(the hill) — The FBI’s surprise search of former President Donald Trump’s Florida residence this week has inspired a sharp backlash on the right, fueling concern among experts about the increased risk of political violence.
The response among Trump supporters has ranged from sharp criticism of the Justice Department’s tactics to incendiary rhetoric, with Trump himself comparing the search of his home to the Nixon-era burglary of the compound of Watergate.
Some of Trump’s most ardent supporters described this week’s legal development as a reflection of a country in the midst of civil war, and in isolated cases, some far-right extremists called for mobilization in response to what was depicted as an act of tyranny by lawless federal agents.
Although the FBI’s search was based on a warrant approved by a federal judge, that didn’t stop Republicans from claiming that the probe was born out of a desire to damage President Joe Biden’s main rival rather than a potentially criminal conduct related to Trump.
“The GOP’s choice to turn an investigation into the mishandling of classified documents into a cause célèbre is dangerous, especially given Trump’s history of calling for support for private violence, mobs and militias,” said Rachel Kleinfeld, senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “A democracy cannot allow anyone to be above the law.”
It’s no surprise that a criminal investigation tied to Trump, the de facto leader of the Republican Party and a possible 2024 contender, would trigger an impassioned response. At the same time, even the most provocative political speech, other than incitement to violence, enjoys broad protections under the First Amendment.
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But the outrage over the FBI search of Trump’s home comes at a particularly tense time in American politics, as the proportion of supporters who believe violence is sometimes justified to achieve political ends has grown significantly . According to researcher Nathan Kalmoe, about one in five supporters say their own party’s violence is at least somewhat justified to advance its goals.
“It seems likely that there will be more partisan violence in the future, especially in response to particularly tense moments like the one Trump has escalated here,” said Kalmoe, a Louisiana State University professor who has tracked the rise in support for political violence.
In the immediate aftermath of the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago, a swift backlash emerged from a chorus of voices on the right.
Experts said no specific, concerted plan for real-world action has emerged, but warned officials should keep a close eye on the tense online vitriol.
Prominent alt-right figure Jack Posobiec posted a series of inflammatory posts this week on Telegram, including one with over 62,000 views that “the federal security state has declared war on Donald J Trump and his supporters “.
According to Alyssa Kann, an associate researcher at the Digital Forensic Research Lab, some of Posobiec’s messages have been posted on national extremist channels, where users also talk about taking up arms, mobilizing and targeting the FBI.
Incendiary sites have not been contained to marginal sites. Posobiec, who has 1.8 million followers on Twitter, tweeted on Wednesday that “Our government has been taken over by a deranged eunuch class. It is up to us to dislodge them and dismantle their corrupt apparatus.”
Steven Crowder, a conservative commentator with 1.9 million Twitter followers, tweeted Monday night: “Tomorrow is war. Sleep tight.”
Twitter has not taken any action on these posts or the accounts. A company spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.
Violent rhetoric is also spreading through alternative social networking sites such as Gab, Parler, Getter, which have few content moderation policies and attract right-wing audiences, particularly users banned from mainstream sites.
Collectively, the posts that have emerged online, across platforms, highlight a “small shopping list of far-right narratives,” said Jared Holt, senior research director at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue ( ISD).
“It’s like a big firehose of incendiary content that has flown into the news in these spaces,” he said.
Although the rhetoric has become more intense, the distance between the political fringe and the political mainstream has shortened.
According to Kann, inflammatory rhetoric that might once have been limited to fringe venues and far-right figures has been embraced even by politicians with large followings on mainstream platforms like Twitter and Facebook, a dynamic that “encourages” influencers from ‘extreme right to be. “Even more violent,” he said.
“It also brings this kind of violent rhetoric into the everyday person, which is scary to think about,” Kann said.
Tweets by far-right Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) have added to the heart of the right, with the political brand calling for “defunding” the FBI, calling the attack “tyrannical” and comparing the situation with action in a “civil war”.
Shannon Hiller, executive director of Princeton’s nonpartisan Bridging Divides Initiative, which seeks to track and mitigate political violence, said American politics was at a “sensitive moment,” one that called on leaders to crack down on tensions, not that they intensified them.
He pointed to the governors. Larry Hogan of Maryland and Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas as examples of Republican leaders who, while critical of the DOJ’s lack of transparency, had expressed their views without further inflaming the political discourse, unlike some of their colleagues. leagues of the GOP.
“I think other GOP leaders winking and waving extremist rhetoric are playing with fire,” he said. “We know from other research that leaders who call for calm and reject violence have a positive effect on reducing risk, that’s what we should be asking of all our leaders now.”
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Trump, meanwhile, has continued to use his megaphone to raise the temperature. On Wednesday, the former president suggested, without evidence, that federal agents had planted evidence on his property, once again casting himself as the victim of a shadowy “attack.”
Legal experts refuted Trump’s portrayal of the FBI operation and emphasized the interests of the investigation as well as the backlash.
“Even though a judge issued the search warrant for Trump’s home, which requires a determination of probable cause that a crime was committed and that evidence would be found on the premises, Trump and his supporters they go on the offensive and engage in heated rhetoric that somehow the DOJ has handled Trump inappropriately,” said Barbara McQuade, a law professor at the University of Michigan who spent seven years as a federal prosecutor during the presidency of Barack Obama. “It’s amazing to me how many people are willing to take the bait.”
“I think the risk of civil unrest is very real, but the DOJ cannot allow that fear to prevent it from enforcing the law,” he added, calling the Jan. 6 attack a “thought-provoking” reminder to not underestimate “the threat of political violence from those who support Donald Trump.”
Experts pointed to a key difference between the online posts before the Jan. 6 Capitol riot and the aftermath of the FBI’s search of Mar-a-Lago. While the lead-up to the January 6 attack saw the emergence of a specific plan, the posts circulating online this week have not had the same concerted link to a specific time and place.
At least not yet, said ISD’s Holt, who added that the security situation would continue to be closely monitored.
“We’re starting to track some calls for protests, we’ve seen a couple floating around, but nothing has really been centralized at this point,” he said. “There have been at least a couple of cases where this has inspired extremists to call for protests or call for mobilization. We’ll keep an eye on that and see how it develops.”
