Twice in the past two weeks, Donald Trump has suggested violent consequences for those who dare to cross him.
Mark Milley, the outgoing chairman of the joint chiefs of staff? He deserves to be executed, Trump charged. Milley’s backchannel communications, intended to reassure Chinese military leaders before and after the 2020 election, amounted to a treasonous act “so egregious that, in times gone by, the punishment would have been DEATH!”
And Letitia James, the New York attorney general who filed a damaging civil fraud case against Trump? He didn’t stop at calling her “corrupt and racist”.
“I don’t think the people of this country are going to stand for it … This is a disgrace. And you ought to go after this attorney general,” he said publicly on his way into the courtroom this week.
As always, Trump walks right up to the line. He didn’t quite say “execute Milley” or “assassinate Letitia James”. But he comes perilously close, and some prominent legal experts think he has moved past free speech and into criminality.
“Trump’s first amendment freedom of speech includes the right to express his racist views about anyone, including attorney general Letitia James,” wrote Lawrence Tribe, the Harvard Law School emeritus professor. “But he has no right to foment violence against her. He crossed the line into criminal threats when he said ‘you ought to go after this attorney general.’”
But because we all are so inured to the former president’s reckless behavior and irresponsible rhetoric, most people seem to have shrugged off these shocking words as simply more of the same. Merely Trump being Trump.
Violence makes good sense to Trump’s devoted followers, as they memorably demonstrated on 6 January 2021 by storming the US Capitol.
To the crimson-capped choir, Trump’s words are gospel.
“Treason is treason. There’s only one cure for treason – being put to death,” parroted one Trump supporter in Iowa when asked by an NBC News reporter about Milley.
For the rest of us, it’s important to understand this rhetoric for what it is – a crucial tool of a political leader plowing the ground for the authoritarian regime he intends to lead.
“There’s a whole playbook” for would-be autocrats involving such threats, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, an expert on authoritarianism, told me recently on my Substack podcast, American Crisis.
The would-be autocrat “tries to demonstrate that democracy has failed and what you’re left with is crime, anarchy and no way to control it – so you create an appetite for a strongman”.
And she added, they paint the picture that violence is not merely necessary to fight back. It’s actually good, a necessary way of reasserting control against corruption.
Ben-Ghiat develops the theme in her 2020 book, Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present.
“In the tradition of the fascists,” she writes, “Trump uses his rallies to train his followers to see violence in a positive light.”
As the Republican frontrunner ramps up his 2024 presidential campaign and defends himself against myriad legal challenges, his violent talk is escalating. In California recently, for example, he trashed the state’s crime rates, promising that when he’s in charge, shoplifters won’t be tolerated.
Blood will flow.
“Very simply, if you rob a store, you can fully expect to be shot as you are leaving that store,” he said at the California Republican fall convention. The crowd, of course, cheered him on.
Fox News and its imitators are right there to help him with the messaging.
“Trump decries corruption, ‘election fraud’ at NYC civil fraud trial” went the headline on the rightwing network’s story about his remarks on his way to court. Those distancing quotation marks around election fraud, no doubt, are supposed to communicate that Fox learned its lesson after paying Dominion Voting Systems $787m in a recent defamation settlement over spreading lies about the 2020 election.
As that Fox headline suggests, Trump’s aggression is all about fighting corruption and fraud with whatever weapons are available.
At this point, that crowd of true believers and media amplifiers are a lost cause.
But the rest of us – reasonable citizens and the reality-based press – ought to understand what this violent rhetoric really means. And what it may help to accomplish.
The goal is to throw out American democracy and move to something none of us should want.
Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist writing on media, politics and culture
