President Donald Trump has often flaunted the brawn of his supporters, adding a baseline of menace to his increasingly embattled presidency. “Law enforcement, military, construction workers, Bikers for Trump ... These are tough people,” he said at a 2018 campaign event in St. Louis, Missouri. “These are great people. But they’re peaceful people, and antifa and all—they’d better hope they stay that way. I hope they stay that way.” Six months later, in an interview with Breitbart News, Trump made the threat of violence from his supporters more explicit. “I have the tough people, but they don’t play it tough, until they go to a certain point,” he said. “And then it would be very bad, very bad.”



Very bad indeed. Fast forward a year, and Trump has made the prospect of violence more palpable. Since Democrats launched an impeachment inquiry into the president’s attempts to strong-arm Ukraine’s government into targeting Joe Biden, Trump has labeled the House of Representative’s constitutionally enumerated actions “a COUP, intended to take away the Power of the People, their VOTE, their Freedoms, their Second Amendment, Religion, Military, Border Wall, and their God-given rights as a Citizen of the United States of America!” He has said that a successful impeachment would “cause a Civil War.” He has called for House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, the Democrat leading the impeachment proceedings, to be arrested for treason, while reminiscing about the death penalty punishment that crime had routinely carried. During an October rally in Pittsburgh, he mock-pleaded with his supporters, “Make sure you don’t hurt them, please. Thank you.”

Trump has, in other words, laid the groundwork for his acolytes to respond to impeachment—in his description an illegitimate, immoral, and illegal campaign to deprive patriotic Americans of their democracy, conducted by the Deep State, the “enemies of the people” in the liberal media, and Democrats who “hate our country”—with a corresponding urgency. With, if need be, brute force.

Trump has laid the groundwork for his acolytes to respond to impeachment with brute force.

Of course, Trump says many things, a mix of lies, half-truths, conspiracy babble, and almost comical nonsense. He sprays the public discourse with so much scattershot that it is impossible to keep track of all the spent fragments. But there is a growing sense that he considers violence a potent weapon in his political arsenal—and that his supporters will not go down without a literal fight if he is either impeached, or defeated in an election. Stuart Rhodes, the head of the right-wing militia group the Oath Keepers, for example, leapt through the door Trump had opened, declaring in a September tweet, “We ARE on the verge of a HOT civil war. Like in 1859.”

Such rhetoric insinuates that there is an army of shadows milling among us—one that might one day decide to enact its own understanding of the law. And by mixing together his supporters, from military to militia, Trump has rendered even more porous the border separating those who exercise violence officially, from those doing so unofficially, or illegally. This act of elision raises the specter of a specific type of state-promoted vigilantism—the same kind of violence nurtured by autocratic leaders elsewhere to erode liberal democratic constraints on their power. Leaders like Rodrigo Duterte, who has urged Filipinos to kill drug dealers wherever they are found and has presided over a body count in the thousands; Narendra Modi, who casually fostered vigilante lynch mobs before he became India’s prime minister; Jair Bolsonaro, who defended the idea of street justice prior to his election as president of Brazil; and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who encouraged pro-state vigilante militias in the wake of the failed 2016 attempted coup d’état against him.