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Trumpworld walks a line between predicting violence and threatening it

cigaretteman

HR King
May 29, 2001
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It is generally understood that any indictment of former president Donald Trump would be rejected out-of-hand as corrupt by many of his most fervent supporters. There are further widespread worries that some of those supporters might engage in acts of violence in response.
This is not idle speculation. The revelation that Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort had been the target of an FBI search earlier this month led to a broad backlash against the bureau, with a spike in threats against agents and at least one attempt at violence. The political right’s view of the search began with it being an unwarranted overreach, a position that has been left largely unmodified as more details emerge.
There’s an obvious parallel here: Trump and his allies repeatedly insisted that the 2020 election was tainted and, on Jan. 6, 2021, his supporters violently pushed past law enforcement and overran the Capitol.
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That this risk exists is unquestionably a complicating factor for the Justice Department as it picks its way forward in its investigation into Trump. Attorney General Merrick Garland reportedly spent weeks considering the Mar-a-Lago search before ultimately approving it, a consideration that certainly included the anticipated response.
But there is an important difference between understanding the existing threat and leveraging it.
In an interview on Fox News Sunday evening, Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) rationalized why Trump supporters would be furious at an indictment.
“There’s a double standard when it comes to Trump,” Graham told host Trey Gowdy. He articulated this “double standard” in familiar ways, including disparaging the investigation into Russian interference. “I’ll say this," Graham continued, referring to Gowdy’s former role leading the House investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of an email server while secretary of state as part of the probe of the 2012 terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya, “if there’s a prosecution of Donald Trump for mishandling classified information after the Clinton debacle, which you presided over and did ... a good job, there’ll be riots in the streets.”
Before the end of his interview, Graham returned to this point.
“If they try to prosecute President Trump for mishandling classified information after Hillary Clinton set up a server in her basement,” Graham said, "there literally will be riots in the street. I worry about our country.”
Gowdy agreed.
So did Trump. Soon after the segment aired, Trump shared a clip of it on Truth Social, without comment.
A screenshot of Trump's Truth Social post. (Truth Social)
Now the question becomes: why? Why did Graham reiterate his point about “riots” twice? And why did Trump decide to share it with his followers on the social media platform he runs?
Graham was stating that he understood the aftermath of an indictment would be likely violence — which, again, we knew. So we arrive in a grayer area, differentiating between the warning of action and the rationalization of it. Graham’s angry, pointed declaration of what would come was predicated on the idea that riots would in some way be justified, that a universe of Trump supporters who have come to understand investigations as unwarranted would understandably engage in violence.
Trump, eager to throw any roadblock in front of a criminal probe, readily amplified that suggestion. Where Graham was rationalizing possible violence, Trump appeared to be threatening it. And even recent history suggests that when Trump nods at violence or unrest, some part of his base takes him very seriously.
One effect of Graham’s comments on Sunday night is to give any acts of violence or outrage moral cover. We’ve seen this before. One response to the riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6 was that the left had engaged in a spate of violence the prior summer, compared to which the Capitol riot paled. It was an effort to minimize the violence itself. But the moral predicate for the riot — this false idea that the election was tainted — was well-established on the right. The response was seen as excessive, but understandable. Even as he appeared to break with Trump in the hours after the attack, Graham himself repeated false claims about the election results, as though there were valid questions about Biden’s win.
We must note that this attempt to rationalize potential violence in advance is based on a view of law enforcement’s actions that’s deeply rooted in false or exaggerated right-wing narratives. That the 2020 election results were suspect, that the Russia probe lacked a basis, that President Biden’s son Hunter faces no federal probe, as Graham suggested: all of these are articles of faith on Fox News and in the right-wing media universe but each is false or dubious. In other words, Graham’s explanation for why we might expect violence is rooted in false claims that he himself was elevating and validating.
It’s worth asking where this “rioting” might unfold. There are a lot of Trump supporters in blue states and in cities. (More people voted for Trump in Los Angeles County than voted for him in half of the states in the country.) It seems unlikely, though, that a Trump indictment would spur a demonstration in the heart of a major American city. Unless, of course, there’s a triggering action. Unless there’s a court hearing in D.C. or a warrant being served in Florida. What made the Capitol attack happen as a riot was a call by Trump and others to come to D.C. on that day. Otherwise, the possible violent response to a Trump indictment would be stochastic, to use a weirdly in-vogue descriptor: sporadic and relatively isolated. The sort of attack that the Department of Homeland Security warned about even while Trump was still president.
In response to a question from The Washington Post, Graham spokesman Kevin Bishop described the senator’s comments as “predicting/forecasting what he thinks will happen.” That’s certainly true. But this risk was understood before Graham articulated it on Fox News. So why articulate it there?
Again, he was obviously doing so as a warning: if the government takes this step, it is the government that is responsible for what follows. If Trump is indicted, we can expect violence and it’s the government’s fault for bringing the indictment.
An argument that Trump wanted to make sure that his millions of Truth Social followers heard. It wouldn’t be their fault.


https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/29/trump-graham-violence/​

 
“If there’s a prosecution of Donald Trump for mishandling classified information,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham on Fox News, there will be “riots in the streets.”
The South Carolina Republican’s quote has been relentlessly skewered as a blatant threat of retaliatory political violence ever since he offered it Sunday night. And it is that: Everyone knows the old mob-speak trick of cloaking threats in the guise of faux-innocent “predictions.”

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But there’s a more pernicious danger here that shouldn’t escape notice. Underlying Graham’s threat is another attack on the rule of law, one that more Trump propagandists will resort to when their man’s legal perils deepen. It’s an effort to discredit the idea that the law can be applied to Trump at all.

Trump endorsed Graham’s threat by posting video of it on Truth Social. And Trump himself had already unleashed a volley of deranged hints that the FBI search of his Mar-a-Lago compound is the stuff of banana republics and that the FBI leadership is riddled with corruption.


All this comes after release of the redacted affidavit for the Mar-a-Lago search warrant has deepened our understanding of Trump’s potential crimes and strengthened the case that the search was premised on reasonable law enforcement grounds.



Some Republicans have quietly shifted from objecting to the search to questioning the search’s timing. That’s silly: The timing reflects evidence amassed by federal agents that Trump still had highly sensitive documents as late as June. But this shows how hard defending Trump has become.

Not for Graham, apparently.
“Most Republicans, including me, believe that when it comes to Trump, there is no law,” Graham seethed in that Fox appearance. “It’s all about getting him.”
Graham then called the 2016 FBI investigation of Hillary Clinton’s email practices a “debacle.” Graham predicted “riots in the streets” if Trump is prosecuted precisely because she was not prosecuted, which would constitute an unfair double standard.










And when Graham’s interviewer suggested treating Trump and Clinton “the same” would mean refraining from prosecuting Trump, Graham emphatically agreed. Trump himself is arguably the architect of this idea: He has raged that rank-and-file FBI agents are in revolt about this unfair double treatment, an entirely baseless claim.

So the argument is this: Clinton was not prosecuted, therefore prosecuting Trump would constitute unequal treatment before the law. (Another variation holds that not only should Trump be spared prosecution; Clinton was not prosecuted but should have been.)
We can’t let this go unchallenged. It contains a sleight of hand that will become more widespread.
As you’ll recall, former FBI director James Comey announced in July 2016 that an exhaustive investigation had failed to produce evidence to make a criminal case against Clinton. The Justice Department inspector general subsequently found no grounds for questioning that decision.


In other words, Clinton was not charged because the facts did not merit it. We don’t yet know whether Trump will be criminally charged. But if the Justice Department decides in this case that the facts do merit charges — which of course should be the foundation of any determination to charge — the disparity in charging decisions cannot by itself constitute unequal treatment.

Indeed, in both cases, the facts would be dictating the outcome. That may seem obvious on its face. But it’s precisely the point that Trump and propagandists like Graham want to obfuscate.
Let’s be clear: Their argument, effectively, is that equal treatment constitutes refraining from prosecuting Trump regardless of whether investigators conclude that the facts add up to evidence of crimes that investigators believe would sustain a conviction!


The goal here is to erase the very idea that the law can be applied to Trump in a neutral and legitimate way. All law enforcement activity directed at Trump is inherently politically motivated.
Graham said this straight out: When it comes to Trump, “there is no law.” That’s what Trump and his propagandists want the public (or at least Trump’s base) to come to believe, so Americans tune out the facts and conclude prosecution cannot be legitimate.

But if we can’t acknowledge it forthrightly when one set of facts justifies prosecution and another set of facts does not — if law enforcement must reach equivalent prosecution decisions regardless of what the facts dictate, simply because the two cases involve opposing politicians — that itself makes a mockery of the rule of law.
“Investigators, prosecutors, judges, and juries need to apply the law impartially in each case,” political theorist Jacob Levy, who has written extensively on the foundations of the rule of law, told me.


“The idea that Trump can never be prosecuted for any of his crimes because the FBI concluded Hillary Clinton didn’t commit any isn’t impartiality at all,” Levy continued. "It’s mindless balancing. It badly undermines the rule of law.”

None of this means prosecuting Trump would automatically be the right decision — again, we still don’t know if charges will be brought. Nor is it to say we can be certain the investigation is perfectly proper. In retrospect we may conclude it wasn’t, though that’s not now in evidence.
Rather, it’s to say that Trump and Graham cannot be permitted to advance the idea that applying the law to Trump cannot be done neutrally or legitimately by definition. Graham is not just threatening political violence. He’s also providing an invented rationale for it that’s deeply dangerous.

 
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