Trump Threatens Violence If Democrats Don’t Support Him

Photo: Chris Kleponis/Getty Images

One of Donald Trump’s favorite riffs is a wish, cast as a warning, that his supporters inside and outside the state security services will unleash violence on his political opponents if they continue to oppose the administration. The specifics of the riff don’t vary much. Trump laments that his opponents are treating him unfairly, praises the toughness and strength of his supporters — a category that combines the police, military, and Bikers for Trump, which he apparently views as a Brownshirt-like militia — and a prediction that his supporters will at some point end their restraint.

He does it again in a new interview with Breitbart:

I actually think that the people on the right are tougher, but they don’t play it tougher. Okay? I can tell you I have the support of the police, the support of the military, the support of the Bikers for Trump – I have the tough people, but they don’t play it tough — until they go to a certain point, and then it would be very bad, very bad.

Early warnings that Trump could undermine the Constitution have not been borne out, which has produced a certain complacency about the issue. It is true that Trump is only an aspirational authoritarian, and to date has failed to bring his most illiberal dreams to life. He has used the government to punish independent media, prevailing upon the Post Office to raise rates on Amazon in retaliation for Jeff Bezos’s ownership of the Washington Post, and repeatedly told his staff to order the Justice Department to block a merger in order to punish CNN. So far, this has had little effect.

On the other hand, if Trump wins a second term — a prospect that, under current economic conditions, is close to a toss-up — his presidency will only be a quarter of the way through. Already his authoritarian rhetoric is so thoroughly normalized that it hardly even registers as news any more. Anybody whose political efforts involve helping Trump gain more power, rather than opposing that project, is playing Russian roulette with the Constitution.

Republicans have had some success in restraining Trump’s abuses — in large part by slow-walking his most blatantly illegal or authoritarian orders. But the GOP’s willingness to defy Trump has also eroded steadily over his presidency. Congress’s failure to block Trump’s use of emergency powers to build the border wall that Congress has declined to fund is an important marker in that deterioration.

Republicans used to define more modest exertions of executive power by President Obama as dangerous Caesarism. Republicans turned Obama’s rather casual vow to use his “pen and phone” to carry out executive authority into a Hitleresque claim of total power. Accordingly, when Trump claimed executive power to fund a project Congress refused to fund, at least some conservatives denounced his plans. North Carolina senator Thom Tillis wrote an op-ed calling for Congress to deny Trump’s authority.

“Conservatives rightfully cried foul when President Barack Obama used executive action to completely bypass Congress and unilaterally provide deferred action to undocumented adults who had knowingly violated the nation’s immigration laws. Some prominent Republicans went so far as to proclaim that Obama was acting more like an “emperor” or “king” than a president,” he wrote, “There is no intellectual honesty in now turning around and arguing that there’s an imaginary asterisk attached to executive overreach — that it’s acceptable for my party but not thy party.”

But then Trump started looking into supporting a primary challenger against Tillis. And lo and behold, Tillis abandoned the sacred principle. Republicans could have mustered a veto-proof majority to join with Democrats and block Trump, but failed. If Republicans are too frightened to defend what they themselves regard as a vital principle of the Constitution, what confidence should we have that they’ll stand in the way of Trump’s continued assaults on the Republic?

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Right – he’s a prodigious small-dollar fundraiser.

He has been. In a race that looks almost nothing like this one!

I think it’s hard to deny the appeal of a candidate as cool as Beto, but Democrats have become accustomed to a leader who was both a policy wonk and somehow cool at the same time. I could see a lot of voters being frustrated if he doesn’t live up to that. (edited)

And yes, half of the frustration online comes from his outsize profile in the national press, with magazine profile after magazine profile.

I mean, I get it. He’s trying something different from any other candidate we’ve seen recently. All I’m saying is we’ll have a pretty good indication pretty quickly of whether he ACTUALLY starts off in the position we all seem to be assuming for him. I think there are a number of pretty big questions he faces, but one thing he’s clearly doing in a way only 1-2-maybe 3 others can do is dominate the news for a few hours at a time, which is no small skill in this environment.

How much does his lack of clear policy on much of anything really matter, at this point?

Does it matter at all?

It’s not like having a website full of policy outlines put Hillary Clinton in the Oval Office.

It matters insofar as voters have a right to know where candidates stand. But obviously there’s something to be said for strategic vagueness, wherein candidates try to express broad values and let voters project their policy wishes onto them. That, however, tends to look narrower than this when it works. Still, O’Rourke has suggested he’ll put some ideas forward, and the Vanity Fair profile even included a mention of him kicking himself over not being specific in a Washington Post story about his immigration policy.

I’d be pretty shocked if he doesn’t offer any policy ideas, but he’s also been running for a few hours now, and candidates don’t often kick off with a full policy slate (sometimes they do, obviously).

I want a full rundown by midnight.

But still, there’s a huge difference between planning to roll out policies over a few weeks and just kicking off without having thought much of it through.

I thought the Vanity Fair piece was very good. I felt like I had a full portrait — maybe too full! — of who he is as a person, even if I don’t know where he stands on specific issues

it feels odd that I’m already pondering Beto’s relationship with his dad and how that drives him on day one of his campaign

Another possible hurdle: I wonder if anyone’s in the mood for the kind of “we need to come together as a country” type of rhetoric he’s known for. There’s certainly at least a vocal minority of Democrats who want to go straight to hardball politics, and beto isn’t that. Is unity too 2008?

That’s one of the big divides of the primary. But call me when Joe Biden isn’t leading the polls.

(That may be in like a week, but I think you have my number.)

Yes, his dominance so far provides a convincing a strong rebuke of the thesis,

I rewatched the last few lines of Obama’s 2008 election night speech recently (yes, evenings get pretty wild at the Hartmann house) and his “we’re not red America or blue America” rhetoric felt like it could have been from decades ago

Maybe people want to hear that – a normal call for civility and unity – even if they don’t want to practice it in their day to day lives. It’s a nice sentiment, and seems like the kind of thing people still want the president to say, even if they’re still annoyed at Aunt Sally for wearing a MAGA hat to Thanksgiving.

I agree. I think that, even now, the majority of people are turned off by what they view as partisanship.

To me Beto seems vastly more “authentic” than the other candidates, but I don’t know if people are going to appreciate that, or get hung up on personal quirks they don’t enjoy. And by people maybe I mean me.

I want to like Beto, but I alternate between feeling like he’s a genuine guy more willing than many to admit his mistakes, and getting hung up on privileged activities like rambling around and trying to find himself in his 20s, or rambling around to find himself sans family and kids after losing to Ted Cruz. Basically, I’m not sure how I feel about all the rambling.

Well the way that manifested in 2018 is: he’s an extremely good retail politician, and he campaigned nonstop, in person, for two years. Massive rallies, small events, constant live streaming. Etc. And it got him close. The first and last question he’ll have to answer, I think, is how much of that transfers to this race, which is completely different in basically every way, from the electorate to the competition to the stakes etc

As our dear president is so fond of saying: We’ll see what happens.

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