Donald Trump has repeatedly shown himself to be a very dangerous man. As seen on Jan. 6 with his coup attempt and the lethal assault by his MAGA followers on the Capitol, he appears to have an erotic attachment to violence.
Last Friday, Trump shared an image of President Biden bound and gag, hog-tied, in the back of a pickup truck. Michael Tyler, who is the Biden campaign’s communications director, condemned Trump’s most recent threat. “[He] is regularly inciting political violence, and it's time people take him seriously — just ask the Capitol police officers who were attacked protecting our democracy on January 6. Donald Trump is perfectly comfortable with violence when he thinks it benefits him. In fact, he encourages it. Put simply, his campaign is about itself. It's about revenge. It's about retribution….Political violence has been and continues to be central to Donald Trump's brand of politics.”
In a video post on X/Twitter historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat, who is one of the world’s leading experts on fascism and authoritarianism, offered this context: "Being life-size, this image is allowing Americans to imagine a fate that Biden would have if he were removed in a violent way….And so it's continuing the coup of January 6."
Explaining how coups involve harm being done to the deposed leader, Ben-Ghiat warns that Trump’s incitements of violence against President Biden are an “emergency” that should be taken very seriously.
Trump, for his part, claimed the video image of Biden being hog-tied by one of the MAGA people was filmed on Thursday while he was attending the wake of a New York police officer who died in the line of duty. This is no coincidence: Trump views America’s police and other law enforcement as his personal enforcers who will do the bidding of his regime when/if he becomes the country’s first dictator. That loyalty appears to be reciprocated, as Donald Trump seems to enjoy a large amount of support from many of the country’s police, immigration and border agents, members of the military and other violence workers. To that end, Trump has promised the police that he will empower them to act with impunity and to not be held responsible when they abuse the public (in practice this means unlimited thuggery and abuse against black and brown people and members of other marginalized communities).
Trump’s repeated threat(s) against President Biden’s life and safety are likely a crime. In an interview with MSNBC on Sunday, former federal prosecutor Andrew Weissmann explained, “A standard condition of being out on bail applies in New York and in the D.C. federal case and in the Georgia state case: that you not commit a crime while you are out on bail….Threatening the president of the United States is a crime, so the question would be the legal and factual question whether what he has engaged in with respect to posting the image of Joe Biden bound and gagged....”
Predictably, Donald Trump’s threats of murder and other violence against President Biden are now being mostly ignored and willfully forgotten by the mainstream news media. By mostly ignoring Trump and his agent’s and followers’ threats of (and real acts of) violence against President Biden, leading Democrats, and other people deemed to be the “enemy”, the mainstream news media is enabling and encouraging such behavior – and by implication undermining American democracy and civil society.
Clearly documenting Trump’s years (and decades) of violent and other antisocial behavior is a form of essential testimony and witnessing for the truth and the facts in an era when such basic concepts are being smeared, blotted out, if not wholly erased by ascendant American fascism and the larger global anti-democracy movement.
Donald Trump attempted a coup against American democracy (and specifically multiracial democracy) on Jan. 6, threatened to kill an American general who dared to be more loyal to the Constitution than to him, used stochastic terrorism, de facto commanding his MAGA people to assassinate President Biden, President Obama, Hillary Clinton and other leading Democrats, led a COVID democide, channeled Hitler and the Nazis with his threats of mass extermination for the human “vermin” who are “poisoning the blood” of America, continues public statements of admiration for murderous tyrants such as Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un, promises to have Biden and other Democrats put on trials and punished for “treason” when/if he becomes the country’s first dictator, plans to put non-white undocumented residents, migrants and refugees in concentration camps, repeats acts of harassment and intimidation against the judges, prosecutors, district attorneys and other members of law enforcement (and their families) who are daring to hold him responsible under the law for his obvious crimes, has been credibly accused by dozens of women of sexual harassment, sexual assault and even more serious crimes, and claims to be a type of prophet and messiah chosen by God and Jesus Christ.
Once again, none of this is normal. The Trumpocene is a state of malignant normality, where all the wrongness in the form of American fascism, the culture of cruelty, gangster capitalism, massive violence both domestically and internationally, collective pathology, and so many other bad things manifest in both the corporeal form of Donald Trump and what he represents and has channeled with his MAGA movement have now become normalized and a type of background noise in America life.
As I explained in a previous essay here at Salon, those of us who can see clearly through the miasma and other poisoned air of the Trumpocene have an obligation to keep doing so and sounding the alarm about the monsters lurking inside. We must be the hope and salvation we are looking for because the elites will not save us or this country.
In an essay several days ago at the New Republic, Michael Tomasky, who is one of the few prominent public voices who has consistently and directly warned of the extreme dangers of normalizing the Trumpocene, called out the American mainstream news media for their role in nurturing the disaster:
Republicans have gotten away with this for ages. The mainstream media has come to expect and tolerate this state of affairs for two reasons. It’s simple human nature: If a parent has a well-behaved kid and an unruly kid, the parent naturally over time expects more of the former and lowers the bar for the latter. And once something has happened a thousand times, it isn’t really news anymore.
The result has been this: House Republicans utter outlandish lies about Obama or Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden or whomever, and it gets reported, but we hardly bat an eye. That’s what we expect of them. Then, once in a while, a Democrat says something that crosses the normal lines of discourse….and a massive hubbub ensues, leaving the casual viewer with the impression that both sides are equally guilty of extreme rhetoric, or indeed that the Democrats are worse.
When it comes to Trump—well, he has so thoroughly corrupted our standards of discourse that nothing he says is shocking anymore. So of course he posted a video of a hog-tied Joe Biden. What else is new? The news stories on Sunday reporting the event were brief and kind of ho-hum.
Whereas, if Biden posted a video of a hog-tied Trump … you can just imagine the faux outrage on the right. And high-ranking Democrats, who would be genuinely kind of offended to see their standard-bearer for the presidency behave in such a tawdry way, would indeed rebuke Biden for having done so….
This is the advantage to the debaser of debasing standards of behavior. He is eventually held to no standard in the media, which just rolls its collective eyes. I would like to think, though, that voters, or at least enough of them, still have standards. Trump will do things between now and November to make this Biden video look mild, and the voters will finally say enough.
One of the great errors of the American mainstream news media in the Age of Trump is an assumption that democracy is a settled matter in this country and that Republicans and Democrats are both equally invested in normal politics and consensus where the differences are just “partisan” and not existential. In the Age of Trump (and the years and decades that brought us here), that is manifestly not true. Public opinion polls and other research show that today’s Republican Party and larger “conservative” movement no longer support pluralistic multiracial democracy. Any members of the news media who conclude “everyone already knows” about Donald Trump's violence so “why keep reminding them, it is old news,” is committing a number of gross errors in logic and inference.
Most Americans do not follow the news and current events closely. Moreover, political scientists and other experts have repeatedly shown that the mass public is ignorant and not highly sophisticated in terms of their political decision-making and knowledge. Even worse, public opinion polls now show that a larger percentage of Americans are possessed by collective amnesia and are actually yearning for a return to the horrible years when Donald Trump was in the White House.
This refusal to adapt and change for the better in service to real pro-democracy journalism and its dictate to pursue the real truth and not just what is comfortable and the “consensus”, is one of the many reasons why the mainstream news media has lost credibility with huge swaths of the American public.
Channeling Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels, Donald Trump and many of his MAGA followers have already targeted the American mainstream news media and its reporters and journalists as “enemies of the people." To that end, Trump and his enforcers are threatening and planning (as publicly documented in Project 2025, Agenda 47, and elsewhere) how they are going to put "disloyal” and “non-complaint” (in their words “unpatriotic”) reporters, journalists, and other truth-tellers in the back of those pickup trucks right next to President Biden and their other enemies. Those threats are not metaphorical. They are literal.
When the autocrat, fascist, or some other enemy of democracy tells you what they are going to do you should always believe them. They are not kidding. Unfortunately, too many members of the American news media refuse to do so — and it will only be their undoing. They were repeatedly warned. Denial will not save them.
