In a study by the Southern Poverty Law Center, out of the nine hundred hate crime incidents in the first ten days following Donald Trump's election, it was found that people explicitly invoked Donald Trump's name or his campaign slogans in at least four-in-ten (40 percent) of these crimes.

QUESTION: What mechanisms explain perpetrators explicitly invoking a political figure's name during hate crimes? Worth exploring the symbolic function.

Arsalan Iftikhar, Fear of a Muslim Planet_ Gl…, loc. 227