Donald Trump’s Violent Rhetoric: A Catalogue
No American public figure has done more to normalize political violence.
FOLLOWING THE JULY 13 ATTEMPTED ASSASSINATION of Donald Trump, his supporters—and many anti-anti-Trump commentators—have been wringing their hands about the supposed rhetorical extremism of Democrats and other Trump foes. It’s all a bit rich, though, given that violent, fearmongering, and dehumanizing rhetoric has been Trump’s stock in trade over the past decade. This is, after all, the man who started his presidential campaign on June 16, 2015 by claiming that the vast majority of immigrants from Mexico, including legal ones, are “bringing drugs [and] crime” or “are rapists”—and who recently accused Joe Biden of “running a Gestapo administration.”
At a moment when so many people on the right are smearing any impolite Trump critic as complicit in the assassination attempt, revisiting Trump’s long history of flirtation with verbal violence is in order—if only to keep the record straight.
So, bearing in mind that nothing Trump has said or done excuses or mitigates the horrific acts of his would-be assassin, here’s a list of instances of Trump normalizing, endorsing, promoting, or winking at political and other violence.
November 22, 2015
In a Fox News interview, Trump defends the actions of his supporters who were caught on video shoving, punching, and kicking a protester at a Trump rally in Birmingham, Alabama after the man interrupted the rally by shouting, “Black lives matter!” According to Trump: “Maybe he should have been roughed up, because it was absolutely disgusting what he was doing. I have a lot of fans, and they were not happy about it. And this was a very obnoxious guy who was a troublemaker who was looking to make trouble.”
December 22, 2015
At a rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Trump mentions the fact that Vladimir Putin “has killed reporters” and says he is “totally against that” himself: “I hate some of these people, but I’d never kill them.” (This comes on the heels of an earlier controversy in which he seemed to downplay Putin’s murders of journalists and political opponents by saying that “our country does plenty of killing also.”) Pointing at the journalists in the press pen, he repeats, “I hate them. . . . These people, honestly, I’ll be honest, I would never kill them. I would never do that.” And then, after taking a showman’s pause to imply uncertainty or hesitation: “Uh, let’s see, uh? No, I would never do that.”
February 1, 2016
At a rally in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Trump announces that he has been warned about tomato-throwers in the audience: “If you see somebody getting ready to throw a tomato, knock the crap out of ’em, would you? Seriously. Just knock the hell—I promise you, I will pay for the legal fees. I promise. I promise.”
February 22, 2016
Trump reacts to a nonviolent heckler in Las Vegas, Nevada with nostalgia for more violent times: “You know what they used to do to guys like that when they were in a place like this? They’d be carried out on a stretcher, folks. . . . I’d like to punch him in the face, I tell you.”
March 4, 2016
After a protester interrupts a rally in Warren, Michigan, Trump tells the crowd, “Get him out. Try not to hurt him. If you do, I’ll defend you in court.”
March 9, 2016
At a rally in Fayetteville, North Carolina, Trump says, “All right, get him out, thank you; we’re gonna have such fun, such fun tonight” after a protester is sucker-punched while being escorted out. (It’s unclear whether Trump saw the punch.) Trump later complains about protesters at his rallies: “They put their hand up and they put the wrong finger in the air . . . and they get away with murder. Because we’ve become weak.”
March 11, 2016
At a rally in St. Louis, Missouri, Trump complains that using violence against putative protesters is frowned upon: “They’re allowed to get up and interrupt us horribly and we have to be very, very gentle. They can swing, they can hit people but if we hit them back it’s a terrible, terrible thing.” (Sen. Ted Cruz—then Trump’s rival in the GOP primary, not yet his sycophant—claims Trump’s campaign “affirmatively encourages violence.”)
August 9, 2016
At a rally in Wilmington, North Carolina, Trump tells his supporters that Hillary Clinton will abolish gun owners’ rights if elected, then adds, “If she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks. Although the Second Amendment people—maybe there is, I don’t know.” Trump later claims he was simply saying that Second Amendment supporters are a powerful voting bloc who can stop Clinton, but in context, his remark clearly referred to something that “the Second Amendment people” could do after Clinton’s election victory.
July 28, 2017
At an appearance in Brentwood, New York, Trump boasts about encouraging police officers to manhandle suspects: “When you see these thugs being thrown into the back of a paddy wagon, you just see them thrown in, rough. I said, ‘Please don’t be too nice.’ . . . When you guys put somebody in the car and you’re protecting their head you know, the way you put their hand over [their head]. . . . Like, ‘Don’t hit their head and they’ve just killed somebody, don’t hit their head.’ I said, ‘You can take the hand away, okay?’”
October 18, 2018
At a rally in Missoula, Montana, Trump gives an extended riff praising Greg Gianforte—then a congressman, now the governor of Montana—for assaulting reporter Ben Jacobs in May 2017 during his campaign for the House seat. Gianforte was convicted of misdemeanor assault in June 2017 after pleading guilty. To Trump, this is a point in his favor: “Any guy that can do a body slam, he is my type!”
May 9, 2019
At a rally in Pensacola, Florida, Trump plays standup comedian in response to a suggestion that migrants should be shot at the border. After complaining that border agents aren’t allowed to “use weapons” against border-crossers, he adds, “I would never do that. But how do you stop these people?” When someone shouts out, “Shoot them,” Trump chuckles, pauses to let the audience cheer and laugh, then delivers his punchline: “That’s only in the Panhandle you can get away with that statement. Only in the Panhandle,” and basks in the wild applause and laughter. (In October of that year, there were reports—not contested by Trump—that in White House discussions of the migrant problem, he had suggested shooting border-crossers in the legs.)
April 17, 2020
In a series of all-caps tweets, Trump urges protesters against COVID-19 lockdowns in blue states to “liberate” their states and seems to encourage the use of weapons by stressing the Second Amendment and supposed perils to it.
May 1, 2020
Trump tweets again in support of Michigan anti-lockdown protesters who had swarmed the statehouse the previous day, many of them displaying handguns and rifles—and some carrying placards with such inscriptions as “Make treason punishable by hanging” and “Tyrants get the rope.”
September 12, 2020
In a Fox News interview discussing the fatal shooting of an Antifa-connected murder suspect by federal marshals, Trump frames it (and praises it) not as law enforcement action against an armed and dangerous subject, but as an extrajudicial execution: “That’s the way it has to be. There has to be retribution when you have crime like this.”
September 29, 2020
During his debate with Joe Biden, Trump declines an opportunity to condemn far-right violence, instead telling the Proud Boys, a group implicated in a number of violent incidents, to “stand back and stand by.”
October 30–November 1, 2020
After a Biden campaign bus on a tour in Texas is harassed on the interstate highway by a caravan of forty-some Trump flag-sporting trucks—causing a minor collision, endangering nearby traffic, and forcing the Biden campaign to cancel several events due to safety concerns—Trump tweets a video of the highway “Trump Train” with the comment, “I LOVE TEXAS!” The next day, he tweets, “In my opinion, these patriots did nothing wrong,” and slams the FBI’s San Antonio office for investigating the case.
December 19, 2020
Trump invites his supporters to a rally in Washington, D.C. on January 6, 2021, promising that the gathering—which turned into the attack on the Capitol—“will be wild.”
January 6, 2021
When notified that attendees at his rally near the White House are bringing in weapons, Trump orders the metal detectors removed. “I don’t [fucking] care that they have weapons. They’re not here to hurt me,” he reportedly says.
“We fight like hell and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore,” Trump tells the angry, energized crowd of his supporters after two months of whipping them into hysteria with lies about a supposedly stolen election. A February 2024 analysis by Tom Joscelyn, Norman Eisen, and Fred Wertheimer finds that while “Trump uttered the word ‘peacefully’ just one time during his speech, which lasted more than an hour, he used variations of the word ‘fight’ 20 times.” (Eighteen of those, moreover, were ad-libbed and not present in the prepared notes for the speech.)
As the Capitol riot erupts, Trump initially resists allowing a statement urging his supporters to stay “peaceful” to be posted on his Twitter account. At 2:24 p.m., when he has already been watching the riot on TV for an hour and when the mob has already broken into the Capitol, he tweets that “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country.”
(For a fuller analysis of Trump’s public remarks before and on that day, see the final report of the House January 6th Committee.)
August 6, 2022
In his speech to the Conservative Political Action conference, Trump suggests that the plot to kidnap and possibly kill Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer in 2020 (which eventually resulted in nine convictions and guilty pleas) was a “fake deal” set up by the FBI—and so was the January 6th insurrection.
August 8, 2022
Following the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago to retrieve the classified documents Trump stole, Trump issues a statement lamenting that his home is “under siege, raided, and occupied by a large group of FBI agents,” complaining of “prosecutorial misconduct, the weaponization of the Justice System, and an attack by Radical Left Democrats,” and asserting that “these are dark times for our nation.” Three days later, on August 11, Trump supporter Ricky Walter Shiffer, who has posted angrily on social media about the search of Mar-a-Lago, opens fire at police at the Cincinnati FBI field office and is killed after an hours-long standoff. (Undeterred, Trump makes even more irresponsible statements about the Mar-a-Lago raid in May 2024, repeatedly amplifying a claim by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene that it was a Biden-authorized FBI assassination attempt.)
November 1, 2022
On a radio show, Trump drops conspiratorial hints about the hammer attack on then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband Paul Pelosi three days earlier, saying that what’s happening in Pelosi’s household is “weird” and “very sad”—a wink at the conspiracy theory that the attacker was a male prostitute in a sexual relationship with Paul Pelosi.
March 26, 2023
Trump opens the first major rally of his 2024 presidential campaign in Waco, Texas, with “Justice for All,” a recording of the national anthem sung over a phone line by a choir of people in prison for crimes committed on January 6th, including violence against law enforcement officers. Trump declares that “2024 is the final battle, it’s going to be the big one. You put me back in the White House, their reign will be over and America will be a free nation once again.”
September 22, 2023
Trump insinuates that Gen. Mark Milley, whom he appointed chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and who had later been elliptically critical of Trump, should be executed.
September 29, 2023
At the California Republican Party convention, Trump once again makes fun of the attack on Paul Pelosi (who suffered a fractured skull during the assault).
November 23, 2023
In a Veterans Day speech to his supporters, Trump pledges to “root out 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.” He also asserts that this “enemy within” will “do anything, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America and to destroy the American Dream.” In addition to the violence clearly implied in the promise to “root out” a broadly defined political enemy, this is surely far uglier rhetoric than the words currently causing so many Republicans to hyperventilate.
December 29, 2023
After Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows removes Trump’s name from the primary ballot on the grounds that he is ineligible for the presidency under Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment, Trump tweets out a link to her biographical information. Her home is swatted the next day.
March 11, 2024
Trump pledges to “Free the January 6 Hostages being wrongfully imprisoned!” as one of his first acts in office if he is elected. (On an earlier occasion, he expressed openness to pardoning even the members of the Proud Boys imprisoned on sedition charges.)
March 17, 2024
At an Ohio rally that once more features “Justice for All,”Trump refers to the rioters as “hostages” and praises them as “unbelievable patriots.” The alleged persecution of the January 6th rioters becomes a key part of his campaign.
March 29, 2024
Trump shares on social media a video that includes an image of Joe Biden tied up in the back of a pickup truck with a “Trump 2024” bumper sticker.
May 27, 2024
Trump calls his political opponents “Human Scum that is working so hard to destroy our Once Great Country.”
ANY LIST LIKE THIS cannot be fully comprehensive because Trump so often figuratively targets people who become literal targets of threats and violence, from the judges in his various civil and criminal cases to election workers like Shaye Moss and Ruby Freeman. It’s impossible to know with certainty whether Trump actually intends for these people to be harmed or harassed. However, the pattern of Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric and de facto incitement is hard to ignore.
It is worth noting that, at this point, there is no evidence that the shooter who tried to kill Trump had any political motive or was inspired by any rhetoric from Democrats. On the other hand, even before January 6th, a review by ABC News found forty-one criminal cases in which violent acts or threats were linked, by the perpetrators themselves, to Trump’s statements. None of this is to say that Trump knew about, directed, participated in, abetted, or even benefited from any of these acts (again, until January 6th). But the claim that the anti-Trump coalition is responsible for creating a climate of violence in American politics represents one of the most brazen attempts at DARVO imaginable.
Hyperbolic and sometimes violence-inflected rhetoric is nothing new to American politics. But by any measure, Trump has taken this rhetoric to a shocking new level. He has done more than any other American political figure to erode our social and cultural norms against political violence. And, if elected, he is very likely to take us even further down that dangerous road.