."

After the November election, amid Donald Trump’s rising rhetoric about a “stolen” vote, I talked to counterextremism experts about what it would take to bring the president’s most devoted and deluded supporters back from the edge. John Horgan, a Georgia State University professor and the director of the Violent Extremism Research Group, told me at the time that violence had become inescapable. “The warning signs are all around us,” he said then. “I want to be wrong about this, but I see short- and medium-term violence in our future. It’s all around us.”

Horgan was closely following the chatter among right-wing groups leading up to the Jan. 6 Capitol assault. I called him back this week to ask if the attack was the kind of violence he had expected, what those images of rioters inside will mean for pro-Trump extremist groups, and what we can do to lower the temperature. Our conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

Aymann Ismail: The last time we spoke in October, you said the prospect of violence from radicalized Trump supporters “kept you up at night.” I’m guessing that hasn’t changed.

John Horgan: Oh, my God. I wish I could say I’m sleeping better, but no. It’s not happening. I got TV on here in the background, and I’m still looking at these images. I’m shocked and stunned and horrified and sickened, and no, I’m not going to say I was surprised. If there’s one thing we’ve learned over the last four years, it’s that it can always get worse. I still don’t think we’re headed toward civil war, but I think all bets are off the next few weeks.

I feel overwhelmed too. I was there as a reporter trying to document what I was seeing. Now that I’m home watching it on TV as nefarious details keep trickling out, I’m realizing how lucky I was to not get hurt. Is the Capitol attack the kind of violence you expected? Did anything happen between the election and now that raised your alarm level at all?

I study this stuff for a living, so I exist in a rather strange bubble, but I think there’s a societal sense in which a huge line had been crossed. Even last week, I don’t think it’d fully sunk in that we are now facing the consequence of unchecked right-wing extremism being nurtured over the past several years. This wasn’t anything new that Trump heralded. Yet we have seen Trump and his ilk feed it. The most disturbing trend I’ve seen in the last couple of weeks and months has been the way in which people like Ted Cruz haven’t just radicalized Americans, but mobilized them to action. In mobilizing people to come from across the United States to defend in D.C., this is the kind of thing that Anwar al-Awlaki would envy.