\n This was a Republican senator saying a GOP president actually enjoyed seeing people violently storm the Capitol on his behalf.\n <\/p>\n
\n But it\u2019s hardly the only indicator that Trump sees potential utility in political violence<\/a> or the threat thereof.\n <\/p>\n \n And repeatedly in recent weeks, we\u2019ve seen this callousness rear its head in some pretty remarkable ways.\n <\/p>\n \n Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene Georgia has cited an escalating number of threats she\u2019s gotten from the right since she has begun criticizing Trump. And she has tied the threats directly to the president\u2019s rhetoric, in which Trump has labeled her a \u201ctraitor.\u201d She said this kind of language could \u201cput my life in danger.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n But when a reporter brought that to Trump\u2019s attention last month, he seemed unmoved. In fact, he quickly used the epithet again.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cMarjorie Traitor Greene,\u201d Trump said. \u201cI don\u2019t think her life is in danger. I don\u2019t think \u2014 frankly, I don\u2019t think anybody cares about her.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n Greene made a similar case in an interview that aired Sunday<\/a> on CBS\u2019 \u201c60 Minutes.\u201d She said the threats directed at her often use the nickname Trump coined, including threats on her son\u2019s life.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cThose were death threats directly fueled by President Trump,\u201d Greene said.\n <\/p>\n \n Greene said she brought this directly to Trump\u2019s attention. She told \u201c60 Minutes\u201d that Trump\u2019s response was \u201cextremely unkind.\u201d She then added in a social media post<\/a> that Trump \u201cresponded with harsh accusatory replies and zero sympathy.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n And Trump has now also responded to this episode just like he did the first \u2014 by re-upping the nickname that Greene says has fed these threats.\n <\/p>\n \n In a post<\/a> Monday morning, he called her \u201cMarjorie \u2018Traitor\u2019 Brown (Green turns Brown under stress!)\u201d and attacked \u201c60 Minutes\u201d and CBS\u2019 parent company, Paramount, for giving Greene a platform.\n <\/p>\n \n The situation echoes another that hasn\u2019t gotten as much attention but follows a similar roadmap.\n <\/p>\n \n Republicans in the Indiana Senate this week are considering redrawing their state\u2019s congressional map<\/a> under intense pressure from the administration and from Trump personally. Amid that pressure, about one-fourth of the GOP senators say they have gotten threats or been the subject of swatting or other forms of intimidation. And those are just the members we know about.\n <\/p>\n \n (\u201cSwatting,\u201d i.e., calling in a situation that requires an armed response from a SWAT team at a lawmaker\u2019s home, can be particularly dangerous.)\n <\/p>\n \n The state Senate has previously resisted this pressure. But the situation raises the prospect of a very troubling precedent in which these threats might convince lawmakers to reverse themselves.\n <\/p>\n \n And there\u2019s one very important politician who appears rather unbothered by that potential precedent: Trump.\n <\/p>\n \n In fact, the same day Trump shrugged off Greene\u2019s comments about the threats she was facing last month, the president attacked a pair of Indiana GOP senators. Within hours, one of them was swatted<\/a>.\n <\/p>\n \n Despite this, the following day Trump resumed his attacks on the other lawmaker<\/a> he had cited, state Senate President Rodric Bray, and said he would endorse against<\/a> anyone who opposed him on the issue.\n <\/p>\n \n Unlike the Greene situation, it\u2019s not clear that Trump is actually aware of the threats that have cast a pall over the process in Indiana. But it\u2019s difficult to believe they wouldn\u2019t have registered with someone in the White House. We\u2019ve seen strong statements on this from Indiana\u2019s GOP governor, bipartisan leaders of the state legislature, and plenty of others. And this weekend\u2019s story from CNN\u2019s Eric Bradner<\/a> makes clear it\u2019s a very big deal locally.\n <\/p>\n \n Indeed, at some point it\u2019s probably worth asking \u2014 again \u2014 whether Trump actually sees utility in such threats, as long as they help get him what he wants.\n <\/p>\n \n That might seem pretty unthinkable, especially since Trump himself was a victim of political violence with his attempted assassinations last year in Butler, Pennsylvania, and South Florida.\n <\/p>\n \n But both before and after that, we\u2019ve seen plenty that could lead one to draw such conclusions.\n <\/p>\n \n Similar to the situation with Greene, Trump has downplayed the threat that his first vice president, Mike Pence, faced on January 6, 2021. Trump told ABC News\u2019 Jonathan Karl that he didn\u2019t think Pence was actually in any danger as the president\u2019s supporters chanted \u201cHang Mike Pence.\u201d Trump also suggested those chanting such things had good reason to be upset, calling it \u201ccommon sense.\u201d<\/a>\n <\/p>\n \n And even after the assassination attempts, Trump has done some things that could be read as legitimizing political violence.\n <\/p>\n \n When he was sworn in this year, one of the first things he did was pardon virtually everyone who rose up on his behalf on January 6 \u2014 including those who assaulted police.\n <\/p>\n \n And recently, Trump suggested his political opponents face possible execution. When some Democratic lawmakers cut a video urging military service members not to obey illegal orders, Trump accused them of sedition and treason and noted that can carry the death penalty.\n <\/p>\n \n The Democratic lawmakers say they\u2019ve been subject to extensive threats.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cI\u2019m not threatening them, but I think they\u2019re in serious trouble,\u201d Trump told Fox News Radio on November 21. \u201cThey\u2019re in serious trouble. In the old days, it was death.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n Trump has also repeatedly spoken in recent years about the idea of justified political violence from his supporters<\/a>. That includes in September when he suggested that the political right, unlike the left, was \u201cradical\u201d for good reasons<\/a>.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cI\u2019ll tell you something that\u2019s going to get me in trouble, but I couldn\u2019t care less,\u201d he said. \u201cThe radicals on the right oftentimes are radical because they don\u2019t want to see crime. \u2026 They\u2019re saying we don\u2019t want these people coming in.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n One of the unhappy realities of our modern politics is that these kinds of threats probably do prevent others from speaking out like Greene is, and they probably do make it more likely that Indiana will pass the map that Trump wants.\n <\/p>\n \n Greene\u2019s comments, like Sasse\u2019s nearly five years ago, seem to suggest he might just be OK with that.\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"One of the most striking comments from the aftermath of the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot came from…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":338242,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[54],"tags":[88,92],"class_list":{"0":"post-338241","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tv","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-tv"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/338241","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=338241"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/338241\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/338242"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=338241"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=338241"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=338241"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"US](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/03-gettyimages-2244665852.jpg\")
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