How Donald Trump turned America into a seething cauldron of political violence

The aftermath of the failed assassination attempt on Trump on July 13 was a rare moment in which voices across the spectrum pleaded: Political violence has no place in the United States.

There was one problem with the plea. For the last decade, the chief instigator, cheerleader, and apologist of political violence has been Donald J. Trump.

Trump revels in political violence. He alone fomented the deadly Jan. 6 insurrection, the only attempted coup in U.S. history. In 2017, he said there were “very fine people” among white nationalists days after one of their ranks murdered Heather Heyer in Charlottesville, Virginia. In 2020 he told the Proud Boys, a violent fascist gang, to “Stand back and stand by.” In 2016, he implied his followers could shoot his opponent Hillary Clinton when he said maybe “Second Amendment people” could stop her from picking Supreme Court justices.

Trump has not let up. In 2023 he told his supporters, “I am your retribution.” This March Trump warned, “Now if I don’t get elected … It’s going to be a bloodbath for the country.” In June, Trump vowed “revenge” against his enemies.

Political violence has been Trump’s defining quality since that day in June 2015 when he descended a golden escalator and ranted about Mexican immigrants, “They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.”

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Two months later, two Boston-area men engaged in what prosecutors called a “vicious and unprovoked” assault on a homeless man because he was Hispanic. One assailant told police, “Donald Trump was right, all these illegals need to be deported.” When asked about the assault, Trump claimed he didn’t know anything about it, but then in effect endorsed the attack, “I will say that people who are following me are very passionate. They love this country and they want this country to be great again. They are passionate.”

That set the tone for the 2016 campaign. Embracing and celebrating political violence was Trump’s calling card. By early 2016 Trump’s encouragement of violence against protesters at his rallies was so frequent The New York Timescompiled a greatest hits video:

“Maybe he should have been roughed up.”

“Knock the crap out of them, would you? Seriously. … I will pay for the legal fees.”

“You know what they used to do to guys like that when they were in a place like this? They’d be carried out on a stretcher folks.”

“I’d like to punch him in the face. I’ll tell you.”

“They used to treat them very, very rough. And when they protested once, you know they would not do it again so easily.”

Trump has transformed America into a seething cauldron of political violence of every form imaginable. Trump was entirely responsible for Jan. 6. He was the chief organizer, telling his followers “Be there, will be wild!” Before his armed supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol, he exhorted, “And we fight. We fight like hell. And if you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore.” His heavily armed mob wielded tasers, pepper spray, baseball bats, and other blunt instruments in a “medieval battle” that injured at least 140 police officers and killed five people. Even as aides, congressional leaders, and his family begged Trump to call off his Brownshirts, he poured “gasoline on the fire,” a White House aide said later, by attacking Mike Pence on Twitter as he was fleeing for his life.

After his goons committed thousands of acts of political violence on Jan. 6, Trump tweeted a video in which he said, “So go home, we love you, you’re very special.”

Political violence follows Trump like black flies follow water buffalo. In 2016 hate crimes surged 226 percent in counties that hosted a Trump rally in contrast to similar counties that did not host one, according to a Washington Post analysis.

Trump is an accelerant for individual hate crimes. In May 2020, ABC News “identified at least 54 criminal cases where Trump was invoked in direct connection with violent acts, threats of violence or allegations of assault.” What’s remarkable is these are just the statements that were admissible as evidence. In one instance a white man suddenly punched a Latino gas-station attendant in Florida and was caught on a surveillance camera saying, “This is for Trump.” In another case a suspect in Washington state who threated to kill a Syrian-born man told police that he wanted the victim “to get out of my country,” and added, “That’s why I like Trump.”

Trump is linked to dozens of white nationalist terrorists who killed at least 25 people in 2017, his first year in office. Many mass shooters have been Trump fans or cited his words and ideas. This includes massacres that killed 10 people or more at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, Parkland High School in Florida, a Walmart in El Paso, and a Buffalo supermarket. The mass shooter who killed 51 people at two mosques in New Zealand in 2019 hailed Trump as “a symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose.”

Trump’s enthusiasm for violence has bred the worst outburst of organized far-right terrorism since the days of Jim Crow. Dozens of militias and gangs cropped up after Trump began his campaign in 2015 such as the Proud Boys, Patriot Prayer, Atomwaffen Division, Identity Evropa, Rise Above Movement, American Guard, and Patriot Front, which together are responsible for more than a dozen deaths.

While many of these groups were short-lived or changed their identity, Trump encouraged the new generation. Some graduated from Charlottesville — where they joined with established pro-Trump extremists like David Duke, the KKK, the Daily Stormer, Neo-Nazis, Richard Spencer, the Oath Keepers, and League of the South — to Jan. 6 where they were identified among the forty-six extremist groups that joined in the insurrection.

Trump has created an entirely new form of political violence as a result of his attack on the 2020 vote: violent threats against election workers. In 2021 Reuters published an investigative series describing how: “The people who administer U.S. elections – from poll workers and ballot counters to county clerks and secretaries of state – have endured a year of terroristic threats from supporters of former President Donald Trump, inspired by his false assertions of widespread fraud in the 2020 vote. The result … has been a campaign of intimidation that is stressing the foundation of American democracy.”

In one report Reuters said it “identified more than 100 threats of death or violence made to U.S. election workers and officials.” Reuters also described how law enforcement agencies failed to investigate many cases, and overall they “have made almost no arrests and won no convictions.”

With his bevy of lawsuits and criminal cases have come “threats to the prosecutors, judges and other public officials involved in his cases,” according to Politico. “Some have been besieged by racist messages or death threats. Others have been targeted by ‘swatting’ calls.”

In 2019, Trump tweeted an edited video that portrayed Rep. Ilhan Omar as downplaying the 9/11 attacks. One of the first Muslims in Congress, Omar said, “I have experienced an increase in direct threats on my life — many directly referring or replying to the president's video.” Trump responded by attacking Omar again.

After Trump attacked a CIA analyst who filed a whistleblower report that led to his first impeachment as “almost a spy,” the analyst “faced a torrent of threats” that earned him the dubious distinction as “The CIA’s most endangered employee” in the world.

Trump’s attacks on Dr. Anthony Fauci weeks into the coronavirus pandemic led to near constant federal protection for him and his family.

As the 2020 election loomed, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer wrote, “Every time the president ramps up this violent rhetoric, every time he fires up Twitter to launch another broadside against me, my family and I see a surge of vicious attacks sent our way. This is no coincidence, and the president knows it. … he thinks it will help his reelection.”

So heated was Trump’s violent rhetoric in 2020, The Washington Postsaid “seething hostility stoked by a sitting president” was aimed at “nearly every category of government service: mayors, governors and members of Congress, as well as officials Trump has turned against within his own administration.”

Trump is a superspreader of violence who has infected the entire right. It is now common for the MAGA world to threaten civil war. In 2022, after the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago for classified documents that Trump allegedly held, talk of civil war exploded 3,000 percent on Twitter. After Trump was found guilty of 34 felony charges on May 31, far-right threats of civil war, insurrection, and coups bounced around the internet. On July 4, the head of the Heritage Foundation, which is orchestrating Trump’s 2025 Project to grab power, declared a “second American Revolution” and all but promised bloodletting against the left.

After the failed assassination, the GOP blamed political violence on Biden and the Democrats. But it was the right that cried “War now,” “They should all be hung in the streets,” “eradicate and eliminate all democrats.” Wired reported the right is not just taking about war, it’s planning for it. “Militia and anti-government groups across the United States are using the attempted assassination of former president Donald Trump as an opportunity to organize, recruit, and train.”

As dangerous as Trump and his forces are out of power, they have a far greater capacity for political violence in power such as by ethnic cleansing millions of immigrants, encouraging and overlooking police brutality, and deploying military forces against protesters.

If there is any hope of preventing such a scenario, it needs to start with the media explaining loudly and clearly that for the last decade Trump has been a purveyor of political violence unlike any other seen in modern American history.

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