Trumpism and the Rise of Political Threats and Violence

Donald Trump's rhetoric is normalizing political threats and violence against his political rivals. And it's leading us to a dangerous future.

It was a Sunday night, just over a week ago, and Judge Tanya Chutkan, who is presiding over Trump’s federal criminal trial in D.C., was spending a quiet night alone at her home. That peaceful evening was shattered when, quite suddenly, police cars and fire trucks were on the scene, responding to an emergency call about a shooting that allegedly had taken place at her residence.

The shooting was a false emergency. Judge Chutkan had been “swatted”—a dangerous practice of summoning armed police or federal agents to a private residence or business under false pretenses. Because of the chaos that can result when armed authorities respond, swatting can lead quickly to terrifying encounters and even the deaths of innocent people. 

It is no innocent prank.

Lately, swatting has been weaponized by anonymous forces to make political points and punish opponents. Within the past few months, judges, many prosecutors and civil servants who have sought to hold Donald Trump accountable have faced serious and dangerous threats. 

Special Counsel Jack Smith, who is prosecuting two federal cases against Trump, also had his home swatted on Christmas Day. Judge Arthur Engoron, who is the presiding judge over Trump’s civil fraud trial and has been the target of antisemitic and other threats upon himself and his law clerk, experienced a bomb threat on his home, called in within hours of closing arguments in the case.

It isn’t just judicial officers at risk and under attack. Secretary of State Shenna Bellows of Maine, who recently determined that Trump was not qualified to appear on Maine’s primary ballot because he engaged in insurrection, was also recently swatted.

Less frequently but just as dangerously, officials on the far-right of the political spectrum have been swatted as well. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s residence has been the subject of false emergency calls some eight times.

These incidents come not long after Republican House members, their families, and their staff received credible threats upon their lives during the recent House leadership contest. This is part of a disturbing upward trend: The number of reported threats upon U.S. Congressional elected officials has grown exponentially since 2016, from some 900 that year to well over ten times that number—a whopping 9,700 threats according to the Capitol Police—in 2021.

Historians and experts on political violence warn that such threats and intimidation have a chilling effect upon our politics, causing valued civil servants, such as already thankless local election officials, to leave public service. It even sometimes causes elected public officials to be too afraid to perform their constitutional duties. For example, Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) and former House Reps. Liz Cheney and Peter Meijer are on record saying that some of their own GOP colleagues had confided privately that they wanted to vote to impeach or convict Donald Trump for his actions on January 6, but were afraid to do so out of fear for the safety of their families.

There is a common denominator to the rise of political threats of violence in the U.S.: former president Trump. To understand how such threats, once rare and exceptional, have become dangerously commonplace, we need to explore how Trump and the MAGA GOP have not only opened the door to them but have made these threats of political violence part of Trumpian political identity. 

Today, I will explore four aspects of this specifically: the normalizing of political violence, the dehumanizing of the “enemy,” the perpetuation of the Big Lie, and the use of stochastic terror. I’ll also discuss one successful way the victims of such attacks have responded to face down these attacks and threats upon them and our system.

Normalization of political violence

Throughout his first two presidential campaigns, it was common for Donald Trump to suggest physical violence as a way of “dealing” with the opposition. On the day of the Iowa Caucuses back in 2016, Trump told his supporters that protesters might be planning to hurl tomatoes at him, so he urged them to “knock the crap out of ’em” — and that he would pay their legal costs. Back then, Americans weren’t used to hearing one of the leading candidates speak that way. And not long afterwards, one of his followers actually took him at his word and threw a sucker punch at a protester at a Trump rally. 

It was a sign of what was to come.

Trump operates by way of a “permission structure,” where a leader signals that something that was once socially out of bounds is suddenly okay, even to be praised or glorified. The permission structure established by Trump has been reinforced by his surrogates and feckless GOP officials. The party now commonly deploys the language of violence and open warfare, even when describing what ought to be normal politics.

During the 2020 campaign, Donald Trump famously told the Proud Boys, a militant right-wing group with strong ties to his close advisors such as Roger Stone, to “stand back and stand by.” This was a clear suggestion to a radical, violent group that it should await a signal from the president. Recruitment into the Proud Boys reportedly soared in response. The tacit approval of the president, who earlier had referred to Nazis and white nationalists as “very fine people” in the aftermath of the Charlottesville protests, led directly to the participation of many extremist, militia-style organizations during the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

At Trump’s speech at the Ellipse that day, he told his followers, among other things, to “fight like hell” and not to show “weakness” or they wouldn’t take back the country. He riled them up with his words before unleashing them on the Capitol, knowing many were so heavily armed that they couldn’t even make it through his own rally’s metal detectors. He then watched as the riot unfolded and for hours did nothing to call off his mob, despite the pleas of his advisors to intervene.

In years past, Trump would couch many of his statements in language that still held ambiguities about whether he was promoting political violence. But that has gone out the window. For example, in early 2023, Trump amplified a post by “1776” on his Truth Social platform, where the user called expressly for a physical fight, bragging that they were “locked and LOADED” to take action for Trump.

Trump also has been openly highlighting and promoting mob bosses, both fictional and real, to send a clear signal to his political enemies and to judicial officers. 

For example, when Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg brought charges against Trump for false business records, Trump amplified an image of himself holding a baseball bat behind Bragg’s head, evoking a brutal beating and murder in the movie “Goodfellas”:

He had the post taken down, but not before the message he had wanted to convey was delivered in no uncertain terms.

As recently as this past week, Trump openly praised a mafia boss, highlighting his connections to organized crime to threaten the judges on his cases. Trump posted an old interview with Salvatore Gravano, aka “Sammy the Bull” of the Gambino crime family, who had called Trump “a legitimate guy.” With a barely disguised threat, Trump said, “I hope Judges Engoron and Kaplan see this,” naming two judges presiding over his ongoing lawsuits. “We need fairness, strength and honesty in our New York Courts. We don’t have it now!”

It’s important to understand that Gravano confessed to 19 murders. Trump knows precisely what he is doing by dredging up this old “interview” to make his supposed “character witness” point here.

And in case anyone still believes that it is mere bravado for Trump to suggest political hitjobs and murders, his own top advisor, Roger Stone, was caught on tape discussing just that. Mediaite recently released a tape recording of Stone discussing with a NYPD officer the assassinations of Reps. Eric Swalwell (D-CA) and Jerry Nadler (D-NY). The conversation occurred just before the 2020 election. Stone is heard on the tape saying the following:

Go find Swalwell and get this over with. It’s time to do it. Then we’ll see how brave the rest of them are. Either Swalwell or Nadler has to die before the election. They need to get the message. I’m just not putting up with this anymore.

Stone claims the recording is a fake, but Mediaite stands by its reporting and source.

It’s been a bit over eight years that Donald Trump has dominated our headlines and dragged our politics over the edge with him. What began as indirect encouragement of political violence has since morphed into something real and terrifying. We are no longer talking about the mere possibility of political violence, because it already occured three years ago at the Capitol. And credible threats upon officials continue to this day. We must now confront the likelihood of even more violence in this election year, up to and including attempts on the lives of prominent figures.

Let’s turn now to how Trump is paving the way for this to happen.

Dehumanizing the “enemy”

Trump follows an authoritarian playbook when speaking about his political enemies. He repeatedly uses degrading and dehumanizing rhetoric to drill home to his followers that his enemies are worthy of being attacked and even eliminated. He routinely refers to his political opponents as “communists” and “thugs” in order to portray something sinister and un-American about their efforts to hold him accountable, while using “globalist” and “Soros-backed” to add a vile dose of antisemitism to the mix.

But the name calling goes beyond politics and prejudce into a warped universe of morality. Trump regularly uses fundamentalist religious terms, and a stark good/bad dichotomy, to lean into the strong support that Evangelicals have for him. Efforts on his behalf mean acting to save the world, while doing nothing allows the “forces of evil” to win. Further, he regularly amplifies messaging that Democrats are “satanic” so they can be justifiably attacked or even killed, while Trump himself is chosen by God to be America’s “caretaker.”

To this end, Trump has openly embraced the fringe QAnon conspiracy, whose many unbalanced adherents believe that Democrats are pedophiles busily harvesting the blood of children. On Truth Social, he consistently has reposted images of himself wearing the QAnon pin under the words “The Storm is Coming,” in direct reference to the moment Trump will supposedly regain power and execute his opponents live on national television.

In an ominous shift, Trump recently has stoked anti-immigrant sentiment by adopting the words of Adolf Hitler. Specifically, Trump warned that “illegal” immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of this country. This comes just one month after referring to those on the other side of the political aisle as “vermin”—another terrible echoing of the World War II Nazi chancellor.

Trump appears to be succeeding in his messaging, at least within his own base. In a recent poll, an overwhelming majority of Republican primary voters agreed with Trump’s statement that illegal immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of America. In fact, the percentage of Republican primary voters who approve of the message actually went up, from 72 to 82 percent, after they were told that the specific language originated from Trump. However, as of the time of the poll, the majority of Americans, some 53 to 47 percent, still disagreed with this statement, meaning he hasn’t yet managed to pull most of America into this dark worldview.

Historians of civil wars and genocide often cite mass campaigns to dehumanize political enemies and to stir up baseless conspiracies about them as a telltale precursor to something far more horrible. We have the benefit of having observed other societies hurtle into this before. But it remains to be seen whether we have both the wisdom and the determination to avoid a similar fate.

Perpetuation of the Bie Lie

Trump understood that in order to stir up his supporters sufficiently, they would have to believe something much bigger than their candidate’s electoral loss was at stake. Thus was born the “Big Lie,” another Nazi tactic deployed successfully by Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda. Trump and his cohorts, including Roger Stone who was an architect of “Stop the Steal,” set out to poison the American electorate into believing that free and fair elections were anything but.

Trump’s repeated lies about a stolen election managed to radicalize enough of his supporters that he fleeced them for hundreds of millions of dollars and then rallied them for a violent assault upon the seat of our democracy on January 6, 2021. To this day, some two-thirds of Republican voters continue to believe the Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen, including over two-thirds of those who voted recently in the Iowa Caucuses.

The Big Lie has had a tremendously negative impact upon civil servants working in our elections. Before 2020, almost no one questioned their professionalism or dedication, let alone their honesty or patriotism. But now, even Republican officials overseeing elections are regularly intimidated and have even received death threats just for doing their job.

Take Stephen Richer, a county recorder in hotly contested Maricopa County, Arizona. In years past, most citizens wouldn’t even know the name of their county recorder. And officials could dutifully and peaceably perform what amounts to a largely administrative task of overseeing elections. 

Not so any more. According to a report by Vox on rising violence within the GOP, Richer can no longer attend Republican gatherings without being harrassed, because he is now the subject of false reports of election fraud. He used to attend state Republican functions without incident. But now he avoids them. Vox writes that at one event

the crowd heckled and harassed him. When he tried to leave, they dragged him back in, yanking on his arms and shoulders, to berate him about the allegedly stolen 2020 election. He started to worry: Would his own people, fellow Republican Party members, seriously hurt him?

Richer had hoped his party members’ bizarre fixation on a false conspiracy about the election would fade over time, but in some ways things have gotten more extreme. By the 2022 midterm elections, one in which false claims of fraud were amplified by election deniers including the GOP candidate for governor, Kari Lake, Richer’s office felt more like a military base, surrounded by armed police to protect him and his staff. Many of them actually quit after heated incidents with local voters. Richer himself had to testify in three federal cases against people who had threatened to kill him.

“You need to do your fucking job right because other people from other states are watching your ass,” one man allegedly said in a voicemail. “You fucking renege on this deal or give them any more troubles, your ass will never make it to your next little board meeting.”

With such threats not only increasing but abounding at the local as well as national level, the risk to our democratic system is clear. It is difficult enough to encourage qualified citizens to serve in government. With constant intimidation and threats, often coming not from organized groups but from ordinary but misled citizens, our system is being stretched thin as experienced civil servants quit.

Deployment of stochastic terror

In an earlier piece, I wrote about how Donald Trump is a classic “stochastic terrorist.” That term is defined as “the public demonization of a person or group resulting in the incitement of a violent act, which is statistically probable but whose specifics cannot be predicted.” In other words, it means publicly encouraging others, who might be unstable and manipulatable, to do the dirty work for you. 

Donald Trump knows that in a public post, he need only name his enemies and how they have allegedly wronged him, and his minions online—and even at times in person—will take up his cause.

This presents a problem for law enforcement and for judges who are trying to set limits on what Trump as a criminal defendant can say. Trump often is not directly threatening anyone with anything. He simply identifies someone, usually in a post on Truth Social, and his more fanatical followers will respond as he intends them to: with intimidation and threats, and sometimes even violence.

The case of Fulton County election workers Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss is a good example of this, and their story lies at the crossroads of rising political violence, election lies, dehumanizing rhetoric and this kind of Trumpian stochastic terror.

In the wake of Election Night 2020, Trump and his campaign targeted two African American poll workers, Freeman and Moss, who were working that evening at State Farm Arena counting ballots. Using a highly edited and misleading videotape, and theories that were quickly and irrefutably debunked, Trump and Rudy Giuliani spread baseless and racist lies about Freeman and Moss. 

Trump referred to Freeman as a “professional vote scammer” and a “hustler.” And during a Georgia legislative hearing, Giuliani claimed that the women had pulled out a suitcase full of ballots from beneath a table and were “passing around USB ports like they were vials of heroin or cocaine”—a racially charged and completely untrue claim; the two women had shared a ginger mint.

Predictably, Freeman and Moss were promptly doxxed and began to be threatened directly by anonymous Trump supporters. Moss’s son would answer the phone, and callers would begin with racial slurs and say what they were going to do to him. Strangers began to appear at Freeman’s home, and she received 420 emails and 75 text messages, including one that said, “We know where you live, we coming to get you.”

On the day of the insurrection at the Capitol, a crowd had also gathered at Freeman’s house. They had come searching for Freeman after Trump’s and his allies’ lies had put a target upon her. Thankfully, she had already fled her home upon the advice of the FBI.

Trump continues to regularly attack the judges, prosecutors, and even court staff in his various cases. And as discussed at the outset, it appears his more radical followers are responding to the call. 

For example, after Maine’s Secretary of State, Shenna Bellows, made an appealable decision to remove Trump from the state’s primary ballot, Trump went beyond attacking the decision, he posted a link to Bellows’s biographical information on his Truth Social account. Not long afterwards, Bellows’s home address was posted and shared online, and then the threats began, culminating in a swatting incident when, thankfully, she and her family were not home.

Trump would argue that there is nothing illegal about posting a biographical link of a public official. Indeed, a criminal prosecution for this behavior would nearly be impossible to pull off, given that there’s nothing anyone can point to that shows Trump’s criminal intent. He could claim, for example, that he merely wanted his followers to write letters of protest, not to threaten or intimidate her.

So what can be done?

Our criminal laws run pretty quickly into the First Amendment when it comes to trying to stop someone like Trump from incubating a culture of violence, dehumanizing his enemies, promoting the Big Lie, or stochastically terrorizing innocent civil servants.

But election workers Freeman and Moss have, through great courage and determination, showed us at least one way to hold the purveyors of this political poison accountable: by suing them to high heaven.

Since their harrowing ordeal, Freeman and Moss have sued for defamation, naming not only Rudy Giuliani but also One America Network for spreading lies about them. They already settled with OAN for an undisclosed sum, but they stuck through it all the way to trial against Giuliani. The judge found that Giuliani was liable as a matter of law, and ordered the case to trial on damages, and the jury there returned a whopping $148 million judgment—enough to keep Giuliani pinned down financially for the rest of his life.

Other civil lawsuits are also showing some life. Capitol police officers injured during the attack on January 6 have argued that Trump cannot hide behind presidential immunity to avoid civil liability for having incited the insurrection and directly contributed to the harm that day. This past December, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeal agreed, dealing Trump a significant legal blow.

While these cases take a painfully long time to wind their way through the system, they have one clear advantage: The standard of proof is a “preponderance of the evidence,” meaning tipping just over 50 percent. Whether Trump knew, for example, that his violence-laced rhetoric would lead the mob to attack is far easier to establish in a civil trial than a criminal one, where even any amount of reasonable doubt can destroy the prosecution’s case. Given that Trump is now plainly on notice that his threats and exhortations cause his followers to take violent actions, he could be held accountable, possibly for hundreds of millions of dollars as Giuliani has been.

Trump cares a great deal about his money and the status of his business empire, which is integral to his identity. It is why he has attended the civil trial in New York so regularly and even bullied his way into speaking at closing arguments. 

Moreover, the networks that carry his false messages must now also take care not to venture into Big Lie territory. Fox News learned this after being forced to settle with Dominion Voting Systems for over $700 million. And OAN learned it when faced with a lawsuit by Freeman and Moss.

The consuming public has some sway here, too. Media companies should not air Trump’s speeches live, or if they do, they must be prepared to condemn his words and fact check him in real time. Audiences can bring pressure to bear on these private companies to raise their vigilance, and they can vote with their remote controls over which stations to watch. 

But above all, we must have a keener awareness of exactly how Trump is using these rhetorical techniques to pull us all toward a far more violent and dangerous political future. Calls to violence can’t get a pass, nor can dehumanizing language, election lies, and stochastic terror. 

Understanding the Trump playbook is the first step in countering it.