ON a recent Tuesday morning, a visibly frustrated Donald Trump sat through a tense hearing in the first-ever criminal trial of a former American president. During a break, he let rip on his social media platform.
New York Justice Juan Merchan, Trump declared on Truth Social, is a “highly conflicted” overseer of a “kangaroo court.” Trump supporters swiftly replied to his post with a blitz of attacks on Merchan. The comments soon turned ugly. Some called for Merchan and other judges hearing cases against Trump to be killed.
“Treason is a hangable offense,” one wrote.
“They should all be executed,” added another.
The April 23 post by Trump and the menacing responses from his followers illustrate the incendiary impact of his angry and incessant broadsides against the judges handling the criminal and civil suits against him. As his presidential campaign intensifies, Trump has baselessly cast the judges and prosecutors in his trials as corrupt puppets of the Biden administration, bent on torpedoing his White House bid.
The rhetoric is inspiring widespread calls for violence. In a review of commenters’ posts on three pro-Trump websites, including the former president’s own Truth Social platform, Reuters documented more than 150 posts since March 1 that called for physical violence against the judges handling three of his highest-profile cases — two state judges in Manhattan and one in Georgia overseeing a criminal case in which Trump is accused of illegally seeking to overturn the state’s 2020 election results.
Those posts were part of a larger pool of hundreds identified by Reuters that used hostile, menacing and, in some cases, racist or sexualized language to attack the judges, but stopped short of explicitly calling for violence against them.
Experts on extremism say the constant repetition of threatening or menacing language can normalize the idea of violence — and increase the risk of someone carrying it out. Mitch Silber, a former New York City Police Department director of intelligence analysis, compared the Trump supporters now calling for violence against judges to the US Capitol rioters who believed they were following Trump’s “marching orders” on Jan. 6, 2021.
“This is just the 2023-2024 iteration of that phenomenon,” Silber said. “Articulating these ideas is the first step along the pathway of mobilizing to violence.”
Trump spokesperson Steven Cheung did not respond to specific questions about the posts.
Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, has a right to criticize what he called “un-Constitutional witch hunts,” Cheung said. He also asserted, without citing examples, that Trump has been the target of calls for “despicable violence” from “Democrats and crazed lunatics.”
On Patriots.Win, an online forum that describes itself as Trump’s “community of choice,” Trump’s attacks on courts and judges regularly spur calls for violence. Merchan “needs to be strangled with piano wire,” one poster wrote. He “deserves garroting in the street,” wrote another.
The Gateway Pundit, a website influential in the pro-Trump community, is also a frequent venue for Trump-inspired violent rhetoric against judges hearing his cases. “These judges and lawyers should HANG for perpetuating these fraud cases,” a commenter wrote on April 16, suggesting the executions would be “an example for future generations of judges and lawyers.”
The Federal Bureau of Investigation and the New York Police Department declined to comment on whether any threatening posts directed at the New York judges were under federal or local investigation.
While Trump himself hasn’t called for violence on judges, his language can signal to followers that judges are no different from partisan rivals worthy of scorn, derision and attack, threatening the legitimacy of the independent judiciary, said experts on political violence.
“Trump is constantly riling up his supporters to be angry on his behalf,” said Lilliana Mason, a John Hopkins University political scientist. “He takes that large group of angry people, he points them in a particular direction, and then the judges get all these death threats.”
Cheung had no response to that analysis.
The posts also illustrate a shift in the way violent language is being expressed online by Trump’s followers. In 2021, Reuters documented a wave of threats by Trump supporters targeting US election workers. Legal experts found that many had met the legal standard for prosecutable threats, which typically requires language or context that reflects a clear intent to act or instill fear, rather than simply suggesting a frightening outcome.
In contrast, the current barrage of pro-Trump threats generally stops short of that red line.
Posters often call for violence — without explicitly stating they intend to commit it themselves. Such language is usually defensible as constitutionally protected free speech.
But experts say it can have the same effect as a direct threat: to intimidate and sow fear.
On Feb. 29, Reuters published an investigation into death threats targeting mostly federal judges involved in Trump-related cases, including threats those judges received personally.
For this story, Reuters examined three prominent pro-Trump websites to assess the prevalence of violent online posts directed at the state judges handling some of the highest-profile cases against Trump.
The judges in both of Trump’s New York cases issued gag orders barring him from attacking judicial staff and, in Merchan’s court, witnesses, jurors and family members of the judge and prosecutors. On April 30, Merchan held Trump in criminal contempt for violating one of those gag orders, fined him $9,000 and warned him that he could be jailed for further infractions. On May 6, Merchan fined Trump an additional $1,000 for a subsequent violation.
His April order noted the “singular power” that Trump’s derisive statements and social media posts have to inspire his followers, instill fear in his targets and endanger the rule of law. The judge has warned that he could impose jail time for any additional violations by the former president, who calls the gag orders “election interference.”
‘Crooked’ and ‘conflicted’
Reuters examined more than 1,800 posts by Trump on Truth Social from March 1 to April 30. In at least 129 of them, he attacked judges handling his cases in New York, Georgia and other jurisdictions, either in his own words or by re-posting critical comments or videos from supporters or others.
Much of his anger is focused on Merchan, who is presiding over Trump’s criminal prosecution on charges that he violated New York law by falsifying business records to conceal a sex scandal during his 2016 campaign. Trump also frequently attacks New York Justice Arthur Engoron, who ruled in February during a separate civil trial that Trump committed fraud by inflating his properties’ values on financial documents. Trump has appealed the verdict.
Trump often labels both judges “corrupt” and “conflicted,” and falsely accuses them of taking orders from President Joe Biden, his Democratic rival for the White House. As state judges, they weren’t appointed by the president, who has no authority over them.
Trump’s comments and re-posts on Truth Social often trigger a furious response from his supporters. At least 152 posts on the three pro-Trump websites in March and April urged the beating or killing of Merchan or Engoron in New York or Judge Scott McAfee in Georgia, Reuters found. At least 65 of those were on Truth Social, about half in replies to the former president’s posts. The rest were split about evenly between Gateway Pundit and Patriots.Win.
All three sites have comment policies discouraging threatening or violent rhetoric. Truth Social’s terms of service forbid users from writing posts that are “filthy, violent, harassing, libelous, slanderous” or “advocate, incite, encourage, or threaten physical harm against another.” A Truth Social spokesperson said the company “works expeditiously to remove posts that violate” those standards. The Gateway Pundit and Patriots.Win did not respond to requests for comment.
