Trump claims to love “law and order,” but he continually incites violence. He incited the single most violent uprising in our history against the law and the Constitution on January 6, 2021. And he treated the Capitol police with contempt, those defending law and order.
He regularly attacks the judicial system—the bastion of law and order—because he is under multiple indictments.
He writes posts on social media intended to incite hatred, division, and yes, violence.
He recently paid a visit to the wake of a New York City policeman who was murdered by a criminal. It was performative politics.
The father and brother of Officer Brian Sicknick, who died after defending the U.S. Capitol, slammed Trump for playing politics. Trump did not pay a condolence call to the families of police officers who died after the riot that Trump incited. He didn’t visit any injured police officers in the hospital. Instead, he refers to those who beat up the police as “patriots.” This is sick and twisted. The people who menaced the Congress, threatened to kill the Vice-President, and damaged the seat of government are, to Trump, “patriots” and those who were convicted for their violence are “hostages.” Not the police who defended Congress. Not those who defended law and order.
Tom Nichols wrote in The Atlantic about Trump’s obsession with violence, about his encouragement of violence, about his threats and intimidation.
He wrote:
On Good Friday, Donald Trump shared a video that prominently featured a truck with a picture of a hog-tied Joe Biden on it. I’ve seen this art on a tailgate in person, and it looks like a kidnapped Biden is a captive in the truck bed.
The former president, running for his old office, knowingly transmitted a picture of the sitting president of the United States as a bound hostage.
Of course, Trump’s spokesperson Steven Cheung quickly began the minimizing and what-abouting: “That picture,” he said in a statement, “was on the back of a pick up 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.”
I cannot recall prominent elected Democrats calling for hurting Trump or his family. The closest Biden got was when he once lost his temper six years ago and said that if he and Trump were in high school, he’d have wanted to beat him up behind the gym, a comment Biden later said he regretted. And there is certainly no evidence to suggest that Biden or his spokespeople ever promoted the idea that the 45th president should be taken hostage. Over the weekend, Trump’s defenders took to social media to keep raising the 2017 picture in which the comedian Kathy Griffin held up an effigy of Trump’s severed head. So let us all stipulate: Her stunt was ghastly. Griffin’s comedy—or parody, or protest art—was in bad taste and potentially a risk to a sitting president. She paid for it: The Secret Service investigated her, and her career at CNN was torched.
But Griffin is not a former president seeking once again to become commander in chief of the armed forces and the top law-enforcement authority in the United States. And Griffin did not incite a mob of rioters—some of whom were bent on homicide—to attack the Capitol. Donald Trump is, and he did.
Meanwhile, Trump also had words last week for the people trying to hold him accountable—or, more accurately, for their children. The day before he promoted imagery depicting the torture of the sitting president, Trump fired off a Truth Social post in which he mentioned the daughter of Juan Merchan, the judge presiding over his hush-money criminal trial: “Judge Juan Merchan is totally compromised, and should be removed from this TRUMP Non-Case immediately,” Trump wrote. “His Daughter, Loren, is a Rabid Trump Hater, who has admitted to having conversations with her father about me, and yet he gagged me.”
Then, on Saturday, Trump blasted out a New York Post article that included Loren Merchan’s picture to his followers.
Trump’s fan base will shrug off its leader’s condoning of violent fantasies and implied threats of violence as more harmless lib-owning. But what Trump is doing is dangerous, and the time is long past to stop treating support for his candidacy as just one of many ordinary political choices. As the historian of authoritarianism Ruth Ben-Ghiat posted on Friday on X: “This is an emergency. This is what authoritarian thugs and terrorists do. Trump is targeting the President of the United States.”
Other Americans are well within their rights to wonder if this is what Trump supporters actually want to see in 2024.
Perhaps a thought experiment might help: Would today’s Trump supporters think it hilarious, say, to see Ronald Reagan or Jimmy Carter bound in the same way that Biden was depicted? Perhaps Bill Clinton or the Bushes tied up like hostages? (We can only begin to imagine what kind of ugly end the truck Rembrandts might have portrayed for Barack Obama.)
After seeing Trump post this video, I found myself wanting to ask his voters the questions that always occur after one of his outrages: Is this okay with you? Is this something you’d want your children to see?…
Unfortunately, we’re not getting much help in making those determinations from some of the media. On Sunday morning, for example, Kristen Welker of Meet the Press noted that Trump had “stepped up his attacks on the judge and his family in the New York hush money case” and is “falsely calling the criminal proceedings ‘election interference.’” Her verdict: “It is yet another reminder that we are covering this election against the backdrop of a deeply divided nation.”
Well, sure, that’s one way to put it. More accurately, however, we might say that a mostly coherent and decent nation is under electoral assault from a violent seditionist minority that has captured one of our two national parties, and its leader encourages and condones threats against officials at every level across the country, including threats of violence against the sitting president of the United States.
Every ardent Trump supporter should be asked when enough’s enough. And every elected Republican, including the sad lot now abasing themselves for a spot on Trump’s ticket or in his possible Cabinet, should be asked when they will risk their careers for the sake of the country, if not their souls. We have reached an important moment—one of many over the past years, if we are to be honest. After all we have learned and seen, and all of the questions we might ask of Trump supporters, perhaps only one simple and direct question truly matters now:
Is this who you are?…
In my view, Trump’s behavior towards others is vile, immature, narcissistic, and pathological. Anyone who is a critic or antagonist to Trump is treated with hatred and contempt. They deserve punishment. They should be hog-tied and beaten. They should be publicly shamed. They are not competitors, they are enemies. When Trump identifies them as such, they are certain to get death threats, threats of violence.
This is not normal. Trump has the mind of a mafia boss or a ruthless authoritarian.. He demands total loyalty. Those unwilling to embrace him and his lies and hatreds are cast out. This is not normal.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
It is absolutely sickening that anyone would want to follow a misogynistic, bigoted, racist, narcissistic, lying, criminal of a man who is only interested in himself and taking advantage of others. Inciting an insurrection on the capital, found guilty of criminal activities, etc, etc, etc. This country is, and will, become a theocracy and dictatorship under that of Trump. He will have the constitution re-written to his liking. No one running for any public office, especially for that of President, in my own opinion should not be found guilty of criminal activity. To vote for a criminal for president is just plain sickening and outrageous.
KM, You are so right. He turns my stomach
Read “The New American Nihilism” in The Atlantic, and read these books: “”White Rural Rage” and “The Rural Voter”.
And rural Americans are not alone in feeling that democracy has failed them. And that’s because scholarly analysis indicates that America today is only a paper democracy and has actually become an oligarchy: After studying more than 20 years of government policy, Princeton University researcher Martin Gilens and Northwestern University researcher Benjamin Page documented that the U.S. is no longer a representative republic because the government does not represent the interests of the majority of the country’s citizens, but is instead ruled by the rich and powerful. The researchers analyzed 1,800 U.S. policies enacted over a period of two decades and compared the laws and regulations that were passed to those favored by average Americans to those favored by wealthy Americans and corporations: “EVEN WHEN A MAJORITY OF CITIZENS DISAGREES WITH ECONOMIC ELITES OR WITH ORGANIZED SPECIAL INTERESTS ORDINARY CITIZENS GENERALLY LOSE.” In short, the United States has long been an oligarchy. Today, America has the best government that money can buy…and many Americans are angry and seeking a political Samson to bring it all crashing down.
Farmers and rural Americans know that Trump is lying to them, conning them — but they know that Trump can deliver what they want: The destruction of the failed democracy-turned-into-oligarchy that impoverishes, enslaves, and oppresses them. They know that like the biblical Samson, Trump has had his Delilahs and myriad moral failings, and they don’t care, because like the debauched Samson, Trump can and very likely will bring down the corporate temple called “America”; and they know that will destroy them, too…but they hate The System so much that they are prepared for that fate.
“Trumpism” isn’t about Trump — “Trumpism” is American Nihilism that has accrued over the past 50 years and has finally found in the person of Trump the tool for destroying The System that has left it behind economically and that does not share its traditional values.
https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-echochambers-27074746
It is indeed the case that the United States is no longer a democracy in the sense that what the majority of the people want (e.g., Medicare for All, abortion access, parental leave, higher taxes for the wealthy) does not get enacted into law. People who think that Trump is going to attempt to tear down the system that they find oppressive are fooling themselves. Trump seeks more of the same–whatever benefits Trump and only what benefits Trump.
We are a Kleptocratic Oligarchy. Democracy died when SCOTUS decided that Citizen’s United would become the law of the land. Capitalism won!
As for “those” people….there are just as many on the far left that want the same thing as the far right. ”We the People” haven’t been able to vote our way out of this mess in years, but to blow it all up without a plan is the wrong way to go.
If you were to conduct a poll of farmers, I seriously doubt that they would agree that they want to tear down the system. I expect they are very patriotic even though they hate agribusiness and factory farming.
the farmers I know do not want Trump to blow anything up.
“ we might say that a mostly coherent and decent nation is under electoral assault from a violent seditionist minority that has captured one of our two national parties,”
we might say that. So why do relatively intelligent people not believe that? Maybe denial runs deep. Maybe ignorance, but it is an ignorance born of a particular news media that has foresworn truth. While some media outlets swear fealty to neutrality, trying to “see both sides,” the right wing media outlets feed their minions on complete fabrication.
Every Republican who does not disavow magaism is complicit in its depredations.
Sad, but true. So many working class Americans feel left behind. They are naive if they think they will find solutions with the GOP. They are totally in the oligarchs’ pockets. Do these people think that more tax cuts for billionaires and corporations will benefit them, especially if the right wing slashes the social safety nets that workers depend on?
All the dump knows is violence….and lies!
That dumpster turns my stomach!
Traitor Trump’s idea of law and order is a mob of MAGARINO vigilants hanging anyone the traitor accuses of crimes without evidence, without a jury, without lawyers, or judges.
The Traitor is planning to get rid of his legal bills by getting rid of the lawyers too.
The Traitor will become law and order. His whims will be those always changing laws.
Before the traitor is done, he’d own all the land across the United States that courts were built on since the country wouldn’t need them anymore. He’d build golf courses and hotels on that land and get rid of the competition so anyone that wanted to travel or play golf would have to do it one one of his overpriced dumps.
If Traitor Trump lives into his 90s, he’d be the world’s first trillionaire before he died.