Trump’s Anger and Pettiness Endangers Former Officials And Others
Trump continues to foster an atmosphere of violence and rage at his perceived enemies and like the Mafia don, he has insulated himself from recriminations.
Trump has a long history of holding grudges and a longer history of seeking revenge. In his latest pique of passive aggression, intimidation and pettiness, trump revoked federal protection details from four of his most vocal antagonists. The four should be plenty worried as the decision came days after trump pardoned convicted rioters from the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection, sending the message that violence in the name of trump is OK.
Trump’s revocation of protection comes at a time when he has nurtured an apocalyptic atmosphere of fears reminiscent of the communist scares of the 1950s caused by the disgraced Sen. Joe McCarthy, D-Wis.
Trump has called on federal workers to squeal on colleagues who may disagree or not follow trump’s policies. Trump has ordered that federal workers should report colleagues who do not follow the government’s cancellation of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) efforts across the government. Trump’s Justice Department also has threatened local officials with criminal prosecution for refusing to carry out the administration’s mass deportation agenda.
Trump’s decision to pardon around 1,500 of the Jan. 6 rioters is likely to encourage vigilantes and militias who would be accountable only to the president. It would be not unlike dictatorial governments that rely on militias to maintain power.
Former Rep. David Jolly, R-Fla., said the danger is real.
“Culturally, and within the country, we have some very dark movements,” Jolly said. “The Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers are far-right organizations that ultimately would like to take down our own government. They are dangerous and they will remain dangerous.”
Trump addressed the Proud Boys directly during a presidential debate in 2020 when asked by moderator Chris Wallace, “Are you willing tonight to condemn white supremacists and militia groups, and to say that they need to stand down and not add to the violence in a number of these cities?”
Trump answered, “Proud Boys, stand back and stand by. But I’ll tell you what, somebody’s got to do something about Antifa and the left because this is not a right-wing problem, this is a left-wing.”
Jolly said trump acted “almost out of vengeance.”
“This is not just about the 70-year-old grandmother who got caught up in going into the Capitol, and maybe she acknowledges her wrongdoing, and mercy is due. This is not the case. Many of these people got out and said, ‘Where are we going now? Where’s the next fight? I’m going to buy a gun.’ And for Donald Trump, I mean, he just unleashed his own army here,” Jolly said.
Trump pardoned violent and non-violent Jan. 6 offenders including the likes of Stewart Rhodes, whose Oath Keepers group staged firearms and ammunition near Washington on Jan. 6 in anticipation of a “bloody and desperate fight.”
Another was Enrique Tarrio, whose Proud Boys led rioters into the Capitol and who had declared just after the 2020 election that while he and his followers would not start a civil war, they would be sure to “finish one.”
Tarrio, 40, wore a black “Make America Great Again” cap when he arrived last week at Miami International Airport. The Proud Boys leader said he wants retribution for what he and trump consider persecution and not prosecution.
“I’m happy that the president’s focusing not on retribution and focusing on success, but I will tell you that I’m not gonna play by those rules,” Tarrio said. “The people who did this, they need to feel the heat. They need to be put behind bars, and they need to be prosecuted. They need to pay for what they did.”
Tarrio served 16 months of his 22-year prison sentence. He was convicted of seditious conspiracy for playing a key role in orchestrating the Proud Boys’ storming of the Capitol.
Far-right activists and neo-Nazis also may be seeing the moment as a time to energize their efforts.
“Be ready to cash out the next four years,” read one neo-Nazi account on Telegram, in a post viewed more than 1,000 times. “Get the bag, infiltrate existing institutions with power, build new institutions while we have breathing room, and tear down anything leftist.”
Posting on several social media apps, including the Kremlin-controlled VKontakte, the neo-Nazi terrorist group the “Base,” released a photo of four members somewhere in Appalachia. The Base was the subject of a major nationwide FBI crackdown last year, with more than a dozen members arrested for terrorist activities across the US and Europe.
The Aryan Freedom Network, a neo-Nazi group with chapters around the country, urged members to “find companies that are hiring or harboring illegal aliens” and report them to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement, better known as ICE.
“In order for us all to stop the Great Replacement and to save the white working class jobs, every white nationalist must do their part to save white America!” the network posted.
Christopher Pohlhaus, an ex-Marine and leader of the neo-Nazi “Blood Tribe” posted on X a video of a Nazi salute from a member in his group, juxtaposed with a video of Musk’s gesture at a recent trump rally, which was seen by many as the Heil Hitler salute.
“14 million views on this one,” Polhaus posted, before applauding his group for owning “the Roman salute and the swastika” in the news.
Musk has said that he was making a gesture symbolizing how his heart “went out’ to the crowd.”
Trump has said the former prisoners were “political prisoners” who were charged as part of an effort to destroy trump. In his further effort to re-write history, trump has ordered removal from the Justice Department website of a database detailing the criminal charges and successful convictions of January 6 rioters. The searchable database had been easily accessible for information on all January 6, 2021, cases.
“This is a huge victory for J6ers,” Brandon Straka, who was among those pardoned by trump, wrote on X. “This site was one of countless weapons of harassment used by the federal government to make life impossible for its targets from J6.”
Straka said trump’s acting US Attorney Ed Martin for the District of Columbia was responsible for removing the site. Martin was an organizer with the “Stop the Steal” movement and was involved in the financing of the January 6, 2021, Trump rally on the Ellipse that occurred directly before the attack on the Capitol.
The FBI also wiped off its on-line list of wanted Capitol rioters. Some were fugitives or rioters who hadn’t been identified. The sites had also included information about the unsolved case of two pipe bombs found outside the headquarters for the Republican and Democratic national committees on January 5, 2021.
Trump’s violent temper has had clear effects. CNN reviewed more than 500 federally prosecuted threats to elected and non-elected officials and found that politically motivated threats to public officials increased 178 percent during trump’s presidency. Threats related to controversial topics like abortion or police brutality also exploded during the trump years, increasing by more than 300 percent from Obama’s second term.
A January 25 report by the Brennan Center for Justice found that the January 6 insurrection marked a new peak in extremists targeting public officials. One especially gruesome event involved the hammer attack on the husband of Rep. Nancy Pelosi, R-Calif., by a right-wing conspiracy theorist who sought the then House speaker in her home.
The report noted that legislators in all levels have been targeted by extremists. It found that 43 percent of state legislators experienced threats and that 18 percent of local officeholders experienced threats. It also found that 38 percent of state legislators reported that the amount of abuse they experience has increased since first taking public office, while only 16 percent reported that it has decreased. Also, 29 percent of state legislators reported that the seriousness of the incidents has increased, while only 12 percent reported that it has decreased.
Other findings include that officeholders of color were more than three times as likely as white officeholders to be targeted. Larger shares of women and people of color serving in local elected office experienced abuse related to their families including their children than did other officeholders. Also, women serving in state legislatures were nearly four times as likely as men to experience abuse of a sexual nature.
Trump fancies himself as “The Great Uniter” but his actions hardly generated national unity as he promised he would do in his inaugural address.
“We’re going to have a message that will make you happy, unity. It’s going to be a message of unity. And again, I think success brings unity,” trump said.
Among former elected officials, only presidents and their families retain a Secret Service security detail but other security teams are provided to specific threats, or to guard against more generalized but credible dangers. That included Dr. Anthony Fauci, who was in the lead of crafting the government’s program to battle COVID-19; former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and his top aide, Brian Hook; and former national security adviser John Bolton.
Trump’s actions should come as no surprise from the man who reacted to news of deadly threats by Jan. 6, 2021, rioters to his then-vice president Mike Pence on Jan. 6, 2021, with “So what?” Or trump’s tweet after the riot was underway and Pence had refused to block certification of President Joe Biden’s victory, “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done.”
Trump revoked government security protection for Fauci who had disputed the president’s false claims about COVID-19 cures. He also ended protection for Pompeo and Hook and Bolton, who have each faced threats from Iran since they took hardline stances on the Islamic Republic during trump’s first administration. The former officials fell out of trump’s favor in the years after he left office in 2021.
Trump said he would not feel responsible if as a result of lifting the federal protection, any of the former officials were targets of MAGA violence. Asked about Fauci and former national security adviser John Bolton, Trump said, “They all made a lot of money. They can hire their own security, too.”
Trump failed to note that during his first administration the
Secret Service spent millions protecting the trump extended family during excursions around the world.
Fauci has received death threats from far right opponents to COVID-19 measures he helped craft. Last June, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., vowed before a far right Turning Point Action conference to have Fauci sent to prison over his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Dr. Anthony Fauci should be tried for crimes against humanity,” Greene said at the conference, leading to the crowd chanting, “lock him up.”
During the height of the pandemic in 2020, Fauci said he was “getting death threats for me and my family and [people] harassing my daughters to the point where I have to get security.”
In August 2022, Thomas Patrick Connally Jr., 57, was sentenced to more than three years in prison for making threats to Fauci and his family, as well as targeting other health officials. Prosecutors said Connally’s conduct included an email threatening that Fauci and his family would be “dragged into the street, beaten to death, and set on fire.”
Fauci further earned trump’s ire last year after he wrote a memoir, “On Call: A Doctor’s Journey in Public Service.” The book was a New York Times bestseller and chronicled Fauci’s six decade career in public service including being the leading voice through the COVID-19 pandemic.
Just 70 pages of the 464-page memoir deal with the trump administration. But the world famous Fauci landed on trump’s hit list because he wrote that he would not publicly vouch for trump’s claims about the use of the malaria drug hydroxychloroquine for the treatment of COVID. Hydroxychloroquine can have life-threatening side effects.
Pompeo and his top aide, Hook, and Bolton have each faced threats from Iran in revenge for the 2020 killing of Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani in a U.S. drone strike during Trump’s first term.
In August 2022, a member of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps was charged in a plot to murder Bolton. The accused, Shahram Poursafi, 45, of Tehran, is accused of attempting to arrange Bolton’s assassination likely in retaliation for the killing of Iranian Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani in January 2020. Poursafi, who also goes by Mehdi Rezayi, attempted to pay $300,000 to individuals in the United States to carry out the killing in Washington or Maryland. Poursafi remains a fugitive and the U.S. government has offered a $20 million reward for information leading to Poursafi’s arrest.
Trump surely resented Pompeo after he considered running against Trump in the 2024 GOP primary. Pompeo later withdrew his candidacy.
Trump’s Justice Department sued in 2020 to stop publication and distribution of Bolton’s book, “The Room Where It Happened.” The government claimed the book disclosed classified information but the suit was later dropped. The book was released in the days before the 2020 presidential election and an unflattering account of trump’s foreign policy dealings.
Bolton was granted Secret Service protection from Biden in 2021 amid fears of retaliation from Iran. Bolton was told that threats of Iranian retaliation against him remained active in the days before trump’s inauguration.
The Biden administration had provided and renewed round-the-clock protection by the Diplomatic Security Service for Pompeo and Hook since Jan. 21, 2021, when they left office along with Trump. A March 2022 report to Congress showed that the State Department was paying more than $2 million per month to provide security to Pompeo and Hook.
Trump claimed he was critical of the costs to continue providing security but in his first term, he cost the government millions for numerous questionable trips by himself and his family.
Under Biden, the Secret Service provided protective details to 33 members of his administration and family. Trump had a record number of 42 individuals getting protection, including 18 family members.
Trump frequently visited Mar-a-Lago and each visit was estimated to have cost $3 million for manpower and equipment. In one year, the Secret Service spent around $60,000 for golf cart rentals to keep a close eye on trump.
The president, his wife, Melania, and their youngest son, Barron, had separate security details in Trump Tower in New York City. Trump’s other sons, Donald Jr. and Eric, based in New York, also are covered by security details when they travel to promote Trump-branded properties in other countries.
Eric Trump’s business travel to Uruguay cost the Secret Service nearly $100,000 just for hotel rooms. Both sons had security when they traveled to Vancouver, British Columbia, for the opening of new Trump hotel there, and to Dubai to officially open a Trump International Golf Club.
Security details accompanied part of the family, including Ivanka Trump and husband Jared Kushner on a skiing vacation in Aspen, Colo. Tiffany Trump, the president’s younger daughter, took vacations with her boyfriend to international locales such as Germany and Hungary, which also require Secret Service protection.