The Washington Post has a new story indicating that individual prosecutors involved with special counsel Jack Smith’s indictment of Donald Trump are being subjected to “substantial” harassment and threats from pro-Trump deplorables. That’s not exactly surprising news, but it does bring home just how grotesque Trump, a seditionist, continues to be, because it’s been Trump himself inciting the threats against his declared enemies. Of course his “base” is going to respond; these are people who still support Trump after he assembled a mob that attempted to violently topple the United States government.
Anyone who still waves a Trump flag after the Jan. 6 coup attempt is a traitorous crapsack who’s already proven indifferent to or supportive of political violence. If anything it’s a miracle that there hasn’t been more violence on Trump’s behalf, but thankfully most of Trump’s backers are as lazy as they are traitorous, so there you go. There is no mass violence in support of Trump; the most he can hope for is provoking a series of unhinged lone wolves. It’s stochastic terrorism backed by Trump himself, and it is absolutely his intent.
We’re seeing it play out in real time. We saw it play out on Jan. 6, when Trump promoted a “march” to oppose the counting of electoral votes, grew angry with security agents who had set up metal detectors to screen the marchers for weapons, and then sent them to the U.S. Capitol with instructions to intimidate the joint session of Congress assembled to certify his election loss. We saw it when Trump, watching the subsequent violence on television, tweeted his disappointment with the fleeing Vice President Mike Pence, causing the crowd to redirect its focus on finding him.
And we saw it just last week, when one of the Jan. 6 insurrectionists was arrested while in possession of multiple weapons after he showed up outside former President Barack Obama’s Washington, D.C., home. How did the clearly unwell suspect get the address? From an online Trump post that revealed it.