Massive roundup of Trump's violent quotes undercut his gripe of inflammatory Dem rhetoric

A new interactive article rounded up 40 instances of Donald Trump rousing supporters with violent rhetoric and threatening language against Americans, undercutting the former president’s accusations that his political opponents' rhetoric inspired his two assassination attempts.

The Atlantic's roundup of posts the MAGA leader made in 2020, 2016 and 2015, including threatening Twitter posts amid the Minneapolis riots after George Floyd’s death. In that instance, he said, “When the looting starts, the shooting starts."

It also included more recent remarks like one made during a campaign speech earlier this year: “If I don’t get elected … it’s going to be a bloodbath for the country.”

Readers can see and hear Trump’s own words for themselves in the interactive article.

“The reality, however, is that Trump himself has a long record — singular among American presidents of the modern era — of inciting and threatening violence against his fellow citizens, journalists, and anyone he deems his opposition,” the article said before highlighting 40 examples from the 2016 presidential campaign to the final months of the 2024 campaign.

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It added that the roundup was just “a partial list of his violent comments.”

“Maybe he should have been roughed up, because it was absolutely disgusting what he was doing,” Trump said in 2015 when asked about a heckler at one of his rallies a day earlier, according to the article.

It also takes readers back to 2016 when Trump is asked what he believes would happen if he didn’t win the Republican nomination in a telling preview of how he would react to an election loss: “I think you’d have riots.”

In perhaps one of his more infamous statements – “You also had people that were very fine people on both sides,” – readers were offered audio of Trump making the widely-criticized assessment of a white-nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, while simultaneously playing the powerful moment of a vehicle in reverse after driving into a group of counter-protesters.