A major study of Donald Trump’s social media posts has revealed the scale of the former US president’s ambitions to target Joe Biden, judges and other perceived political enemies if he returns to power.
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (Crew), a watchdog organisation, analysed more than 13,000 messages published by Trump on his Truth Social platform and found him vowing revenge, retaliation and retribution against his foes.
The presumptive Republican nominee has threatened to use the federal government to go after Biden during a second Trump administration 25 times since the start of 2023, the study found. These threats include FBI raids, investigations, indictments and even jail time.
He has also threatened or suggested that the FBI and justice department should take action against senators, judges, members of Biden’s family and even non-governmental organisations.
“He is promising to go after what he perceives to be his political enemies,” said Robert Maguire, vice-president for research and data at Crew. “He is promising to essentially weaponise the government against anyone he sees as not sufficiently loyal or who is openly opposed to him.
“He has constantly seeded this idea that the numerous charges against him are trumped-up charges and it seems almost to have given him licence to openly say, ‘You’ve done this to me, so I’m going to do it to you.’”
Trump launched Truth Social in early 2022 after he was banned from major sites such as Facebook and the platform formerly known as Twitter following the 6 January 2021 attack on the US Capitol. Although he has since been reinstated to both, he has mostly stayed off X, as it is now called, the Elon Musk-owned platform that was once his primary megaphone.
Trump reaches far fewer people on his platform, where he has fewer than 7 million followers, than he might on X, where he boasts 87 million. The research firm Similarweb estimates that Truth Social had roughly 5m monthly visits in February of this year. This compares with more than 2bn for TikTok and more than 3bn for Facebook.
The study is part of a larger Crew project tracking and analysing Trump’s Truth Social posts. The watchdog says that Trump’s niche following means that the extent of his threats has flown mostly under the radar. There have also been concerns about Trump fatigue over the past decade, with some voters numbed and inured to statements that would have been jaw-dropping from any other president.
Maguire said: “His comments are often reported on or discussed as one-offs. ‘Trump said this today,’ and people talk about it and then it fades away because Trump said something else the next day or the next week or the next month.
“We figured it would be helpful to quantify these comments that he’s making to show this isn’t just a whim or a passing idea that he put out in the world because he saw somebody say something on TV. It’s a fixation of his, it’s a promise he’s making to use the government in ways that are squarely unethical.”
Crew duly analysed more than 13,000 of Trump’s Truth Social posts from 1 January 2023 to 1 April 2024 and found that, while the former president has recently dialed down some of his more violent rhetoric, he remains fixated on threatening political opponents.
Its report, the first in a series, says his attitude can be summed up in one Truth Social post from August 2023: “IF YOU GO AFTER ME, I’M COMING AFTER YOU!” Indeed, last December Trump posted a word cloud based on his speeches: the biggest word was “revenge”.
Many of his threats to Biden reflect Trump’s now familiar tactic of reversing charges against his opponents, conjuring a mirror world in which he claims they are guilty of the very offence of which he is accused.
In one post about the special counsel Jack Smith, he warned that there will be “repercussions far greater than anything that Biden or his Thugs could understand” and, if the investigations continue, it will open a “Pandora’s Box” of retribution.
In another, Trump wrote that his federal indictments are “setting a BAD precedent for yourself, Joe. The same can happen to you.” In July last year Trump reposted rally coverage quoting him that “Now the gloves are off.”
Trump has explicitly threatened Biden with a special counsel investigation and indictment. In one post he called on the attorney general, Merrick Garland, to “immediately end Special Counsel investigation into anything related to me because I did everything right, and appoint a Special Counsel to investigate Joe Biden who hates Biden as much as Jack Smith hates me”.
In another he asked: “When will Joe Biden be Indicted for his many crimes against our Nation?” Trump has posted about this repeatedly, promising to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate Biden, and indict him if Trump returns to the White House for a second term.
Trump has “reTruthed” others’ posts about Biden that are even more ominous. In June last year he reposted a clip from Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene asserting: “Joe Biden shouldn’t just be impeached, he should be handcuffed and hauled out of the White House for his crimes.”
The former president also posted a screenshot of a different post saying the FBI should “raid all of [Biden’s] residences and seize anything they want, including his passports”.
Some posts announced plans for retribution against the specific lawyers, judges and other officials whom Trump blames for his legal troubles. Two months before he was found guilty of 34 counts of falsifying business records, he reposted a call for the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, to be “put in jail”.
He has reposted calls for Jack Smith and others to be locked up and to “throw away the key.” One reTruth promised to charge the Fulton county district attorney, Fani Willis, along with Bragg, Smith, Garland and Biden, with conspiracy and racketeering.
Trump has also made threats to non-profit organisations because of their work. Last November he posted on Truth Social: “For any radical left charity, non-profit, or so called aid organizations supporting these caravans and illegal aliens, we will prosecute them for their participation in human trafficking, child smuggling, and every other crime we can find.”
Crew argues that the posts should not be taken as empty threats but as a wake-up call for Congress to erect meaningful guardrails against the weaponisation of law enforcement agencies before it is too late.
The group has called on Congress to pass the Protecting Our Democracy Act (Poda), which would curb abuses of power by presidents of any party and strengthen Congress’s ability to fulfil its constitutional role as a check on executive branch overreach. The legislation passed the House of Representatives in 2021 on a bipartisan basis but has since languished in the Senate.
Maguire added: “It is critical in making sure that law enforcement and the Department of Justice – all of the things that that entails, both the federal prosecutors and the FBI – cannot be manipulated by the president to go after political enemies. That would go a long way to hamstringing any effort by any president, to be clear, to use those law enforcement powers to go against political enemies.”
