Trump fanatics threaten citizen’s arrest against anyone who pokes ex-president’s ‘fragile psyche’: conservative
Donald Trump has effectively deputized a "mob" of vigilantes who are intimidating elected officials and civilians across the country, according to one conservative.
Armed extremists have threatened citizens arrests of public officials and others in various states in an intimidation campaign that bears strong similarities to the Jan. 6 insurrection, and The Bulwark's Mona Charen said that's no coincidence.
"Stories of threats and violence aimed at ordinary Americans who are simply serving on school boards, supervising elections, holding public office, opening a mobile vaccine clinic, or having the effrontery to be elected as secretary of state are not new," Charen wrote. "It’s a mashup of pandemic-induced mania, social media misinformation, Trump-incited disinhibition, and something in the water."
The citizen's arrest is rooted in English common law and has been codified in many states, often with strict limitations on its use and by whom, but this recent trend is different.
"The invocation of the citizen’s arrest as an excuse for political violence is new," Charen wrote. "Trump set this table with his 'lock her up' chants in 2016, his accusations of treason against New York Times guest editorialists, the FBI, and anyone else who damaged his fragile psyche. His 2019 Twitter tantrum at Representative Adam Schiff was the gold standard."
Trump ordered Schiff questioned for "Fraud & Treason" and then upped the ante by calling for his arrest the next day on "Treason" during the first impeachment saga, and threats against elected officials doubled between 2017 and 2020 -- and the mob of supporters who stormed the U.S. Capitol to overturn the former president's election loss echoed that language during the riot.
"It’s not enough to see these people as revolutionaries or criminals or dupes," Charen said. "Some may be all of those things, but there is a substrate of perverted patriotism here. The frequent invocation of the citizens’ arrest signifies a wish for legitimacy. They yearn to be responsible citizens, upholding the law and the Constitution and the duties of the individual. They have been corrupted, but that’s all the more reason for the rest of the American people to assert their uncorrupted patriotism more boldly."
"They must get active and defend the election workers, health care workers, school board members, journalists, politicians, secretaries of state, and anyone else who is being intimidated, hounded, or abused by the mob," she added. "If patriotism animates only the worst among us, we are lost."
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