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political violence
What Trump's Pardons and Retribution Say About His Fascist Threat
What history teaches should worry us very much.
Jan 29, 2025
President Trump’s recent granting of freedom to nearly 1,600 January 6 insurrectionists, followed by other actions fulfilling what the New York Times last week called “his promises to exact revenge on his perceived enemies,” emphasize the ominous portent of an authoritarian regime in the United States.
The history of fascist regimes documents a direct correlation between unleashing political violence and the intimidation, muzzling, arrests and worse of political opponents which leads to securing mass acceptance for repressive policies and governance.
“This is part of his plan,” said Capitol Police officer Michael Fanone who suffered a traumatic brain injury and heart attack after being pulled from the police line, beaten and shocked with a stun gun on January 6, 2021. “The plan is to pardon those on his behalf, because he knows that will send a message to the citizens of this country,” he told MSNBC’s Joy Reid. “If you commit crimes on my behalf, I support you. If you try to prevent me from doing things I want to do, you know what is coming.”
“This is actually about the future, why this is so dangerous,” said podcaster Jon Favreau. “Because now Donald Trump has pardoned all of these right-wing extremists who were armed, who committed violence, who are not apologetic at all, who are not maintaining their innocence either. They’ve said they’re guilty. They’re not apologetic. And now they’re out of prison. And other right-wing extremists who might want to cause violence now know that if you commit violence in Donald Trump’s name, then he’s got your back. And so why wouldn’t they commit violence again?”
While initial outrage focused on the pardons, Trump’s decision to pull security protections for people he has demonized who continue to face death threats, like infectious disease adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci and other moves targeting perceived opponents, underline the stakes. Trump’s “retribution is intended not just to impose punishment for the past but also to intimidate anyone who might cross him in the future,” said the Times calling it a “signal” Trump is “willing to impose potentially profound consequences on anyone he sees as having been insufficiently loyal.”
“We can take this back to 2015, when (Trump) said at his rallies punch them out to people who were protesting, and I’ll take care of your representation. I’ll pay for your lawyers,” noted Sherrilyn Ifill, former president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund to MSNBC’s Chris Hayes.
Trump’s language in his campaign and first term helped fuel a rise in far-right hate speech that led to vigilante mass shootings at a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018 and at an El Paso Walmart in 2019 by gunmen influenced by Trump’s violent rhetoric. It was also evident in the 2020 storming of the Michigan Capitol by armed anti-government militia and a plan by one group to abduct Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer. That came after Trump encouraged supporters to “liberate” Democratic-led states from Covid-19 safety measures he opposed, and tweeted solidarity with the Michigan militia protesters.
The pinnacle of the violence, of course, was the January 6 insurrection intended to overturn the 2020 election. It emphatically escalated the role of violence to achieve authoritarian rule. That was the danger seen in Trump’s pardons within hours of his inauguration for his second term.
“Now they’re all talking about revenge,” noted Favreau. “Revenge against the people who testified, against the prosecutors, against the judges who put them in prison. And so like when the Proud Boys come to your community and start marching or menacing people or whatever the hell they do, what are the police going to do?”
“Now it’s our turn,” said Proud Boys leader Henry “Enrique” Tarrio, who received the longest riot sentence for mobilizing his right-wing group as an “army” to keep Trump in power through violence after his pardon. Trial evidence showed he and his lieutenants, inspired by Trump’s directive to “stand by” during a 2020 presidential debate, joined what Trump promised would be a “wild” protest on January 6. Similarly, Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes echoed Tarrio, projecting plans for retribution against police witnesses and prosecutors “on up the chain.”
“The most important part of the pardons isn’t specifically who is released from prison, but the meaning of Trump’s gesture: Radical militias are free to act with impunity — as long as they’re loyal to Trump,” wrote Ali Breland in The Atlantic. “After the riot, as law-enforcement agencies began to prosecute those involved, the militias went underground. Political violence, particularly by the right, has been ascendant over the past several years. Now, after the pardons, right-wing extremists no longer have to hide.”
In her book Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, describes the binding of political violence to modern dictatorships, especially in fascist regimes dating to Mussolini’s organization of Fascist Combat Leagues in 1919. It began with assaults and murders on union leaders, socialists, and left-leaning priests in offices, homes, city occupations and ultimately a march on Rome by thousands of fascists and Blackshirt paramilitaries that led to his appointment as prime minister, in what Ben-Giatt called “an elite-approved transfer of power.”
“Fascist violence was neither random nor indiscriminate,” driven by persuading “law and order conservatives and members of the middle class to tolerate fascist violence as a harsh necessity” against disorder or provocation, wrote Robert Paxton in The Anatomy of Fascism. “For some, fascist violence was more than useful: it was beautiful,” he adds, a prescient prediction of Trump’s labeling January 6 a “day of love.”
With Trump’ pardons for January 6, suggested Ifil, “he wants to know he has a kind of army, a group of Brownshirts who will support him, who will show fealty to him to the point of violence,” referencing the most infamous linkage of political violence and fascism — Nazi Germany.
The rise of Hitler
In Hitler’s First Hundred Days, Peter Fritzsche describes the murderous connection. Hitler’s climb also coincided with the formation of a paramilitary organization, the Sturmabteilung (SA), or Brownshirts that carried out his ideological mission of revenge, including physical assaults on those he blamed for Germany’s defeat in World War I, mainly Communists, the Social Democratic Party (a party similar to the centrist Democrats of today in the U.S.), and Jews.
Through street violence against his enemies, the Nazis and SA created an atmosphere of disruption and chaos that, accompanied by an economic collapse in a global depression, produced a desire for political change and distrust in democracy and traditional parties by ordinary Germans.
By 1932, the Nazis had become the top party in the parliamentary elections. But they were eroding support in January 1933 when the then-ruling rightwing nationalist, monarchist parties and leaders, like President Paul von Hindenburg, that also hated the left and Social Democrats, agreed to appoint Hitler chancellor. They believed it “was the only way to establish an authoritarian state” they also favored, writes Fritzsche, thinking they could control him, as many traditional Republicans believed of Trump prior to his first term. It was a catastrophic miscalculation. “It took a long, long time when Germany was already in ruins, for conservatives to understand that they had made a pact with the devil in 1933,” Fritzsche observes.
Like Mussolini before him, Hitler saw physical coercion as central to eliminating his political opposition and helping achieve acceptance of the then majority of non-Nazi supporting Germans. Almost immediately the Brownshirts escalated street attacks to “settle the score,” as one put it, on those deemed as, in words Trump would emulate in 2024, “the enemy from within.” In a February 1933 speech, Hitler declared, “there can be only one victor: either Marxism or the German Volk (people).”
“The Nazis won support because of their militance,” says Fritzsche. “By launching furious, uncompromising attacks on the ‘system’ and physically engaging their enemies, they dramatized the combustibility of the present. … and opened the way to the future. “I want no softies in my movement, I want fanatics,” Hitler told a reporter for the UK Daily Mail, yet another similarity to Trump’s opinion of conservatives, including his own Cabinet appointees, who failed to show unquestioned loyalty to him.
Just weeks after Hitler’s appointment, a massive fire consumed the Reichstag, Germany’s legislative building, akin to the U.S. Capitol. Hindenburg declared a state of emergency, convinced by Hitler and his rightwing coalition allies that Communists were to blame for the fire as a step toward insurrection, though many still believed the Nazis orchestrated it. The order “symbolized the death of representative government and the rule of law,” writes Fritzsche, followed by federal decrees that suspended civil liberties, expanded protective custody and sanctioned the removal of state governments.
The SA Brownshirts, who “sustained the extraordinary energy of the Nazi movement” were deputized by the government as auxiliary police. They now had unlimited power to break up opposition meetings, shut down opposition parties and newspapers, and assault political opponents. Thousands were arrested, mostly Communists initially, then Social Democratic leaders. Home raids, arbitrary arrests, torture of prisoners and prolonged periods of incarceration created fear and widespread disquiet and reinforced a growing sense of national emergency especially heading into new elections in early March.
The violence coincided with other Nazis tactics to build their power in the election turning the election to a victory plebiscite. They exploited state resources, including domination of the media and national festivals, depicted their role as savior of the nation, and “presented themselves as the guardians of a sound moral order threatened by ‘Marxists’ and Jews’.” Immediately after the election, the SA “instigated a reign of terror wrecking trade union and Social Democratic offices, occupying city halls,” and escalated virulent attacks on Jewish shops, synagogues, and street beatings of individual Jews.
Emergency decrees, coercion, and consent
By Day 34 of Hitler’s reign, executive power passed almost completely into the hands of the Nazis, and enabled the Nazis to “consolidate one party rule.” The Communists were the first targets, “but all independent political organizations were eliminated or coordinated in the months to come,” Fritzsche notes.
Through the Spring of 1933, the Nazis engineered acceptance by a majority of the German people with a collective conformity, also based on opportunism, patriotic fervor and the far-right nationalist ideology they had long fostered, including racism and antisemitism.
Contrived fears that “the German people were about to perish” at the hands of Communists and Jews, offers a chilling parallel to the white nationalist Great Replacement conspiracy theory, and Charlottesville neo-Nazi and KKK marchers chanting “Jews will not replace us.”
“Coercion always accompanied consent,” says Fritzsche. Ben-Ghiat draws a similar outcome with fascist Spain under Gen. Francisco Franco, quoting philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset who said: “the threat in my mind of an eventual violence, coercion, or sanction that other people are going to exercise against me” bred conformity.
“Social Democrats believed they could not compete, they could pick up after the Nazis had bankrupted themselves and could act in the future, but not in the present. But the popularity of the Nazis was such that the future kept slipping away, and the pieces the socialists finally did pick up in the late 1940s were destroyed cities and millions murdered,” Fritzsche concludes.
That should be a warning to all elected officials, corporate CEOs, major media, community organizations and anyone else rolling over and seeking to align with Trump and his MAGA policies.
Hitler had no intention of giving up power. “I’m never leaving here” he said a week after moving into the chancellery. ”We have power and we’re going to keep it.” Top Nazi Hermann Goering echoed Hitler, predicting the March 5 election “would surely be the last for ten years or even a hundred years.”
“In four years, you don’t have to vote again,” Trump famously said to supporters last July. “Success is going to be retribution,” Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio told conspiracy monger Alex Jones after his release. “We’ve got to do everything in our power to make sure that the next four years sets us up for the next hundred years.”Keep ReadingShow Less
All But 3 State Attorneys General Call for Peaceful Transfer of Power, Condemn Political Violence
The three Republicans who didn't join the statement "presumably want violence," said one critic.
Nov 05, 2024
A bipartisan group of attorneys general on Monday led the vast majority of the United States' top state-level legal officials in releasing a statement calling for a peaceful transfer of power regardless of the presidential election results—but three Republican attorneys general were conspicuously absent from the list of signatories.
Ken Paxton of Texas, Todd Rokita of Indiana, and Austin Knudsen of Montana did not add their names to the statement, which condemned "any acts of violence related to the results."
"A peaceful transfer of power is the highest testament to the rule of law, a tradition that stands at the heart of our nation's stability," said the officials. "As attorneys general, we affirm our commitment to protect our communities and uphold the democratic principles we serve."
The statement was released a day after Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump said at a rally that he wouldn't mind journalists getting shot and that he "shouldn't have left" the White House after he was voted out of office in 2020.
Trump urged thousands of his supporters to descend on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 to try to stop Congress from certifying President Joe Biden's electoral victory, and has continued to claim he was the true winner of the 2020 election.
Election experts have said in recent weeks that Trump has been setting the stage for the same baseless claims of election fraud and vote-stealing that he and his allies spread in 2020—telling supporters that Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris will only win the election if Democrats cheat and saying, along with his running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), that he will only accept the election results if he views them as "fair and legal."
The attorneys general—representing 48 states, the District of Colombia, American Samoa, the Northern Mariana Islands, and the U.S. Virgin Islands—called on Americans "to vote, participate in civil discourse, and, above all, respect the integrity of the democratic process."
"Let us come together after this election not divided by outcomes but united in our shared commitment to the rule of law and safety of all Americans," they said. "Violence has no place in the democratic process; we will exercise our authority to enforce the law against any illegal acts that threaten it."
The statement was spearheaded by two Democrats—Ellen Rosenblum of Oregon and William Tong of Connecticut—and two Republicans, Dave Yost of Ohio and Kris Kobach of Kansas. Kobach notably led a so-called Election Integrity Commission during Trump's term in the White House, searching unsuccessfully for evidence that the Republican was the true winner of the national popular vote in 2016.
Of the attorneys general who did not join the statement, Rokita and Knudsen are up for reelection on Tuesday.
Indiana-based author Steve Tally said Rokita, Knudsen, and Paxton "presumably want violence" and urged voters to oppose the state attorneys general.
"Where is the Indiana secretary of state and attorney general on this one?" said Destiny Wells, the Democratic candidate challenging Rokita. "Oh that's right, it's their team."
In Texas, Paxton has been a vehement supporter of Trump, announcing Monday he would deploy an "Election Day Rapid Response Legal Team" to polling places and suing the Biden-Harris administration over plans to send federal election monitors to Texas.
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Trump and Trumpism Are the Violent Threat—And They Must Be Stopped
We are not our own worst enemies. Trump is the worst enemy of every one of us.
Nov 02, 2024
William Jacob Parsons was arrested recently in North Carolina on charges of appearing at a FEMA office carrying a semi-automatic handgun and making threats against employees.
According to the Washington Post:
Parsons said he was motivated by social media reports claiming that FEMA was withholding supplies from hurricane victims in western North Carolina. Such false claims are part of a wave of misinformation that has hampered hurricane recovery efforts across the Southeast. ‘I viewed it as if our people are sitting here on American soil, and they’re refusing to aid our people,’ Parsons told FOX8.
A ”wave.” The phenomenon sounds beyond human control, like the waves caused by the hurricane itself.
Only a few paragraphs down does the story mention that there is a politics here: “As the country digs out, false claims about the storms have divided the Republican Party. While Donald Trump and his allies have spread the falsehoods, other GOP lawmakers and officials have sought to counter these rumors without directly criticizing the former president.” It turns out that it was Trump and his allies who caused this “wave.” Even here, the reporter needs to emphasize that “other GOP lawmakers and officials have sought to counter these rumors without directly criticizing the former president.” What is not said: these officials, like Republican office holders throughout the country, continue to support Donald Trump as he runs a campaign centered on lies, threats, and promises to use coercive force to deal with immigrants, suspected criminals, and various “enemies from within”—the same types he described only a few months ago as “the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country that lie and steal and cheat on elections.”
Focusing on the lone wolf rather than the rabid wolf pack led and incited by Trump, and exaggerating the extent to which anyone in the GOP is constraining him in any way, this piece exemplifies the widespread tendency of so many journalists and commentators to downplay the threat that Trump’s rhetoric and his promises poses to so many people—federal workers, election workers, Haitians, anyone suspected of a crime, and pretty much all people on the left.
Robert Pape is a highly respected political scientist at the University of Chicago, and the Chicago Project on Security and Threats that he founded and directs is a major source of data on political violence. In recent weeks he has weighed in on the current U.S. political situation, in a Foreign Affairs essay entitled “Our Own Worst Enemies: The Violent Style in American Politics,” and in a New York Times op-ed entitled “I Study Political Violence. I’m Worried About the Election.” Unfortunately, Pape furnishes the downplaying of Trumpist violence with a patina of “scientific” credibility.
Pape begins by noting that “As we approach the presidential election next month, our election sites and officials may be in considerable physical danger.” He proceeds to note the most obvious source of concern: “Over the past four years, an alarming number of election officials and workers nationwide have been intimidated or threatened by people who appear to believe the widespread lies about voter fraud and rigged voting machines that supposedly helped steal the 2020 presidential election from Donald Trump.”
But as the empirical scientist of politics that he is, he seeks to go beyond the obvious. And the point of his interventions is to share the “worrisome evidence” of his center’s survey research: “we found disturbingly high levels of support for political violence. Notably, this attitude was bipartisan. Nearly 6 percent of the respondents agreed or strongly agreed that the ‘use of force is justified to restore Donald Trump to the presidency.’ A little over 8 percent agreed or strongly agreed that ‘the use of force is justified to prevent Donald Trump from becoming president.’ These results reflect a relatively stable pattern over the past year.”
The upshot is clear: both sides of the political divide display troubling support for violence, and we are, as his essay says, “our own worst enemies.” His recommendation: Republican and Democratic Governors, especially in swing states, should make a joint public statement condemning violence, and dedicate resources to election security, so that both election officials and the broad public can feel safe and confident about the election.
The closing words of Pape’s op-ed underscore that the source of his urgent worry is even-handed and not partisan:
If we had not recently witnessed some of the worst election-related violence in modern American history — the Jan. 6 riot, the attempted kidnapping of Speaker Nancy Pelosi before the 2022 midterms and the two attempted assassinations of Mr. Trump — it might make sense to take more modest precautions. But the past four years have shown that we live in a dangerous new world.
Unfortunately Pape, the prisoner of his data, downplays the Trumpist danger no less egregiously than the many journalists who lack his scientific authority. And the problem is not in his data. It is in the lack of political judgment that he brings to it.
For it is quite obvious that not a single instance of violence that he references has anything to do with the left.
The January 6 insurrection, the attacks on Pelosi (and violent threats against many others, from AOC to General Mark Milley and Georgia Republican Brad Raffensperger), the threats to election officials—all of these things, like the threat to FEMA, come from the right and are indeed directly promoted and incited by Donald Trump. Even the two assassination attempts on Trump had nothing to do with the left—though Trump and Vance continue to lie about this. The first accused assassin was a registered Republican with obvious mental problems. The second was a disgruntled former Trump supporter who actually wrote a book explaining his disillusionment and calling for Trump’s assassination. Both assailants were products of the cult of violence produced by Trump (in a recent Atlantic piece, “The Gunman and the Would-Be Dictator,” David Frum points out that Trump was the victim of his own rhetoric).
There is no obvious reason to doubt Pape’s survey results. There are people on the left who hate Trump as much as people on the right hate Democrats, and many of those on the left might be as willing to say “yes” to a survey question about violence as those on the right.
But all of the threats and the actual violence that Pape notes, and that are so obviously so very dangerous right now, have come from the right.
Not a single Democratic leader has done anything to justify or incite violence or question the legitimacy of the electoral system or describe J-6 insurrectionists as “us” and police as the “they” who had weapons at the Capitol. Only one of the two major parties has unreservedly supported a candidate whose entire campaign has centered on vindicating the insurrection and promising to “eradicate” an opposition that he describes as “vermin,” going so far as to propose using federal troops to repress them. Retired Generals Mark Milley and John Kelly—both former Trump appointees, and neither a member of Democratic Socialist of America– have publicly declared that Donald Trump is a fascist. A fascist. Has any serious military official outside of the deranged Michael Flynn said anything like this about Joe Biden or Kamala Harris or any Democrat? No. Because no Democrat is a fascist.
There may be some symmetry in the way “extremists” on both sides of our polarized politics poll as “sympathetic to violence.”
But as serious political scientists have long known, filling out questionnaires is one thing, and politics is another. Only on the Trumpist right is there an organized campaign to demonize opponents and to incite and justify violence, and only on the Trumpist right are there many thousands of armed individuals—some organized as “patriot” paramilitary groups, some as lone wolves—who have acted on the incitement to violence. Is there a single election official, anywhere, who fears that there are leftist activists who threaten them because they believe that the 2020 election was stolen by Democrats, liberals, progressives and Marxists, and that “we need to take our country back” from the “lunatic communists?”
“There is violence on both sides,” or “we are our own worst enemies”—such rhetoric is stupid and grievously misleading as we approach a truly watershed election in which, to use the words of Trump critic, conservative Republican jurist J. Michael Luttig, democracy itself is “on a knife’s edge.”
There is no symmetry when it comes to the danger of political violence.
We are not our own worst enemies. Trump is the worst enemy of every one of us—from Liz Cheney to Bernie Sanders– who cares about constitutional democracy, and he makes no bones about saying so. He is retribution. He is vengeance.
Trumpism is the source of the violence that threatens to engulf us.
And the solution is simple: Stop Trump!
We have no time to waste.
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