Robert Reich - In
his Saturday speech in Dayton, [Trump] not only repeated his false claims
that the 2020 election was stolen but praised the people serving prison
sentences for attacking the Capitol on January 6 — calling them
“hostages” and “unbelievable patriots,” commending their spirit, and
promising to help them if elected in November.
Trump
loyalists know exactly what he meant when he declared that the country
would face a blood bath if he lost in November, because they’ve heard
him issue similar warnings before — and sometimes acted them.
In 2016, he warned that if he were denied the presidential nomination at the GOP convention, “I think you’d have riots.”
In November 2020, he warned that an adverse ruling by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court would “induce violence in the streets.”
After the FBI’s search of his Mar-a-Lago estate in August 2022, he warned that “terrible things are going to happen,” and then quoted Senator Lindsey Graham predicting “riots in the streets” if Trump were charged.
Last March, Trump threatened “potential death & destruction”
if charged by the Manhattan district attorney and berated those urging
his supporters to stay peaceful, saying, “OUR COUNTRY IS BEING
DESTROYED, AS THEY TELL US TO BE PEACEFUL!”
In January, Trump warned that if the criminal charges against him succeeded, there would be “bedlam in the country.”
Days earlier, speaking of efforts to remove him from the ballot using
the 14th Amendment, he warned that “If we don’t [get treated fairly],
our country’s in big, big trouble. Does everybody understand what I’m saying? I think so.”
Exhibit
A in Trump’s incitements to violence occurred on January 6, 2021, at
the rally he held near the White House two hours before the electoral
vote count was to start at the Capitol.
There, Trump repeated his lies about how the election had been stolen and told
the crowd, “We will never give up. We will never concede. It will never
happen. You don’t concede when there’s theft involved. Our country has
had enough. We will not take it any more.”
He
accused Republicans of fighting like a boxer with his hands tied behind
his back, overly respectful of “bad people.” Instead, he said, they
would have to:
“fight
much harder … We’re going to walk down to the Capitol, and we’re going
to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women, and we’re
probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them, because
you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show
strength, and you have to be strong … We fight like hell. And if you
don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country any more.”
He
told the crowd that “different rules” applied to them. “When you catch
somebody in a fraud, you are allowed to go by very different rules.”