Trump Warns Of "Catastrophic . . . Death & Destruction" If He Is Charged For *Any* Crime
Trump may find soon himself under a judge's gag order and unable to post anything to social media.
Just after 1:00 am Friday morning, Donald “Completely Without Fear” Trump posted yet another threat of violence, stating that if he is charged with any crime, what follows might be “death & destruction [that would] be catastrophic for our Country”.
It will most likely turn out to be an empty threat, since when Trump recently called for his supporters to show their support and protest his up-coming indictment, the only sound heard was crickets. The number of pro-Trump demonstrators outside Trump Tower in New York these past few days could all find seats on a No. 2 train.
Later on Friday, several hours after Trump’s post, the New York Times reported Bragg;s office has received a letter containing a white powder:
Around midday on Friday, a threatening letter containing a suspicious white powder was found in the mailroom for the district attorney’s office, which is in the building where the grand jury meets, a spokesman for the Police Department said. The envelope in which it was sent was addressed to Mr. Bragg, according to a person with knowledge of the matter.
The person said that inside the envelope was a single piece of white paper with a brief message containing the typewritten words “ALVIN: I AM GOING TO KILL YOU” followed by 13 exclamation points. . . .
In a statement, a spokeswoman for the district attorney’s office said . . . “there was no dangerous substance.”
It’s just one of the “several hundred threats” that Braggs’s office has received in recent weeks.
On Thursday, Trump referred to Bragg — the first Black district attorney in Manhattan — as a “SOROS-BACKED ANIMAL” doing the work of “Anarchists and the Devil”. Trump claimed Bragg knows Trump is innocent, but “HE DOESN’T CARE”. He’s doing the work of “THE RADICAL LEFT LUNATICS. OUR COUNTRY IS BEING DESTROYED, AS THEY TELL US TO BE PEACEFUL!”
Trump continued his anti-Semitic comments by implying Bragg has received financial support from (actual) billionaire George Soros. He’s not alone. Rep. Eric Burlison (R-Mo.) called Bragg “a hired hit man by George Soros” and Fox host Rachel Campos-Duffy stated Bragg was “listening to his master” (i.e., Soros). A Black man and his Jew master. It’s astonishing how commonplace this uncloaked racism has become. Why bother with code words? Anytime a Fox host or Fox guest or far-right politican says “Soros”, you should hear THE JEWS.
Spineless jellyfish Kevin McCarthy assured everyone that Trump was “not talking in a harmful way”. When some members of McCarthy’s party called for Trump supporters to protest peacefully, Trump’s response was, basically, Fuck that shit. “Our country is being destroyed as they tell us to be peaceful.”
Later on Friday:
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics weighed in: “While you were sleeping, Donald Trump went and threatened ‘death and destruction’ if he’s indicted. He’s not being subtle, he’s threatening prosecutors with violence.”
Trump got his supporters to attack the government once. He’s making it clear that if he’s arrested, he’s going to try to do it again. And let’s just drop this nonsense now about Trump actually wanting to be arrested, that it will somehow help him. You don’t go on social media rants after 1AM threatening chaos if you’re arrested if you’re not terrified of it. And, of course, all his social media threats are admissible in court. So it’s probably not the last you’ve seen of this post. If Trump thinks he can intimidate prosecutors into not charging him, he's in for a rough awakening. Even though he doesn’t mention January 6th, he references what everybody knows: he can wield his supporters to do violence.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries: “The twice-impeached former president’s rhetoric is reckless, reprehensible and irresponsible. It’s dangerous. And if he keeps it up, he’s going to get someone killed.” Trump got five people killed on January 6 with his calls for violence. Today, some Fascists visited several January 6th defendants and treated them “like celebrities”.
Trump’s dozens of all-CAPS rants could lead a judge to impose a gag order preventing him from posting on social media. Igor Derysh (Salon) notes that Trump shared an article from the far-right National File on Thursday that included an image of Trump holding a baseball bat next to a picture of Bragg’s head.
Norm Eisen, a former Democratic special counsel during Trump's first impeachment, called the post a “sickening threat” and a “call for violence.”
“Threatening a prosecutor is a crime in NY. In fact MULTIPLE crimes,” he tweeted, listing several statutes that he thinks Trump may have violated.
Former federal prosecutor Andrew Weissmann, who served on special counsel Bob Mueller’s team, compared the post to a photo longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone posted of a judge overseeing his Mueller probe trial in crosshairs while he was on bail. Weissman tweeted that a judge may need to impose a similar gag order on Trump as the judge did in Stone’s case after the post. . . .
Former conservative attorney George Conway, a frequent Trump critic, predicted that the post “could get his bail revoked” if he is charged in the Manhattan case.
“He lashes out because he feels he’s being attacked. He feels he’s being humiliated,” Conway said on MSNBC. “But at the same time, he’s going to put on a show to basically gin up his followers. That’s what the danger is here — is that he will be doing this over a period of several months. A period over the next year and a half. I have to think he’s going to get the Republican nomination, and he is going to try to foment violence, as he did on Jan. 6th. He’s done a very good job of it this week. But if he keeps pounding on something for months, which he’s going to be unless the judges put gag orders on him, you will see people starting to try to do things like they did two years ago, sadly.”
On Saturday, Trump will hold a rally in Waco, Texas, the site of a nearly two-month standoff between a cult and federal law enforcement in 1993. Heather Digby Parton, writing in Salon, states: “Considering that Trump is under investigation for inciting an insurrection that resulted in violent clashes between police and extremists, this is too on the nose to be a coincidence.”
Team Trump’s choice of Waco echoes (and it echoes it very strongly) Ronald Reagan showing exactly how he felt about civil rights by beginning his 1980 presidential campaign just outside Philadelphia, Mississippi, where in 1964 the Ku Klux Klan abducted and murdered James Chaney, Mickey Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman, three Black civil rights workers.