Trump: The Political Threats Will Stop … When You Agree With My Lies
At the start of this election year, Donald Trump spoke of “bedlam” breaking out if criminal prosecutions prevent him from retaking the White House. But the chaos the former president is threatening isn’t an abstraction. It’s already here, barely a month into 2024.
U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland recently warned of “a deeply disturbing spike in threats against those who serve the public.” Last month, his top deputy said the Department of Justice is receiving urgent reports of threats to public officials “on a weekly basis.” Around the country, election officials in key battleground states say they are devoting unprecedented resources to election and physical security, and are bracing for an increasingly hellish 2024 to come.
The man who has inspired much of the wave of threats and intimidation efforts directed at politicians, judges, prosecutors, and other officials is not disturbed by any of this. Trump has stressed to close allies that if those individuals — who he says are “harassing” him or trying to “cheat” him out of the 2024 election — simply did what he wanted, the torrent of death threats would stop immediately, two people with knowledge of the situation say.
Trump has publicly pledged that if the criminal cases against him hurt his election prospects, “It’ll be bedlam in the country.” Trump’s lawyers similarly warned the Supreme Court there would be “chaos and bedlam” should Colorado prevail in keeping him off the ballot.
At times, though, the former president has privately accused some officials and Democrats of making up certain threats and attacks to make him look bad, the two sources add.
But for the many people on the receiving end of those threats, there’s nothing fictitious about the dangers or the reverberating consequences. Lawmakers on Capitol Hill are working to find new ways to protect themselves and their staffers. Three years after the deadly Jan. 6 riot, U.S. Capitol Police are still grappling with an explosion in violent threats. And critical states in the upcoming election are experiencing a sharp rise in resignations among election workers and administrators, many of whom openly say they can’t withstand the pro-Trump, conspiracy-theory-fueled scare tactics any longer.
To those who’ve worked closely with the former president, Trump’s steadfast refusal to condemn, or even discourage, right-wing violence is as part of his political DNA as anything else.
“There were instances when I was in the room when I worked in the Trump administration… when one person or more would advise him that his words could potentially cause violence, and he would just wave his hand at you, like he was swatting away a fly, as if to say, ‘whatever’ or ‘shut up,’” recalls Stephanie Grisham, Trump’s former White House press secretary. “Every time something like that was given to him [he would do that]. It was his signal that he didn’t want to hear something. It was always that hand, and you just knew. If you got the hand wave, you knew not to bring it up again — it was his way of showing he thought you were being overly dramatic.”
This reporting is based on new internal government data reviewed by Rolling Stone, as well as interviews with state election officials, senior congressional sources, former federal prosecutors, Biden administration officials, and other Democratic and Republican sources familiar with the matter.
A Trump spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment from Rolling Stone.
The numbers speak for themselves: The American discourse is growing more violent. Over the past five fiscal years, federal prosecutions for threats-related charges generally — against both public officials and private citizens — jumped by 47 percent compared to the previous five years, according to data provided to Rolling Stone by the Justice Department; the number of defendants prosecuted spiked from 769 to 1129.
The Justice Department data includes prosecutions for violations of seven different threats-related statutes, among them a federal statute that prohibits kidnapping or killing a member of Congress or conspiring to do as much. From fiscal years 2012 to 2018, the Justice Department prosecuted only one such case. Since then, it has prosecuted four.
The number of threats investigated by the Capitol Police has doubled since 2017, Trump’s first year in office. The agency’s threat assessment caseload numbered just under 4,000 cases that year but grew to a record 9,625 in 2021. In 2023, Capitol Police investigated over 8,000 threats, with more expected as the country heads into a presidential election. “This is going to be a very busy year for our special agents,” Ashan Benedict, the Capitol Police’s assistant chief of protective and intelligence operations said in a statement.
Many ominous or intimidating messages sent to members of Congress often fall into a gray area between constitutionally-protected, albeit coarse speech and pledges of imminent violence, creating frustration among some public officials. The legal difference between a caller wishing death on a lawmaker or their staff versus actively threatening their lives is not always apparent to the recipient, and the former can be jarring, too.
Rep. Eric Swalwell’s (D-Calif.) office tells Rolling Stone it has been exploring legislation that would allow law enforcement to prosecute a broader range of threats. “You never want to suppress free speech, but I do think we need to look at something between free speech and a specific, direct threat,” Swalwell says.
Of course, not every death threat in this ongoing trend can be attributed to extreme Trumpism or related ideologies. However, the former president’s relentless public targeting of various political and legal foes has clearly thrown a powerful accelerant on an already fraught national state of affairs.
Early this month police were called in when the residence of U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, who is assigned to the federal election subversion case against Trump, was the target of an apparent “swatting” attempt. Elsewhere, Arthur Engoron, the judge presiding over the ex-president’s New York civil fraud trial, received a bomb threat this month. Last month, Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold (D) announced she had been inundated with death threats following the suit that caused Trump’s removal from the state’s 2024 ballot.
“Within three weeks of the lawsuit being filed, I received 64 death threats. I stopped counting after that,” Griswold wrote. “I will not be intimidated. Democracy and peace will triumph over tyranny and violence.”
Pete Simi, a sociology professor at Chapman University, has sifted through court records of prosecutions for threats against elected officials, election workers, judges, law enforcement, and officials who work in education and health care. He says that threats are at a disturbing peak.
“We see the highest number of cases in 2023,” Simi says. “There’s a big spike around 2017 to 2018 and then it maintains at a pretty high level.”
The character of the threats has also changed recently. Offenders can have a variety of motivations for making threats, from losing touch with reality during a mental health crisis to a more calculated attempt to achieve political ends.
In about half of the cases identified by Simi, threat-makers had clear, discernible ideological motivation — a proportion which has only increased with time, peaking in 2023.
Simi — an expert witness in the Colorado Supreme Court case to remove Trump from the state’s 2024 election ballot for inciting an insurrection — believes that Trump plays a unique role in the worsening climate of threats.
“The spike in threats after 2017 reflected, at least to some extent, President Trump’s role in promoting political violence both during the 2016 presidential campaign and in the four years of his administration that followed,” he wrote in an October opinion piece.
Two Biden administration officials tell Rolling Stone that they only expect the volume of death threats and political intimidation to increase as Election Day 2024 approaches. The tide of intimidation has left at least one prominent swing state election official exceedingly frustrated.
“As cautious a person as Attorney General Merrick Garland is, I think he is being far too cautious here, when it comes to these investigations and prosecutions of threats against election administrators and election workers,” Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes said in a recent interview with Rolling Stone.
Another senior state election official, who requested anonymity to speak candidly, adds, “We’re losing election workers left and right because they don’t feel safe, and for good reason. And guess who is going to be there to replace them? A guy who thinks all elections are rigged unless Donald Trump or some other goon wins it.”
John Keller, a top prosecutor in the Justice Department’s Election Threats Task Force, established during President Joe Biden’s first year in office, says the department is “taking threats to the election community extremely seriously.” A spokesperson pointed to a number of recent convictions for election worker-related threats.
Last year, the Brennan Center for Justice released a survey of local officials across the nation showing that 45 percent “of local election officials said they fear for the safety of their colleagues.” The center’s analysis underscored these offices have experienced “high turnover amid safety threats and political interference” during and after then-President Trump’s failed crusade to overturn Biden’s 2020 electoral victory. (Due to those efforts, Trump is expected to stand trial in federal court amid his run for another term as president.)
“On a weekly basis — sometimes more often — I am getting reports about threats to public officials, threats to our prosecutors, threats to law enforcement agents who work in the Justice Department, threats to judges,” Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco said in December. “What we’ve seen is an unprecedented rise in threats to public officials across the board — law enforcement agents, prosecutors, judges, election officials.”
It is not just Democrats or Biden officials making these points. Current and former elected officials who speak out against Trump or his election-denialism movement often endure a similar new-normal: constantly worrying about their families’ safety in ways they never thought they’d have to before.
“It takes just one crazy person to think they are going to make a name for themselves and prove to themselves, one way or another, to be the savior of the country or savior of the cause… It just takes one crazy person to perpetrate some act of violence or shoot somebody,” Rusty Bowers, the former Arizona state House speaker, tells Rolling Stone.
Bowers, a Republican, refused to go along with Trump’s demands that he help him steal the election in the crucial battleground of Arizona, during the chaotic aftermath of the 2020 presidential contest. When Bowers refused to bow to Team Trump’s demands, MAGA supporters published his home address and cell phone number, showed up to his home armed, and drove a truck with a sign falsely claiming him to be a pedophile through his neighborhood, according to the Jan. 6 House committee.
The former state legislative leader now finds the current climate of pervasive, politically-motivated threats “deeply concerning.”
Bowers recalls that when he ran for office three decades ago, “low-level name-calling, and things like that” were commonplace. Now, he says that has been widely replaced by “doxxing, harming you, and putting your information on the internet,” as well as “making your children miserable” and chasing decent people out of public life.
“When Donald Trump’s deportment justified and legitimized a level of discourse countrywide that others were quick to embrace, the genie was out of the bottle,” Bowers says. “We have a worship of violence in our country, it’s entertainment, and when you throw in politics, it just makes everything worse.”
“I don’t blame Trump if someone comes by my house and yells at me,” he adds. “But he could do something about it. Trump could calm down folks on his side. The level of intense, angry public discourse that we have today — that does not respect people, or humanity, or gender, or children, or age, like it’s open season to say whatever you want without any associated responsibility — seems to have coalesced around Trump’s attitudes.”
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