Trump’s Terrifying, Self-Serving Rebrand of Political Violence

It was no doubt inconvenient for the current administration for two of the claims Trump most often deploys to legitimize his hold on power—that immigrants are flooding into the country and voting illegally—were named by a DOJ-funded study as two of the more common narratives that far-right actors use to legitimize their violence. (When asked why this report was removed, a media affairs manager with the Department of Justice responded to The New Republic, “No comment, thanks.”)

But the Trump administration is not just flirting with far-right violence, not merely quietly removing studies that track its rise; it is creating political space in which it can flourish. Such violence, in Trump’s eyes, no longer seems like such a threat to the federal government because it is now more openly aligned with the government. On Fox last Friday, the president said, “I’ll tell you something that’s going to get me in trouble, but I couldn’t care less. The radicals on the right oftentimes are radical because they don’t want to see crime…. They’re saying, ‘We don’t want these people coming in.’” They share his concerns, in other words, and are thus justified in what they do. “The radicals on the left are the problem,” the president concluded. The threat political violence poses is measured by whatever Trump thinks is threatening to him.

To be clear, the right’s minimization and denial of such violence, even as it has unfolded, has precedent. Not long after President Obama’s first election, a Department of Homeland Security analyst noticed an escalation in terrorist threats made by the far right. The analyst, Daryl Johnson, had previously worked for Army Counterintelligence, monitoring domestic threats against the military, and at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, where he investigated neo-Nazis, militias, and white supremacists. At DHS, he continued that work, authoring a report for law enforcement called “Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment.”