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There is a clear and present danger in this country.
If grows more dangerous, with every newly issued not-so-vague threat …
Threats, the issuer may not carry out personally himself, but threats none the less …
On Truth Social, Trump said the only person worse than [Attorney General Letitia] James was [Judge] Engoron.
“His name is Arthur Engoron & he is a vicious, biased, and mean ‘rubber stamp’ for the Communist takeover of the great & prosperous American company that I have built over a long period of years," Trump wrote.
www.usnews.com — Oct 28, 2022
Delusional lies, meant to motivate his delusional followers.
Chilling, in both their manner and effect ...
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This brings us to a third gambit: threats. If the people pursuing these criminal investigations into his conduct don’t back off, he warns, someone—not him, mind you—might do something dangerous. [...]
“I don’t think the people of the United States would stand for it,” he said. “I think if it happened, I think you’d have problems in this country the likes of which perhaps we’ve never seen before. I don’t think the people of the United States would stand for it.”
The implication was clear enough that Hewitt felt the need to throw Trump a preemptive lifeline: “You know that the legacy media will say you’re attempting to incite violence with that statement.”
“That’s not inciting,” Trump replied. “I’m just saying what my opinion is. I don’t think the people of this country would stand for it.”
www.theatlantic.com — Sept 16, 2022
Too many people have been standing for his incendiary language.
Too many people have been taking his threats as a call to action ...
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Three days later, an Ohio man named Ricky Shiffer donned tactical gear, armed himself with an AR-15, and went to the FBI field office in Cincinnati. After failing to breach the facility, he fled and later died in a shootout with law enforcement. Shiffer was a frequent user of Trump’s Truth Social site, where the ex-president has kept up steady attacks on political opponents and the Justice Department and FBI. Shiffer had posted about imminent violence, telling fellow Trump supporters to be ready “to jump into civil war.”
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Was Shiffer spurred to attack the FBI by the statements from Trump and Gosar? It’s hard to know, and that’s no accident. Shiffer’s actions point to a rhetorical method experts call “stochastic terrorism,” whereby a leader vilifies a person or group in ways likely to instigate random supporters to attack those targets, while the instigator maintains a veneer of plausible deniability. Trump made this form of incitement a hallmark of his presidency, galvanizing extremists by railing against and dehumanizing his “enemies.” The country saw the devastating consequences when his supporters stormed Congress to obstruct certification of the presidential election. And now a growing number of Republicans are emulating Trump’s technique.
“While these attacks may defy specific predictability,” threat assessment experts Molly Amman and Reid Meloy wrote in a 2021 study in the journal Perspectives on Terrorism, “their likelihood is greatly increased by the public demonization process.” Repetition and saturation through social media and news coverage further amplifies the effect, they observed.
www.motherjones.com — Nov-Dec 2022
“We need to be better than this.”
— Better than issuing a “Death Wish” to public servants.
— Better than inciting anger, based on still unproven lies ...
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Mississippi Democratic Rep. Bennie Thompson, who chairs the House select committee, on Monday condemned Trump’s social media assault on McConnell and told colleagues in both parties, “We need to be better than this.”
He said in a statement that Trump’s rhetoric “could incite political violence, and the former President knows full well that extremists often view his words as marching orders.”
In an editorial on Monday, the conservative editorial page of The Wall Street Journal also condemned Trump’s attack on McConnell.
“The ‘death wish’ rhetoric is ugly even by Mr. Trump’s standards and deserves to be condemned. Mr. Trump’s apologists claim he merely meant Mr. McConnell has a political death wish, but that isn’t what he wrote,” the paper said.
www.cnn.com — Oct 4, 2022
You would think threatening “violence in the streets” — simply for counting all the votes — would be patently Un-American.
That no one would take such incitements seriously — you might think that, but Newsflash:
Many have taken it seriously. The 1-6 Attack was not a practice match — it was for keeps.
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But to cite just one example—specifically because it’s in the context of Trump issuing a “warning,” ostensibly meant to prepare the public for the consequences of someone doing something he doesn’t like—let’s go back to Nov. 2, 2020: the day before the election.
Trump, the sitting president, tweeted that the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to allow Pennsylvania to receive absentee ballots for three days after Election Day (a common practice in many states)—would “induce violence in the streets.”
Was this a warning? Or was it a threat?
Trump appeared to make his intentions clear when he added, “Something must be done!” and called the Supreme Court’s decision “dangerous.” Lest the meaning be lost on anyone still dense enough to think Trump’s just talking shit and shouldn’t be taken literally, he added, “And I mean physically dangerous.”
A couple months later, at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, we learned once and for all that Trump should be taken seriously AND literally. When he “warns” of violence, he’s implicitly activating that part of the MAGA base, and they take him literally.
www.thedailybeast.com — Sept 26, 2022
They have taken such dangerous threats seriously. And will continue to do so, until the source of lies, hatred, and violence — is held accountable for his delusions of grandeur.
Held accountable for his intentional deceptions … his direct warnings ...
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We’ve long known that Trump has no compunction about inciting or praising violence, so long as he also gives himself a bit of legal deniability. The full list of examples is too long to go over, but here are some of them. During the 2016 Presidential campaign, he said he’d pay the legal fees of his supporters if they “knock the hell” out of protesters at his rallies. In 2017, he said there were “fine people on both sides” of the clashes in Charlottesville between white supremacists and counter-protesters, during which a neo-Nazi rammed his car into a crowd, killing a thirty-two-year-old woman. In May, 2020, during the demonstrations against the police killing of George Floyd, he offered to send the U.S. military to Minnesota and tweeted, “When the looting starts, the shooting starts.” On December 19, 2020, he called on his supporters to descend on Washington on January 6th, saying, “Be there, will be wild.” Last month, in an interview with Hugh Hewitt, a conservative radio host, Trump said the American people wouldn’t stand for him being indicted. When Hewitt pointed out that this statement could be interpreted as an incitement to violence, Trump replied, “That’s not inciting. I’m just saying what my opinion is.”
www.newyorker.com — Oct 4, 2022
Until the would-be ruler for life, is treated like the pariah he is — he will continue to hold the nation hostage, to whatever doxing scenario, that he dares to dream up next ...
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Mentions of “civil war” on platforms including Facebook and Twitter increased tenfold in the hours immediately after last week’s search of Mar-a-Lago, according to an analysis by Zignal Labs, a firm that analyzes social media content.
Many of the posts contained baseless claims suggesting President Joe Biden ordered the FBI to search Trump’s home, or that the FBI planted evidence to incriminate Trump.
“Biden sending the FBI to raid a former President, Mr. Donald Trump’s home is a declaration of WAR against him and his supporters,” wrote one poster on the Telegram platform.
The intelligence bulletin also noted federal law enforcement officials have identified multiple threats against government officials involved in the Mar-a-Lago search, including calls to kill the magistrate judge who signed the search warrant.
The names and home addresses of FBI agents and other officials have been posted online, along with references to family members who could be additional targets, according to the intelligence documents.
apnews.com — Aug 16, 2022
If only it were all delusional, there might be an excuse, for attacking our democracy.
But his admissions to insiders, shows how his lies are intentional.
Intended to do harm … harm to the country that most of us love ...
If there was a time when Trump didn’t know how people would respond when he makes these veiled threats, it has passed. He understands now, and does it anyway. His persistence also helps show why his claims that his exhortations on January 6 were not incitement are not to be believed.
www.theatlantic.com — Sept 16, 2022
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There is a clear and present danger in this country.
If grows more dangerous, with every newly issued not-so-vague increasingly direct threats …
Meanwhile his captives continue to play along with the strongman ploy ...
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Donald Trump is the accelerant -- vox.com
Trump threatens Hillary Clinton with death all over again — and nobody seems to care -- salon.com
The times Trump has advocated for violence -- axios.com
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