The Washington Post has a new story indicating that individual prosecutors involved with special counsel Jack Smith's indictment of Donald Trump are being subjected to "substantial" harassment and threats from pro-Trump deplorables. That's not exactly surprising news, but it does bring home just how grotesque Trump, a seditionist, continues to be, because it's been Trump himself inciting the threats against his declared enemies. Of course his "base" is going to respond; these are people who still support Trump after he assembled a mob that attempted to violently topple the United States government.
Anyone who still waves a Trump flag after the Jan. 6 coup attempt is a traitorous crapsack who's already proven indifferent to or supportive of political violence. If anything it's a miracle that there hasn't been more violence on Trump's behalf, but thankfully most of Trump's backers are as lazy as they are traitorous, so there you go. There is no mass violence in support of Trump; the most he can hope for is provoking a series of unhinged lone wolves. It's stochastic terrorism backed by Trump himself, and it is absolutely his intent.
We're seeing it play out in real time. We saw it play out on Jan. 6, when Trump promoted a "march" to oppose the counting of electoral votes, grew angry with security agents who had set up metal detectors to screen the marchers for weapons, and then sent them to the U.S. Capitol with instructions to intimidate the joint session of Congress assembled to certify his election loss. We saw it when Trump, watching the subsequent violence on television, tweeted his disappointment with the fleeing Vice President Mike Pence, causing the crowd to redirect its focus on finding him.
And we saw it just last week, when one of the Jan. 6 insurrectionists was arrested while in possession of multiple weapons after he showed up outside former President Barack Obama's Washington, D.C., home. How did the clearly unwell suspect get the address? From an online Trump post that revealed it.
As for the specific case of Trump's supporters targeting prosecutors working under special counsel Smith, Trump's attempts to incite such acts have been transparent. The man is not as clever as he thinks he is, and attempts to couch his threats in the same sort of speech that mob bosses use when suggesting actions to their subordinates are not as subtle as he imagines them to be. He's got a history of this: a wannabe mob boss who became an actual mob boss, ultimately using violence to get what he wants.
In late June Trump posted an all-caps message to his Truth Social media site: "COULD SOMEBODY PLEASE EXPLAIN TO THE DERANGED, TRUMP HATING JACK SMITH, HIS FAMILY, AND HIS FRIENDS, THAT AS PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES, I COME UNDER THE PRESIDENTIAL RECORDS ACT, AS AFFIRMED BY THE CLINTON SOCKS CASE, NOT BY THIS PSYCHOS’ FANTASY OF THE NEVER USED BEFORE ESPIONAGE ACT OF 1917."
Campaign Action
Setting aside the usual indecipherability of Trump's would-be logic, that's among the most overt encouragement to his base that Trump has indulged in. He overtly asks his allies to confront Smith, and his family, and his friends, and there's nobody on the planet who plausibly thinks that Trump means that he thinks if some of his allies successfully accost Smith's spouse or children during a shopping trip, those allies will be able to so eloquently explain the "Clinton Socks case" to those family members that they will have no choice but to return home to the "DERANGED" Smith and explain to him that he's gotten the laws all wrong.
Nobody on the planet thinks that and anyone who says they do is a lying sack of dog vomit. Trump wants Smith's family confronted, not convinced.
It's a pattern Trump has used as one of his prime means of intimidating law enforcement, government workers, judges, and even a vice president—and it works. "Far-right Trump supporters are posting the names of prosecutors and government workers online and yelling them at demonstrations, threatening them and sometimes revealing details about their personal lives," reports the Post, having gotten those names either from court documents or from Trump allies like Rudy Giuliani who themselves post conspiracy theories against election volunteers and the like.
Trump is asking his supporters to probe and harass the people around Smith, and his already-seditious base is eager to do it. Most of those allies will limit themselves to posting new conspiracy theories about Smith's family, social connections, and prosecutors, conspiracy theories meant to egg on others into believing all of those supposed Trump enemies are inherently malevolent and dangerous.
A few will go further, like the Truth Social-using Trump supporter who attempted to assault an IRS office in Cincinnati before being shot by law enforcement. That happened in the days after FBI agents conducted a search of Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort and carted off national security documents Trump had attempted to hide. And Trump only needs a few of the truly violent to show up in order to achieve his goal of making it not just politically dangerous to prosecute him for his crimes, but physically dangerous as well.
This pattern pre-dates Trump’s time in office. Adult film actor Stormy Daniels claims that when she was preparing to tell her story all the way back in 2011, a man approached her in Las Vegas to threaten her and her young daughter if she didn’t back off the plan to expose her 2006 affair with Trump. This is a game Trump continues to play, and he's not going to stop. He has repeatedly appeared to genuinely enjoy the thought of violence on his behalf, and has been repeatedly called out for it. Trump created a movement that embraces sedition, insurrection, demonization, false information, and violence. Fortunately, the number of supporters willing to risk their lives and freedom for Trump remains small, but it's not zero. The Jan. 6 insurrection proved that. And knowing that is probably the only thing in Trump's life that still gives the indicted thug some hint of joy in his life. That, and cuddling up with whatever classified documents prosecutors haven't found yet.
RELATED STORY: Jan. 6 suspect arrested near Obama's house after Trump posts the address