Don’t normalise Trump’s threats of violence

By Timothy L. O'Brien

Donald Trump took to his social media platform on Friday and posted a short video that included an image of President Joe Biden hogtied and held hostage in the back of a pickup truck.

That’s just Trump having fun at the expense of a political opponent, you might say, and, well, Trump’s tomfoolery is simply more juvenile and vicious than your average former president. Nothing to see here. So move along, snowflake.

Let’s not.

The road between now and November’s presidential election will be unusually long, and Trump will continue to pave it with threats of violence and appeals to malice and division. That’s the bile that animates him. Avoiding such bad juju is only natural for anyone exposed to his theatrics and menace. Looking the other way offers a measure of solace and continuity in a harrowing, jarring era.

Trump’s counting on that, of course. He wants to stoke the passions of his most ardent acolytes while grinding down the resilience and patience of anyone contending with his myriad threats. That’s why any community that values the American experiment — warts and all — needs to avoid normalizing Trump’s behavior as nothing more than Trump being Trump.

Perhaps Trump wasn’t closely scrutinizing the images of Biden he posted. Or maybe he just gets a kick out of frat-boy flamethrowing and thinks everyone else should, too. For the sake of a full discussion, grant him those points. But a backlash about the Biden post mounted on Saturday and gained momentum into Sunday. The criticism focused on the obvious: Trump was celebrating violence aimed at a sitting president. Despite those concerns, Trump still didn’t bother removing his post. He’s content to let his message stand.

It capped off quite a run for Trump. He continuously targeted the daughter of Judge Juan Merchan, the jurist who is overseeing his criminal fraud trial in New York. Trump insinuated on his social media platform last week and into the weekend that her involvement in Democratic politics meant that Merchan couldn’t be impartial.

Trump has routinely targeted judges as he contends with all of the court cases engulfing him now and in the past, and Merchan imposed a limited gag order forbidding him from assailing prosecutors, court employees and family members. But the order didn’t include Merchan and his family members. So Trump wasted little time publicly slagging Merchan and his daughter –thereby putting them at risk.

Judges watching all of this unfold are cleareyed about what it means. “It is very troubling because I think it is an attack on the rule of law when judges are threatened and particularly when their family is threatened,” Judge Reggie Walton told CNN in an interview.

J. Michael Luttig, a former federal judge and an icon in conservative legal circles, took to social media himself after seeing Walton’s interview. “The Nation is witnessing the determined delegitimization of both its Federal and State judiciaries and the systematic dismantling of its system of justice and Rule of Law by a single man — the former President of the United States,” he wrote.

There’s also an easily discernible track record here. Trump incited the violence that swept the US Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Appeals to violence have also traveled with him from the moment he rolled down the escalator at Trump Tower in 2015 to announce his first successful presidential bid. They’ve been hallmarks of his rallies, his rhetoric, his social media presence and his presidency.

Trump and his lawyers like to argue that Trump is merely exercising his First Amendment right to free speech when he lashes out at Biden and others who are much more vulnerable. But free speech doesn’t protect calls for violence or incitement of criminal acts.

And it’s precisely because Trump is being Trump that accountability matters. He aspires to the most powerful office in the world, after all, and the consequences of letting him subvert the law to suit his own devices will only grow greater with his proximity to the Oval Office. Trump should be held to a higher standard, not a more forgiving one, because he is a former president and may be a future one. His words, actions and threats carry unusual, outsized weight.

The Secret Service should visit Trump and ask him what he intended by posting a threatening video about Biden — as they would with any other citizen who did the same. Judge Merchan should revisit Trump’s gag order and make it stricter. If Trump violates it again, he should throw Trump in jail. And if the Supreme Court ever feels inspired to move more quickly than it has, it should let Trump know that he isn’t immune from the rule of law.

Voters have to continue digesting all of this, particularly Republican voters who say they value the law and democracy. However draining, dispiriting and tedious it might be, everyone else has to continue examining Trump in the months ahead and see everything he does for exactly what we already know it to be: an assault on the fabric and foundations of a civil society.