The New York judge overseeing Donald Trump's civil fraud trial, Manhattan Supreme Court Judge Arthur Engoron, slapped a limited gag order on Donald Trump early in the trial after Trump launched repeated public attacks on Engoron, his clerk, and state prosecutors. In justifying the order, which later was extended to include Trump's showboating attorneys, Engoron cited "hundreds" of threats his office has received after Trump's social media posts.
“The threat of, and actual, violence resulting from heated political rhetoric is well-documented," Engoron wrote.
That gag order (and two subsequent fines leveled against Trump for ignoring it) hasn't accomplished much. Trump is still giddily nudging potential violence along, now by promoting a particularly pointed attack from a Truth Social user. “MY FANTASY ... I WOULD LIKE TO SEE LITITIA JAMES AND JUDGE ENGORON PLACED UNDER CITIZENS ARREST FOR BLATANT ELECTION INTERFERENCE AND HARASSMENT," it read.
This is not a particularly subtle "fantasy." The notion of a “citizen's arrest” refers to the common law principle that allows bystanders who witness a (typically violent) felony to use force to disarm and detain the perpetrator before police arrive. (It is, for example, how some Republicans believe grade-school children facing a mass shooter should defend themselves.)
In far-right and militia circles, however—and especially in the cells of the far-right that believe county sheriffs hold the majority of constitutional powers and that declaring yourself a "sovereign citizen" means you can skate out from paying taxes—"citizen's arrest" refers to the militia belief that at some point armed citizens will be called upon to "arrest" members of the government, staging citizen-led trials for militia-described crimes.
It was one of the far-right objectives during the Jan. 6, 2021, coup attempt that led to seditious conspiracy convictions.
This form of citizen's arrest is indeed a fantasy. Any scenario in which Donald Trump's supporters conducted a citizen's arrest of the judge in his trial or the attorney general who brought charges against him would require pushing past or battling the law enforcement officers surrounding both, "arresting" Trump's targets, and then kidnapping them for the purposes of holding a mock trial. It's an inherently violent little fantasy, and it leans heavily on the same anti-government theories that sparked the Jan. 6 violence.
And both of those reasons are, of course, why Donald Trump is promoting the notion. Trump has never shied from fantasizing about violence against his enemies, and with his actions and inactions on Jan. 6, Trump proved himself more than willing to use actual violence against his enemies.
At this point, Trump is well on his way to being convicted of numerous felonies in numerous courtrooms. He may well see violence as one of the only remaining paths to avoiding those convictions—and he already has a history of "warning" his prosecutors that charges against him would result in violence.
That violence has been limited so far. An attempt to kill or kidnap one of those judges or prosecutors would be useful to Trump as "proof" that prosecuting him for his crimes poses too great a risk for the nation to handle.
It remains to be seen whether Engoron will respond to this new and transparent threat. I maintain my current position: Throwing Donald Trump's ass in jail for a night, a week, or a month is both warranted at this point and likely the only judicial threat he will take seriously. That probably won't happen, but another petty $5,000 or $10,000 fine won't have any impact at all.
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