Trump's Terrorist Threats
It's way past time we call out Trump's tactics as what they are: Terrorism
I was an odd kid. In grade school, I followed the Ford vs Carter presidential contest like a young fan follows their favorite sport. If there’d been baseball-type cards for that election, I would have owned them all. I didn’t have a team. Much like today’s “undecided voter,” school-kid Soriano hadn’t formed a political outlook, nor did I understand what policy is. I was drawn into Ford vs Carter by the “action” – the barnstorming, the speeches, the conventions, the debates, even the TV ads. It was exciting.
Since Carter beat Ford, my life has been saturated with politics. Local, state, national, insider, outsider, at the ballot box, in the halls of power, on the street - I’ve studied, written about, and participated in politics, especially elections, like a junkie chasing after a fix. Yet in all that time, I’ve never heard a candidate for any office, of any stature, at any time say:
I’ve also never seen politicians and their campaign engage and/or inspire a terrorist campaign, specifically one based on They’re eating the dogs!
One day after what’s left of Donald Trump’s brain sent They’re eating the dogs! to his mouth; one day after Trump was humiliated on national TV for that statement and his debate debacle; one day after memes mocking Trump and his couch-loving running mate flooded the internet; Trump’s supporters – allegedly – started making bomb threats to Springfield, Ohio government offices and schools in response to Trump and Vance nationalizing a fringe hoax, that Haitian immigrants in Springfield were stealing and preparing the town’s cats and dogs for dinner.
To be clear, these bomb threats came after Trump babbled the insanity at his debate with Kamala Harris, and after Trump and Vance responded to the hoax’s debunking by further embracing and deepening the hoax. As with January 6, Trump and his team drove a fleet of tanker trucks into a fire and are now watching a town burn, metaphorically.
Bomb threats are a threat of violence which cause psychological and emotional damage. That damage can cause Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, insomnia, trouble concentrating, paranoia, and other crap that kids and adults should not be subjected to. The academic research on this is vast, as is the anecdotal evidence. And the damage doesn’t just come from threats. Research on school-shooting preparedness drills (the reaction to a related form of psychological terrorism) shows that having kids simulate what they should do under the threat of attack is damaging to a child’s mental health. This should be of no surprise to those of us who spent out school days worried about nuclear annihilation and The Day After.
A bomb threat, as well as other threats of violence, is an act of psychological terrorism. It is the use of fear of violence to achieve political aims, in the case of Springfield, the election of Donald Trump as president. The message these bomb threats send is “Vote for Trump or suffer the consequences.” Whether the consequence is an actually bombing campaign or more threats is irrelevant when the damage intended goal is coercion and the intended damage psychological. These bomb threats are terrorism.
If the Springfield threats were the first and only instance of Trump, his team, and/or his supporters engaging in bully tactics, I wouldn’t be as fast to label it terrorism, but this is a long pattern with Trump and MAGA. Over the past two years, in response to MAGA’s attack on the mainstreaming of gay entertainment, venues hosting drag shows have endured a ton of bomb threats. Trump’s focus on banning abortion (and his lies about late-term abortion and baby killing) have led to an increase in threats and violence on health facilities and doctors. Since Trump brought vaccine-deniers in his fold, we’ve seen waves of threats against doctors and clinics. And then there’s the Trump-directed January 6th attack on the Capitol, a clear act of domestic terrorism.
Trump apologists say that Trump has no responsibility for the rise in right-wing threats and violence, that he has never directly ordered an attack on anything or even issued a threat. Bullshit. While Trump often pretends to be a mob boss, suggesting Fat Tony needs to take a “long walk,” he routinely threatens violence if he doesn’t get his way. Nearly every legal charge against Trump, every court case, every judgment has elicited at least one Trump threat of “death and destruction.” As he did in 2016 and 2020, Trump has repeatedly threatened violence if he loses the 2024 election. Threatening terrorist violence is what Donald Trump does.
Trump apologists respond to this reality by denying it. Either they turn “I’m going to kill you” into “Have a nice day” or they hide behind “threats of violence aren’t violence.” Bullshit, again. Anyone who has studied or even observed how terrorism works knows that the goal of the terrorist isn’t causing harm or killing people. The terrorists’ aim is to use violence and threats of violence to get what they cannot achieve through legitimate political means.
By this measure, Donald Trump is a terrorist. And so is J.D. Vance and Marjorie Taylor Greene and Boebert and DeSantis and Abbott and the legion of Republicans who defiantly pose with their (or borrowed) assault rifles, a message supporting the 2nd Amendment, they say, but also a threat of violence if they don’t get what they want. When Ron DeSantis and other Republican elected officials hand-wave acts and threats of political violence that, at the very least, they enable terrorism. When the violence and threats pass without elected officials attempting to stop those engaging in the threats and violence, that is enabling if not abetting terrorism.
Because the mainstream media refuses to call terrorism “terrorism” instead dancing around Trump’s and supporters’ terrorist threats, at best, hiding the obvious by using euphemisms, it is vital that we speak the unvarnished truth. For way too long we’ve tolerated the media’s puppy-petting of the right-wing and far-white*.
During Obama’s presidency, we saw the media frame the right’s unfiltered racism and racist violence as “working class grievance.” And the threat grew. The Birther movement was first treated, by the media, as an eccentricity, then semi-legit, then a serious political issue, then a crazy anomaly and not the racist propaganda campaign that it was.
In 2015, when Trump rode his golden escalator into electoral politics with a blatantly racist and xenophobic speech, the media framed the event as an amusing novelty and not a threat. During the 2016 Republican primaries, rather than listening and reporting on what Trump was saying as if he was serious, the press continued to engage with him as if he was an entertaining celebrity prankster.
It got worse during the Trump administration. The press characterized Trump’s Wall as either a joke or something extremely serious, not as a metaphorical threat or the essence of Trump policy. Remember how long it took for the media to accept that Trump’s lies were lies and not misstatements or mistruths or whatever lame euphemism they cowardly hid behind to avoid calling a liar a liar?
It got worse. Even as millions were dying during the pandemic and while Trump was sending secret police into Portland to smash anti-police violence protests, the mainstream media gave the man the benefit of the doubt. They refused to hold him responsible for a COVID death toll that exceeded that of other countries (per capita). Few challenged Trump directly when he claimed that the numbers were a hoax. Nor was Trump challenged by the mainstream over his authoritarianism during the Floyd/Taylor protests. Hell, aside from a few left-leaning pundits, the word “authoritarianism” was absent in the mainstream media, left to rando eggheads like me.
No more. We cannot allow Trump, Vance and the rest of them to hide behind euphemisms. We must “tell it like it is,” even if the telling is “impolite” and “divisive.” We must wake up to the fact that a gun to the head (or the threat of one) is neither democratic or civil discourse, and that ignoring the gun and excusing threats does not create “unity.” Submit to that bullshit and we become prisoners in the MAGA bubble. Fuck that. No more. Speak the truth. Be bold. Say what you see and experience. That is the only way out of this nightmare.
*credit “far-white” to D. Worden