The conviction of former President Donald Trump on 34 felony counts has lit a fire under Trump supporters, some of whom are speculating about lighting a fire under the American system itself. After the verdict, pro-Trump websites were flooded with comments calling for revolution, riots, and violent retribution, according to a Reuters review of comments on three major Trump-aligned websites: TruthSocial (a platform owned by Trump), the Gateway Pundit, and Patriots.Win.
Some comments spotlighted called for anything from assassinating or executing the judge in the case, attacks on jurors, armed insurrection, to full-blown civil war.
One commentator on Patriots.Win said that they hoped someone in New York who had nothing to lose would “take care of” Judge Juan Merchan, and went on to speculate about what might happen should the judge run into illegal immigrants armed with machetes.
A poster on Gateway Pundit suggested that the verdict proved that the nation’s ills can’t be corrected through voting for good candidates. The only viable path, he said, was to start shooting left-wingers.
Such rhetoric may be more intense at the moment, but it is of a piece with intimidating rhetoric that has been de rigeur in such spaces since the 2020 election campaign and the accompanying allegations of election theft. The current 2024 election season has seen Trump describe the prosecutions arrayed against him as political operations intended to derail his election campaign, as Biden can’t hope to win on a level playing field.
Of the verdict, Trump said in a statement to reporters that it was a disgraced. The trial, he claimed, was rigged by a corrupt judge.
Trump was found guilty in the jury trial of falsifying business documents in order to cover up a crime. The records in question were written in such a way as to obscure payment to prevent an adult film star from publishing her story of her fleeting relationship with Trump in the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election.
