Analysts say the most important reason for the lack of political violence is simply that Trump’s supporters believe he will win the presidential election.
Trump himself has contributed to that certainty by claiming the only way he could lose is if his opponent cheated. With the Republican front-runner predicting a victory over President Biden within five months and poised to carry out his promised “retribution” against his opponent within seven months, pro-Trump extremist groups and radicalized MAGA supporters have little reason to take to the streets, political violence trackers say.
Polls show the race is close, with Trump and Biden roughly tied among voters nationwide, but Trump trending with slight leads in several key battleground states that Biden won four years ago.
But in the eyes of many Trump supporters, Trump is virtually certain to win if the voting is fair. Their confidence comes at a risk: If Trump loses, experts warn, the gap between expectations and reality could lead to a highly volatile post-election period.
“They’re assuming Trump is going to win, and what’s galvanizing them now is, ‘If that happens, it’s time for retaliation,'” said Mary McCord, a former federal prosecutor who now heads the Georgetown Law Center’s Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection, which focuses on threats to U.S. national security and democracy.
But if Trump loses, “it will be the same thing,” he said. [as 2020]”‘This was rigged, they cheated, they stole this,’ that narrative is very dangerous,” she said.
With dehumanizing rhetoric running rampant at home and research showing U.S. attitudes increasingly favoring political violence, many extremism researchers worry the current lull is only temporary. Those fears are exacerbated, they add, by the far-right’s portrayal of Trump not just as a candidate but as a savior — a messianic figure who is our only hope of saving the republic from the “radical left.”
Supporters are calling the former president’s four criminal cases They even printed his face on a T-shirt, including the “Deep State” election interference case in which he was convicted on 34 counts last month. They compared his indictment. Oppose the persecution of Christ. “Jesus was falsely tried but I still follow him,” one right-wing meme reads.
Watchdog groups say the cult-like frenzy surrounding Trump is dangerous because a defeat in November could make him a martyr and provoke revenge among his more extreme supporters.
Extremism monitoring groups have warned for years that Trump’s incendiary rhetoric has inspired real-world attacks. Attackers have invoked Trump’s name in dozens of violent incidents, and “Stop the Steal” rallies held in late 2020 and early 2021 after his election loss became a magnet for members of violent far-right groups that played a key role in the storming of the Capitol.
Every time Trump has appeared to be threatened, from the FBI search of his Florida mansion in 2022 to his guilty plea in a Manhattan court last month, online rumors of a “civil war” have proliferated.
The Institute for Strategic Dialogue, which monitors extremism, recorded about 9,300 online posts related to civil unrest within a day of Trump’s conviction — roughly the same number as after the FBI raided Mar-a-Lago. The posts “included hundreds of calls for violence and explicit fantasies about violently overthrowing the government.”
“While large-scale mobilization is unlikely at this time, conspiracy theories surrounding these developments could inspire individual acts of violence,” the report concludes.
Serious threats against federal judges and prosecutors in the United States have more than doubled in the past three years, according to a Reuters analysis of data from the U.S. Marshals Service. The data shows the increase began around the time of the 2020 presidential election, when authorities were under attack from supporters of Trump who denied his defeat.
Prominent election deniers like Colorado-based podcaster Joe Oltman, who has a national MAGA following, have repeatedly suggested violence as a way to deal with Democrats and other political opponents. In March, Oltman said on his podcast that President Biden “should hang himself until he dies” because he supported an assault weapons ban.
“The question is, when will they move away from armchair theory and return to the physical realm as they have in the past?” said Rachel Goldwasser, a senior research analyst at the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors extremist movements.
Truth Social predicts ‘death and destruction’ when Trump is indicted in New York The plan for spring 2023 did not materialize.
Trump was convicted on May 30 in a Manhattan courthouse fortified to withstand a mob attack. In the end, the trial drew political allies eager to demonstrate his loyalty but few rank-and-file supporters.
The low turnout is in line with new research from extremism monitoring groups, which highlights a polarized security landscape ahead of the election, with high-intensity threats and intimidation online and low-intensity attacks and rallies on the ground.
But that equation could change dramatically depending on the outcome of the election: The biggest spike in far-right demonstrations in 2020 came after that November’s vote, said Kieran Doyle, North America research manager for the Armed Conflict Location and Events Data Project, a global conflict monitoring group.
“So far our data suggests there is less violence and less far-right organising than before, but it’s too early to feel complacent,” Doyle said.
According to the researchers, far-right activity, including armed protests, which surged during the Trump administration, has declined sharply over the past year or so for three main reasons.
One is that because pro-Trump extremists do not believe that Trump is in imminent legal danger or at risk of losing the election, they have not held large national rallies like the “Stop the Steal” protests in Washington in late 2020 and early 2021, when tens of thousands of Trump supporters from around the country gathered in the mistaken belief that Biden’s victory was illegitimate. A February New York Times/Siena poll found that 81% of Trump supporters believe he will win the 2024 presidential election. (74% of Biden supporters said they expect him to win.)
The second is the chilling effect of the Department of Justice’s prosecution of the mob that stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. The two organized extremist movements involved in the attack, the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, have yet to recover from the blow of losing their national leadership following their convictions in federal court on sedition conspiracy charges.
“The Proud Boys remain one of the most active groups in the United States, but their current activity is not comparable to what it was before the last election,” Doyle said, “and other groups like the Three Percenters and the Oath Keepers are more or less inactive.”
Third, by limiting online threats to what researchers call “legitimate but egregious” levels, far-right bullies can intimidate others without incurring the legal consequences of a face-to-face confrontation.
The success of the intimidation campaign is measured in surveys of elected officials at all levels, who say the intimidation is hindering the democratic process by deterring candidates from running for office and making leaders afraid to hold public events.
A survey conducted by Princeton University’s Bridging Divides Initiative in collaboration with other partners found that one in six local government employees said they had received a threat in the past three months, compared with one in four for racial and ethnic minorities.
“If intimidation and harassment were effective at driving people out of public service and shutting down spaces for participation in any kind of democratic practice, we wouldn’t actually see an increase in physical violence,” said Shannon Hiller, executive director of the Bridging Divides Initiative.
As the countdown to November draws near, authorities are stepping up security at polling places and training election officials how to defuse hostile situations. Poll workers, election observers, journalists and campaign staff are taking part in security drills designed to simulate worst-case scenarios.
Extremism researchers have two views on these efforts: On the one hand, they say the emphasis on security exaggerates risk and could scare voters on a historically calm Election Day. On the other, they say there is a real threat of unexpected explosive events as the day approaches, ones that don’t necessarily have anything to do with Trump.
Analysts say the calm could be broken by unexpected events like a terrorist attack, foreign interference or border trouble. They’re still trying to determine whether the calm will last through Pride month in June, which has seen a spike in attacks against the LGBTQ community in recent years. Doyle, the data researcher, documented a fourfold increase in far-right activity during Pride month last year.
“If the situation is similar this year, this month could be a time of increased far-right organizing,” he said.
Doyle said white supremacists have emerged as a new threat, and their public activity has increased rather than waned like other far-right extremist groups. A federal grand jury this month indicted an Arizona man on charges of plotting a mass shooting to spark a race war before the November election.
McCord, the former federal prosecutor, said the most likely threat is not a Jan. 6-style storming of the Capitol, but a targeted attack by individuals acting on conspiracy theories that have spread from the far right to mainstream conservatives.
For example, Trump and other prominent Republicans routinely exploit white racial anxieties and repeat tropes of the “mass replacement” theory, which posits the deliberate eradication of white people from a once-minority background. Mass shooters have cited such ideas in manifestos seeking to justify their deadly violence.
“They’re solitary actors, and they do it,” McCord says, “but they’re not solitary actors in the sense of what inspires them.”
Extremism researchers say election denialism is also a cause for concern, with a mini-industry sprung up around the conspiracy-driven notion that the 2020 election was “stolen” from Trump, and that his supporters should prepare for a similar fight this year.
“They’re constantly on edge. They’re constantly active, they’re constantly loud in public. Videos, forums, they do anything they can,” Goldwasser said. “They’re radicalizing a lot of people.”
A December poll by The Washington Post/University of Maryland found that only about a third of Republicans believe Biden’s 2020 presidential victory was legitimate, which is consistent with other national polls.
Trump has a long history of floating violent thoughts, referring to riots and “riots” when he doesn’t get his way.
Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who is $1.5 billion in debt and facing court-ordered seizure of his assets for making false claims about the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, told his followers that violence was unnecessary given the popularity of Trump and the right-wing movement he represents.
Jones is video “We have won intellectually, culturally and spiritually,” he said shortly after Trump’s conviction.
But when Jones took the stage at a far-right political convention in Detroit this month, he struck a more combative tone. He began his speech with one of his standard lines, alluding to how conservatives should respond to what they see as an Orwellian expansion of government power: “The answer to 1984 is 1776.”
Jones led the crowd in chants of “1776! 1776! 1776!”
Right-wing strongman Jack Posobiec told the crowd that Trump’s victory was certain.
“We know how to defeat them, and we intend to defeat them all within just 140 days on that blessed day of November 5th, when Donald J. Trump will be re-elected president,” he said.
Scott Clement contributed to this report.
