Donald Trump drew an angry response from the Joe Biden White House as well as other opponents after he posted a video containing the image of the president hog-tied on the tailgate of a passing pickup truck.
The Biden campaign communications director, Michael Tyler, said the provocative image of the truck festooned with Trump 2024 insignia on Friday night could be construed as suggesting physical harm toward the former president’s political rival.
“Trump is regularly inciting political violence and it’s time people take him seriously – just ask the Capitol police officers who were attacked protecting our democracy on January 6,” Tyler said, referring to the day in early 2021 when the ex-president’s supporters attacked Congress.
The Trump campaign spokesperson, Steven Cheung, replied that the picture in question depicted the back of a pickup truck that was traveling down the highway.
“Democrats and crazed lunatics have not only called for despicable violence against president Trump and his family, they are actually weaponizing the justice system against him,” Cheung said.
Cheung’s remark was a clear reference to more than 80 criminal charges pending against Trump for attempts to forcibly overturn his defeat to Biden in the 2020 election, retention of classified materials after his presidency and hush-money payments. Trump is also facing multimillion-dollar civil penalties for business practices that have been deemed fraudulent and a rape claim which a judge has determined to be substantially true.
The image of Biden in the truck as well as the reaction to it cap another week of scripted – and unscripted – drama on a presidential campaign trail that is becoming increasingly tense.
Biden’s polling number have risen in crucial swing states since a punchy State of the Union address. And his campaign is beating presumptive Republican nominee Trump in fundraising to the tune of tens of millions of dollars.
On Thursday night, Biden held a fundraiser at New York City’s Radio City Music Hall with former Democratic presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. The glitzy event raised a reported $25m, though it was repeatedly interrupted by demonstrators protesting against the military aid that Biden’s administration has provided to Israel in its strikes in Gaza.
Trump, meanwhile, was at the wake of New York police officer Jonathan Diller, 31, who was shot to death during a traffic stop. The former president called Diller’s murder “a horrible thing” and said “police are the greatest people we have”.
Yet Trump’s remarks also earned him criticism, with commenters noting that the January 6 US Capitol attack carried out by his supporters injured dozens of officers. The attack – a failed, desperate effort to keep Trump in office despite his defeat to Biden – was also linked to some officers’ suicides.
Meanwhile, a caption on the video with the image of a hog-tied Biden said it had been taken in Long Island, New York, just as the former president attended Diller’s memorial and condemned the violence that killed the officer.
Trump’s posting of the hog-tie video comes less than three weeks before the former president is due to stand trial in a criminal case alleging that he covered up payments to two women ahead of the 2016 election to suppress information about extramarital sexual encounters they said he had with them years earlier.
The prosecutor in that case, the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, has also been the subject of violent pictorial representation posted by Trump. The former president last year shared a picture showing him holding a baseball bat next to Bragg.
