How Violence and Intimidation Are Key to Understanding Trump

And why we must not become inured to it.

(Photo by Alexi J. Rosenfeld/Getty Images)

ON FRIDAY, DONALD TRUMP POSTED to Truth Social a creepy image that is arguably his most outrageous incitement to violence since the leadup to the January 6th insurrection. It is a video showing a pair of pickup trucks flying down a highway, decked out with flapping Trump flags and other right-wing symbols. On the tailgate of the second truck is a huge adhesive sticker—a life-sized photoshopped image of President Joe Biden hogtied on his side so it looks like he is lying in the truck bed.

The fake-kidnapping tailgate decals have been around for years, and the Biden decal seems to have been selling since at least early 2023. But products sold to rabid partisans are one thing. For a presidential candidate to gleefully share such an image—for a former president to share such an image of the sitting president—is a gross new low in our politics.

Trump’s crazed post was likely aimed at amping up his base. But the primaries are over and general elections are all about addition—appealing to voters in the middle. Violence-inciting social media posts are almost certain to do the opposite.

Yet Trump can’t help himself. There’s madness to his method, politically and psychologically.

And his madness is a call to all of us for method. We need to be methodical in responding to him if we wish to preserve our safety and our freedom from Trump and his thugs.

Trump’s mind seems ever more chaotic. You can see it in his hours-long ranting and rambling campaign speeches, as journalist Susan Glasser recently chronicled in the New Yorker. The vision that Trump now describes for our future, as Glasser notes, is darker even than that of his “American carnage” inaugural address in 2017—the speech that prompted former President George W. Bush’s appropriately blunt assessment: “That was some weird shit.”

You can see Trump’s wobbly mental condition in the number of times he repeats that Obama is president, or when he confuses Nikki Haley with Nancy Pelosi, or refers to Argentina as “a great guy.” You can see it in his mind fog when he can’t pronounce “Venezuela” as he reads from a teleprompter. Some experts judge his instances of public aphasic slurring to be “not subtle” signs of “early dementia”; at the very least, the frequent episodes call attention to the hypocrisy of his mocking Joe Biden’s stutter.

Finally, you can see Trump’s increasingly erratic mind in his calls for violence and acts of intimidation. Such calls led New York State Justice Juan Merchan to impose a limited gag order on Trump last week to protect jurors and prosecutors in Trump’s upcoming criminal trial in Manhattan.

Merchan will preside over that trial, set to get underway on April 15. The indictment and related statement of facts accuse Trump of orchestrating a scheme to influence and interfere with the 2016 election by covering up his affair with Stormy Daniels immediately after the Access Hollywood scandal broke in the weeks before election day.

The day after Merchan’s gag order was issued, Trump posted a false claim that named the judge’s daughter, prompting prosecutors to file a claim that Trump had already violated Tuesday’s order. Then on Saturday, Trump did it again.

The immediacy of the criminal trial is as good a time as any to remind everyone that, under pressure, things with Trump will get worse before they get worse.

The video is a good example of Trump taking his ordinary m.o. to ever greater extremes. For anyone inclined to disregard the Biden tailgate image as harmless, recall that in December 2022, Barry Croft and Adam Fox were sentenced to nineteen years and sixteen years in prison respectively after being convicted as the leaders of the militant “Wolverine Watchmen’s” conspiracy to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer.

Images like the one posted in Trump’s video are the stuff of MAGA extremists’ fever dreams, just waiting for opportunity to act.

Trump wants every one of us to be afraid to stand up to him. Authoritarian leaders, like those Trump admires abroad, can’t control the vast majority of a population with arms; there are too many of us.

Instead, strongmen prevail, as Yale historian Timothy Snyder emphasizes, by using intimidation to try to get people to obey and conform voluntarily. So long as we don’t, Trump can’t take power.

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ONE LAST GROUP that Trump’s video is covertly targeting: participants in his upcoming criminal trial—jurors, prospective witnesses, and even Justice Merchan’s family. Trump wants all who are part of the judicial system to fear what might happen to him if they stand strong for accountability.

We can fret about this reality or we can face it and do something about it.

Senior D.C. federal district court Judge Reggie Walton, appointed to the bench by Republican Presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, showed us the way. On Thursday, in an unprecedented act for unprecedented times, the sitting judge went on national television to rebuke Trump’s threats against Justice Merchan.

“When judges are threatened, and particularly when their family is threatened, it’s something that . . . should not happen,” Walton told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins in a live interview.

By report, Walton felt compelled to speak out of concern for the “future of our country and the future of democracy in our country. . . . [I]f we don’t have a viable court system that’s able to function efficiently, then we have tyranny.”

Simple as that. Trump needs to undermine the justice system of accountability so he is free to reign supreme.

Judge Walton had to understand that by making his public statements, he was subjecting himself and his family to threats. That courage is a model for all of us.

Unlike Walton, of course, most of us don’t have access to cable news appearances. But we all have our voices and our beliefs. All of us, in smaller ways, can refuse to surrender them and our freedom in private conversations with neighbors and friends.

We can be active in writing letters to the editor about the upcoming New York trial and other subjects, or postcards to inform citizens how to register to vote. We can join or support volunteer organizations that defend the rule of law.

It doesn’t take a lot from any of us individually. Together, small acts of faith accumulate. A citizenry activated to protect its rights will succeed. We can educate the many independent voters who are not yet paying attention and who determine election outcomes.

There is already backlash reported from Trump’s extremist post. Most swing voters will surely be disturbed by Trump’s continuing demented behavior and violence-fomenting attacks.

Trump’s accelerating assaults on our security and on common decency represent a five-alarm fire. In such moments, first responders do not panic. They put on their fire coats and pants, hop on their trucks, and hose down the danger.

That’s our job now. No time for fear or succumbing to panic. Only time for steely gaze and firm commitment to combat the threat to our peace, our law, our order, and our freedom.