'Five-alarm fire': Ex-federal prosecutor sounds the alarm on Trump’s 'thuggish' 2024 game plan

02 April 2024

2024 GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump is drawing scathing criticism from President Joe Biden's campaign for posting, on Truth Social, an image that depicts the president hogtied in the back seat of a pickup truck.

Michael Tyner, a spokesman for Biden's reelection campaign, was quick to call Trump out — saying, in an official statement, "This image from Donald Trump is the type of crap you post when you're calling for a bloodbath or when you tell the Proud Boys to 'stand back and stand by.' Trump is regularly inciting political violence, and it's time people take him seriously — just ask the Capitol Police officers who were attacked protecting our democracy on January 6."

In an article published by the conservative website The Bulwark on April 2, former federal prosecutor Dennis Aftergut stresses that the Biden image must not be viewed as anomaly, but as part of a pattern in which Trump promotes "violence" and "intimidation" against his opponents.

"For a presidential candidate to gleefully share such an image — for a former president to share such an image of the sitting president — is a gross new low in our politics," Aftergut warns. "Trump's crazed post was likely aimed at amping up his base. But the primaries are over, and general elections are all about addition — appealing to voters in the middle. Violence-inciting social media posts are almost certain to do the opposite. Yet Trump can't help himself. There's madness to his method, politically and psychologically."

Trump "and his thugs," according to Aftergut, are only growing more extreme — and the Biden image is a glaring example.

"You can see Trump's increasingly erratic mind in his calls for violence and acts of intimidation," Aftergut observes. "Such calls led New York State Justice Juan Merchan to impose a limited gag order on Trump last week to protect jurors and prosecutors in Trump's upcoming criminal trial in Manhattan…. The immediacy of the criminal trial is as good a time as any to remind everyone that, under pressure, things with Trump will get worse before they get worse."

The Biden image, according to the former federal prosecutor, is "the stuff of MAGA extremists' fever dreams."

"Trump wants every one of us to be afraid to stand up to him," Aftergut explains. "Authoritarian leaders, like those Trump admires abroad, can't control the vast majority of a population with arms; there are too many of us. Instead, strongmen prevail, as Yale historian Timothy Snyder emphasizes, by using intimidation to try to get people to obey and conform voluntarily."

Aftergut argues that the Biden image Trump posted on Truth Social is "covertly targeting participants in his upcoming criminal trial," including "jurors, prospective witnesses, and even Justice Merchan's family."

"Trump wants all who are part of the judicial system to fear what might happen to him if they stand strong for accountability," Aftergut writes. "We can fret about this reality, or we can face it and do something about it…. Trump's accelerating assaults on our security and on common decency represent a five-alarm fire."

Dennis Aftergut's full Bulwark article is available at this link.

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