Donald Trump said he would be arrested this past Tuesday—with no apparent basis for that claim—prepped his supporters to “PROTEST,” raised money off of it, and is now continuing his push to incite violence if and when he is arrested. Just another week in the life of Trump.
Trump’s prediction that Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg would have him arrested on Tuesday related to hush money payments to cover up a brief affair with porn star Stormy Daniels helped him raise $1.5 million in three days, about double his pace in recent weeks. “It’s shaping up to be the biggest month of the campaign from a campaign finance standpoint,” an unnamed Trump adviser told Fox News.
Now Trump is trying to capitalize on the false expectation he created of a Tuesday arrest to claim that there’s “Total disarray in the Manhattan D.A.’s Office.”
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In reality, the grand jury looking at his case doesn’t even meet on Tuesdays. And you would think that the Republicans who’ve been wailing about how the district attorney’s office should have better things to do than indict Trump would be happy that the grand jury spent Thursday on other matters. (If that was a little piece of trolling by Bragg’s office, I’m here for it.) Donald Trump is not the one and only priority of the Manhattan district attorney, even if he’s the one getting the most headlines.
We know this game. If Bragg takes too long after Trump’s invented deadline, it’s disarray. If Bragg had moved early in the week, Republicans would have yelled about his unseemly rush. As tiresome as it is, it works on the Trump base.
Predictably, Trump’s incitement campaign has led to a “significant increase” in threats and violent rhetoric mostly targeting New York law enforcement and judges, CBS News reports. Multiple law enforcement agencies are getting ready for protests and attempts to block tunnels, bridges, or streets in New York City if Trump is indicted.
That’s an outcome Trump is obviously rooting for, and late Thursday night he specifically tried to promote violence against Bragg, writing on Truth Social:
What kind of person can charge another person, in this case a former President of the United States, who got more votes than any sitting President in history, and leading candidate (by far!) for the Republican Party nomination, with a Crime, when it is known by all that NO crime has been committed, & also known that potential death & destruction in such a false charge could be catastrophic for our country? Why & who would do such a thing? Only a degenerate psychopath that truely hates the USA!
What kind of person? Degenerate psychopath. And we know that the person contemplating this step is Bragg. What’s a possible result? Death and destruction—made more likely once again by Trump writing this kind of stuff. He’s really rooting for a replay of Jan. 6 here.
If Trump is arrested and there is violence, that will be on his head, too. In fact, his rhetoric now, after Jan. 6, shows that he knows what he’s doing with this. His deniability on Jan. 6 was never plausible, but on this it will be absolutely nonexistent.
Today, Kerry is joined by Drew Linzer, the director and co-founder of the well-regarded polling company, CIVIQs. Drew and Kerry talk about a recent CIVIQs poll that asked Americans from all walks of life about trans issues, among other things. Drew talks about the methodology and how the results show that conservatives tend to have more liberal views when questions are framed in terms of fundamental rights.
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