Trump Threatens Death & Destruction If He Is Arrested

0
460
Trump Armageddon. Graphic by Terelle Jerricks

Fearing imminent indictment on multiple fronts, Donald Trump did what he does best on March 18: He lied. Spectacularly. In a headline-grabbing way. It was the first volley in a series of social media posts intended to cement his hold on the GOP and radicalize it further against democracy in order to protect himself from standing trial and potentially going to prison.

In the days that followed, GOP leaders echoed his lies and attacks on the criminal legal system, visited and celebrated jailed Jan. 6 insurgents, and telegraphed their intent to pass a law protecting Trump from any criminal prosecution — a law contrary to everything “small government” conservatives claim to stand for — like accountability.

One week later, he held his first 2024 campaign rally in Waco, Texas, during the 30th anniversary of the the Branch Davidian siege, “a not-so-quiet dog whistle to anti-government conspiracy theorists,” as Natalie Jackson, a locally-raised national pollster described it on Substack. “The conspiracy movements that remain inspired by those events have rallied for Trump on plenty of occasions, and he is not going to stop leveraging their anger in his attempt to regain power.”

At the rally, Trump claimed the so-called “weaponization of our justice system … is the central issue of our time,” positioning himself as the ultimate victim. He also claimed, “I’ve got bad publicity and my poll numbers are going through the roof.” But as he spoke, his favorability sat at 41.7% in 538’s average (down from an early March high of 43.3%) compared to 53.5% unfavorable. He was the only U.S. president in history never to reach 50% favorability.

Only about a third of Republican primary voters are hard-core Trump supporters, according to Jackson and other pollsters’ recent analyses, but there’s no other clear center of gravity in the party, and Trump clearly intends to keep it that way by framing the the entire political landscape around his self-proclaimed innocent victimhood, symbolically fused with his supporters — classic elements of fascist propaganda.

In his initial lie-packed social media post — a racist, antisemitic incitement to violence, overflowing with conspiratorial insinuations — Trump claimed he was about to be arrested on the following Tuesday based on non-existent leaks from the Manhattan District Attorney’s office, and called on his supporters to “Protest, take our nation back!”

But there was no leak. There was no arrest. And there were no protests. There was only an intensified escalation of Trump’s hateful, mendacious attacks, faithfully echoed by GOP politicians, culminating in threats of mass violence, that “potential death & destruction in such a false charge could be catastrophic for our Country.”

This, combined with further menacing posts targeting New York County District Attorney Alvin Bragg (one with Trump holding a baseball bat right next to Bragg’s head) could result in further criminal charges, experts warned. “There could be charges brought because he is threatening a public official,” former federal prosecutor Glenn Kirschner said on MSNBC. “This is very similar to the language he used in that we know incited violence, he knows incited violence, he knows precisely what he’s doing.”

But as they unfolded, Trump’s attacks had other targets as well: the rule of law, conservative/antisemitic boogeyman George Soros (falsely accused of funding Bragg and supposedly pulling his strings), his main GOP primary opponent, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, and the collective sanity of the American public, as Trump’s barrage of fantastical lies was clearly intended to gaslight the public into a helpless state of radical uncertainty about even the most basic facts.

Radicalizing The GOP & Consolidating 2024 Support

Roughly half of Republicans who think Trump did a good job think it’s time for someone new, according to polls, and DeSantis has targeted them with a Trumpian culture-war agenda, trumpeting his political success as Florida’s governor while refusing to name anything he disagrees with Trump on. Essentially, he’s been counting on the criminal justice system to get rid of Trump for him — just as Mitch McConnell and most Senate Republicans did when they acquitted Trump in his impeachment trial. But Trump’s attack on the justice system, rallying GOP support, left DeSantis flat-footed as a chorus of prominent Republicans began echoing Trump’s false claims, with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy leading the way, and opening the door for intensified attacks on the criminal justice system.

“Here we go again — an outrageous abuse of power by a radical DA who lets violent criminals walk as he pursues political vengeance against President Trump,” McCarthy tweeted, shortly after Trump’s initial attack. “I’m directing relevant committees to immediately investigate if federal funds are being used to subvert our democracy by interfering in elections with politically motivated prosecutions.”

Two days later, three House Committee chairs wrote to Bragg, accusing him of “an unprecedented abuse of prosecutorial authority” and saying, “we expect that you will testify about what plainly appears to be a politically motivated prosecutorial decision.”

On March 23, Bragg’s office calmly, but firmly responded that the letter was “an unprecedented inquiry into a pending local prosecution” whose “requests are an unlawful incursion into New York’s sovereignty,” going on to say,” [I]t is clear that Congress cannot have any legitimate legislative task relating to the oversight of local prosecutors enforcing state law,” but requesting to “meet and confer” in order to discover if there was any legitimate purpose that they could accommodate.

On March 25, the Republican chairs responded, claiming that protecting Trump from prosecution was a legitimate legislative task. After falsely claiming Bragg’s prosecution was improper, they wrote that they “must now consider whether to draft legislation that would, if enacted, insulate current and former presidents from such improper state and local prosecutions.”

“Setting aside that Congress has no constitutional authority to do this,” author James Surowiecki tweeted, “seems weird to allow former presidents to rob and murder with no fear of prosecution.”

No such law will pass, of course. Senate Democrats wouldn’t pass it, nor would President Joe Biden sign it. But House Republicans are increasingly unmoored from traditional small-government ideology that might have constrained them.

“It’s bad enough to be silent about Trump’s abusive rants, but to make a chamber of Congress part of Trump’s defense team reveals the depth of the rot,” columnist E.J. Dionne wrote. He went on to say, “the incentives and current architecture of politics make it unlikely that any of this will change,” citing two recent studies highlighting the importance of non-college White voters for the GOP. The first found that 142 of the House’s 222 current GOP districts have low levels of racial diversity and are dominated by non-college White voters. The second found that “Racial and cultural issues, rather than economic ones, have fueled Republican gains with the non-college white electorate” over the past 40 years. Commenting on the first study, the Atlantic’s Ronald Brownstein wrote, “the energy in the party over recent years has shifted from the small-government arguments that drove the GOP in the Reagan era toward the unremitting culture-war focus pursued by Donald Trump and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.”

There’s certainly some truth in this. But it leaves a lot out. Mitt Romney was the GOP’s presidential candidate in 2012, and his campaign was much closer to Ronald Reagan’s two campaigns than it was to Donald Trump’s, which came just after him. And a deeper look at GOP politics tells the same story.

A 2020 briefing paper from the V-Dem Institute “New Global Data on Political Parties” found that “the Republican party in the US has retreated from upholding democratic norms in recent years. Its rhetoric is closer to authoritarian parties, such as AKP in Turkey and Fidesz in Hungary,” while “the Democratic party has retained a commitment to long standing democratic standards.” Neither party had shifted noticeably on the economic left/right scale since 2000, but two-thirds of the GOP’s dramatic shift on the “illiberalism” scale occurred just between 2014 and 2016, with no further shift in 2018. Only one-fourth of the shift happened up until Romney’s campaign. Trump’s 2016 campaign was clearly the most consequential. There was a trend before he ran, but he dramatically accelerated it. Which strongly suggests two things: There is no easy going back to the pre-Trump GOP, and Trump is uniquely attuned to where it now is.

Ron DeSantis has tried to implement culture war policies that reflect the attitudes Trump has repeatedly stressed, which appeals to voters who like Trump’s politics but not the political losses Trump has brought. But the pure performative joy Trump gets from his cruelty is something DeSantis can’t match, and that’s really the main attraction of Trumpian politics. The policies themselves really aren’t that popular.

Still, that doesn’t mean Trump’s grip on the nomination is secure. Seth Coltar, an historian of the far right, noted a distinct lack of online enthusiasm for Trump on March 21. “Checked in on a few MAGA-inclined FB groups that I know about and there is absolutely zero concern or interest expressed about Trump’s possible impending arrest. His J6-esque calls to arms seem to be meeting mostly with crickets,” he tweeted. “Lots of commentary about Biden’s veto, state level bills that folks are concerned about, etc. … so it’s not like folks aren’t posting, they just aren’t posting about Trump’s legal woes.”

This wasn’t necessarily good news, he told Random Lengths. “Just because armed lunatics won’t take to NYC streets to prevent Trump from being arrested, that doesn’t mean that goons like Jordan, Gaetz, Boebert, Greene, et. al. with an assist from McCarthy and implicit support from McConnell won’t do everything they can to weaponize the government and legal system to use it to take down any Democratic politician they think is too effective or popular,” he explained. “To me the driving force behind GOP politics right now is a recognition that there are few policy issues on which they stand much of a chance of winning nationwide. Trump has fired up the GOP base and previously apolitical white people and juiced the electoral tank for them … but now where do they go?”

DeSantis was smart enough to see this potential opening coming. But neither he nor anyone else knows how to outmaneuver Trump, even if many voters might be willing to move on.

It’s also a mistake to think that voters hold the key, as Larry Bartels argues in his new book Democracy Erodes From The Top. His book, focused on European politics since 2008, found little change in public opinion on everything controversial where rightwing populists have made gains over this time. Most of those gains have been temporary, and where they gained power — Hungary and Poland — they only turned populist after gaining power, adopting anti-democratic policies to cement themselves in power after the fact. Their leaders, like Trump, have attacked the media, the courts, and other institutions that would restrain them, and so long as they don’t do anything deeply unpopular, they can steadily tighten their grip. They do have fanatical supporters, but not enough to keep them in power electorally if things go really wrong for them. The men at the top are doing their best to change that. And that’s quite similar to what we see with the GOP.

“If we think about January 6,” Bartels told me, “It seems to me that the most important danger to democracy on January 6 was not the rioters in the capitol, but the Republican members of Congress who voted later that day to decertify electoral votes from Arizona and Pennsylvania. They were people with real powers who had a real plan that would’ve overturned the outcome of the election in a way that the protesters really couldn’t have.”

Tell us what you think about this story.