Ex-President fronted power and threats in his campaigning to win against Hillary Clinton….
He NEVER let go of that to rally and advance his support….
And tried to use it , as President, to keep his only government job on Jan. 6, 2021….
Now a man sitting in a criminal courtroom most of the week STILL sell’s something that has migrated across the court for his supporter’s and others…
Violence….
Or the threat thereof……
By almost all measures, the evidence of the trend is striking. Last year, more than 450 federal judges were targeted with threats, a roughly 150 percent increase from 2019, according to the United States Marshals Service. The U.S. Capitol Police investigated more than 8,000 threats to members of Congress last year, up more than 50 percent from 2018. The agency recently added three full-time prosecutors to handle the volume.
More than 80 percent of local officials said they had been threatened or harassed, according to a survey conducted in 2021 by the National League of Cities.
“People are threatening not just the prosecutor, the special counsel, the judge but also family members,” said Ronald L. Davis, director of the U.S. Marshals Service. Lisa Monaco, the deputy attorney general, said she saw “an environment where disagreement is increasingly tipping over” into “violent threats.”
It is still rare for those threats to tip into action, experts said, but such instances have increased. Some capture national attention for weeks. The mass shootings at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018 and the Tops Friendly supermarket in Buffalo in 2022 were both carried out by perpetrators who expressed extreme right-wing views. Trump supporters’ riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, was one of the largest acts of political violence in modern American history.
Others — including an Ohio man’s shootout with state troopers after the F.B.I. searched Mr. Trump’s home and shootings at the homes of Democratic officials in New Mexico — fall out of the headlines quickly….
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Violence — and the threat of it — has been a part of American politics since the nation’s founding. But experts describe this moment as particularly volatile, thanks in great part to social media platforms that can amplify anonymous outrage, spread misinformation and conspiracy theories and turn a little-known public employee into a target.
No politician has harnessed the ferocious power of those platforms like Mr. Trump. The former president has long used personal attacks as a strategy to intimidate his adversaries. As he campaigns to return to the White House, he has turned that tactic on the judges and prosecutors involved in his various legal cases, all of whom have subsequently been threatened.
Democrats by and large have been the loudest voices in trying to quell political violence, although many on the right have accused them of insufficiently condemning unruly left-wing protesters on college campuses and at the homes of Supreme Court justices. After Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York, warned in 2020 that Supreme Court justices would “pay the price” if they eliminated federal abortion rights, Chief Justice Roberts called the statement “dangerous.”….
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Local officials are feeling the pressure.
Election officials — from secretaries of state to poll workers — have faced hostility and abuse after Mr. Trump’s false claims of fraud in the 2020 election, leading to resignations and difficulty recruiting and retaining staff members and volunteers. Such threats “endanger our democracy itself,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said this week.
Local libraries have also become targets amid a heated campaign to ban books and cancel events aimed at members of the L.G.B.T.Q. community. Bomb threats were reported by 32 of the American Library Association’s member institutions last year, compared with two the year before and none in 2021.
Carolyn Foote, a retired librarian in Austin, Texas, who co-founded a group that supports librarians, said her members had become used to being called “pedophile, groomer, pornographer.”
Proving that ugly and hostile language has crossed the line from First Amendment-protected speech to credible threat can be difficult. Experts say prosecutions became even harder last year after the Supreme Court raised the bar for what qualifies as a credible threat, ruling that the person making the threat has to “have some subjective understanding of the threatening nature of his statements.”….