Last Friday, the Republican Party’s presidential front-runner suggested that America’s top general deserves to die. In a post on Truth Social, Donald Trump accused chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley of committing treason, “an act so egregious that, in times gone by, the punishment would have been DEATH!”
Specifically, Trump wrote that Milley had been “dealing with China to give them a heads up on the thinking of the President of the United States,” and that this “treasonous act” could have triggered a war between the two countries. The ex-president was seemingly referring to a report that Milley had called his Chinese counterpart shortly before the 2020 election, and after the January 6 insurrection, to assure him that the United States was stable and that Trump would not be ordering any attack against China on his way out the door. Given that this accurately conveyed the administration’s posture, and that the U.S. had no interest in tricking a nuclear-weapons state into believing that America was about to attack it, it’s difficult to see how Milley’s calls would have constituted treason.
Of course, it’s not remarkable for Trump to issue a baseless (yet incendiary) allegation against one of his critics. What is noteworthy — or at least, should be — is a leading presidential candidate deliberately trying to intimidate his perceived enemies through tacit threats of violence. And it seems fair to conclude that this is precisely what Trump is up to.
The ex-president’s remarks about Milley came amid a surge of violent threats against federal law enforcement, threats that his own rhetoric appears to have inspired.
On August 4, shortly after he was charged for seeking to overturn the 2020 election, Trump posted on Truth Social, “IF YOU GO AFTER ME, I’M COMING FOR YOU!”
One day later, one of the president’s supporters called that case’s presiding judge and told her that if Trump does not win reelection next year, “we are coming to kill you.”
Since the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago for classified documents last August, threats against federal law-enforcement employees and their families have increased by 300 percent, according to the New York Times. These threats have been so persistent and credible that the bureau has provided security details to a long list of law-enforcement officials, including career prosecutors working on cases against Trump.
Over the same time period, Trump has persistently assailed the FBI as an enemy of the American people that threatens the nation’s survival. In December of last year, Trump declared that the FBI, Department of Justice, and Democratic Party collectively comprised a “cancer” that was killing the country, writing, “These Weaponized Thugs and Tyrants must be dealt with, or our once great and beautiful country will die!!!”
Trump is not unaware of his supporters’ attempts to violently intimidate federal officials. Months before he announced that the FBI was a mortal threat to America that “must be dealt with,” a man equipped with body armor and an assault rifle tried to breach the FBI’s office in Cincinnati.
In June, Trump shared what he claimed to be Barack Obama’s home address on Truth Social. Hours later, a man armed with two guns and 400 rounds of ammo was arrested while seeking out ways to breach Obama’s private residence.
More recently, prosecutors have sought a gag order against Trump in the election-interference case, citing a deluge of threats against officials seemingly inspired by the ex-president’s social-media feed. Thus, Trump well understands the effect that his incendiary pronouncements are having. And he continues to suggest that his adversaries are enemies of the state and worthy of death nonetheless.
From the very start of his tenure in presidential politics, Trump has encouraged his supporters’ violent impulses while wielding their reputation for violence as a kind of leverage. When his rallygoers beat up a Black Lives Matter protester in November 2015, Trump called their actions “beautiful,” saying that the activist “should have been roughed up because it was absolutely disgusting what he was doing.”
In August 2016, he said that even if Hillary Clinton won, and acquired the legal authority to appoint Supreme Court justices, “Second Amendment people” might be able to stop her from doing so.
Earlier this year, Trump warned that there would be “potential death and destruction” if authorities in New York City arrested him.
The threat that Trump’s cultivation of political violence poses to our democratic life is not hypothetical. It manifested itself in the January 6 insurrection, and in the myriad, psychotic lone wolves who have sought to avenge Trump through acts of domestic terrorism, such as the man who attempted to kidnap Nancy Pelosi (before settling for bashing in her husband’s head) last year.
Perhaps more alarmingly, Trump’s capacity for directing violence at his enemies has reportedly dissuaded congressional Republicans from defying him. As McKay Coppins reported for The Atlantic earlier this month:
One Republican congressman confided to [Senator Mitt] Romney that he wanted to vote for Trump’s second impeachment, but chose not to out of fear for his family’s safety. The congressman reasoned that Trump would be impeached by House Democrats with or without him—why put his wife and children at risk if it wouldn’t change the outcome? Later, during the Senate trial, Romney heard the same calculation while talking with a small group of Republican colleagues. When one senator, a member of leadership, said he was leaning toward voting to convict, the others urged him to reconsider. You can’t do that, Romney recalled someone saying. Think of your personal safety, said another. Think of your children. The senator eventually decided they were right.
The moment that an elected official changes their vote on a pressing public matter — not because they fear electoral backlash from their constituents, but because they fear that their party leader will endanger their children’s lives — democracy has been compromised.
Two weeks ago, we learned that this moment has already passed. Since then, the Republican front-runner has pronounced one of America’s top military officials worthy of death, fomented threats of violence against federal law-enforcement officials, and promised that, should he return to the White House, he will investigate adversarial news outlets for treason.
Yet these realities have not dominated national news coverage. Indeed, Trump’s remarks about Milley scarcely registered in the headlines. The fact that the leader of the Republican Party is an authoritarian who tacitly (and sometimes explicitly) encourages political violence may have lost some novelty over the past seven years. But it’s shed none of its menace or import.
The mainstream press is in a tough position. It has published reams of excellent reporting on Trump’s scandals and no shortage of op-eds denouncing him. The plurality of voters who support Trump over Biden in many recent polls are not ignorant of the ex-president’s contempt for election results or threats against federal law enforcement. Rather, they either believe that Trump’s conduct is justified given the deep state’s treachery, or they simply don’t care. Therefore, the electorate, the Republican Party, and every organ of mainstream conservatism are treating Trump as though he were an ordinary presidential candidate.
In this context, a news outlet can cover Trump’s affronts to democracy. But it can’t quite internalize them. For such a publication to fully behave as though it has a working memory — and a capacity to rationally weigh the significance of disparate pieces of information — would be for it to resemble a partisan rag.
The most salient truth about the 2024 election is that the Republican Party is poised to nominate an authoritarian thug who publishes rationalizations for political violence and promises to abuse presidential authority on a near-daily basis. There is no way for a paper or news channel to appropriately emphasize this reality without sounding like a shrill, dull, Democratic propaganda outlet. So, like the nation writ large, the press comports itself as an amnesiac, or an abusive household committed to keeping up appearances, losing itself in the old routines, in an effortful approximation of normality until it almost forgets what it doesn’t want to know.
