Trump Threatens Political Violence

My wife and I watched “The Dictator’s Playbook,” a PBS TV series, each episode profiling one of history’s worst dictators, and analyzing their methods for gaining and holding power. Every one prominently featured violence. Always violence, to bludgeon opponents into silence and submission.

“It can’t happen here?”

Remember Trump encouraging people at his rallies to beat up protesters? Even promising to pay their legal bills. And some violence did break out. That’s where it starts.

Last week Trump gave an Oval Office interview to Breitbart News. It’s a far-right website notorious for extremist, inflammatory, and false content. Exactly the kind of menace that’s shredding America’s civic culture. Trump’s thusly dignifying Breitbart is an utter disgrace. (He’s even done the same for Alex Jones, worse yet.) But never mind that. Even more disturbing is what Trump said:

“You know, the left plays a tougher game, it’s very funny. I actually think that the people on the right are tougher, but they don’t play it tougher. OK? I can tell you I have the support of the police, the support of the military, the support of the Bikers for Trump — I have the tough people, but they don’t play it tough — until they go to a certain point, and then it would be very bad, very bad.”

And what might that certain point be? “Like with all the nonsense that they do in Congress . . . all this invest(igating) . . . they do things that are nasty.”

So the message is clear: if Congress continues its “nasty” investigations, at “a certain point,” Trump’s bikers and his other “tough people” will do “very bad” things. “Very bad.” (He did repeat it twice.)

Like the “tough people” Saddam Hussein, Manuel Noriega, and Idi Amin deployed to beat up, torture, murder, and cow opponents to consolidate their power. No pesky investigations for these tough guys. No legislators making them accountable for their crimes.

At about the same time the president of the United States was delivering his extraordinary, chilling warning, a white supremacist was killing 50 people at prayer in New Zealand — having disseminated a manifesto that called Trump an inspiration.