Right-Wingers Are Already Promising Vengeance After The Trump Verdict
The ink wasn’t even dry on the jury sheet declaring former President Donald Trump guilty of 34 felonies when his right-wing allies started vowing revenge.
“They’re the wolves with the bloody piece of meat in their mouths,” SiriusXM talk show host Megyn Kelly told viewers Thursday night. “That doesn’t stop the wolf from coming back for more. The only thing that will stop him is if he loses a limb of his own.”
Despite the gruesome imagery, Kelly stressed that she wasn’t “talking about violence.” Rather, she said, she was referring to a “tit-for-tat” in which Republican officials pass new laws to allow for the prosecution of old crimes that Democrats including Joe Biden, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton “surely committed.”
Kelly wasn’t alone in calling for retributional criminal charges against Democrats. Rep. Mike Collins (R-Ga.) declared: “Time for Red State AGs and DAs to get busy.” And far-right commentator Matt Walsh called for Republicans to make lists of “which Democrats they will have arrested,” and for Trump specifically to “publish a list of ten high ranking Democrat criminals who he will have arrested when he takes office.” The first two names, Walsh said, ought to be Joe and Hunter Biden.
Charlie Kirk, the millionaire MAGA influencer and founder of the conservative youth organization Turning Point USA, fumed that “we must defeat these savages,” before calling on conservative prosecutors across America to seek revenge. “How many Republican DAs or AG’s have stones?” Kirk wrote on X, formerly Twitter. “We aren’t a serious political movement until we are ready to fight fire with fire. Indict the left, or lose America.”
Tucker Carlson, the Fox News alum, warned his nearly 13 million followers on X that Trump’s conviction opened the door for him to be assassinated.
“Import the Third World, become the Third World,” Carlson wrote. “That’s what we just saw. This won’t stop Trump. He’ll win the election if he’s not killed first. But it does mark the end of the fairest justice system in the world. Anyone who defends this verdict is a danger to you and your family.”
Trump’s allies may have been taking cues from the man himself: Trump’s campaign wrote in a fundraising email after the verdict that “NOW IT’S TIME FOR ME & YOU TO SHOVE IT BACK IN THEIR CORRUPT FACES.” The campaign’s communications have repeatedly referred to the former president as a “political prisoner.” Trump also reshared a video on Truth Social in which he promised to “liberate America from these villains once and for all.”
Some commentators seemed to call for their audiences to fight back against the guilty verdict.
“We’re wounded as a country,” Fox News host Jesse Watters said on his show. “And we’re not going to go down ... We’re going to get back up, we’re going to regain our strength, and then we’re going to vanquish the evil forces that are destroying this republic.”
Mollie Hemingway, the editor-in-chief of The Federalist, referred to the trial’s outcome as “Democrat hate” and “almost incomprehensibly dangerous.”
“All honest people must fight it,” she wrote.
Others called for going after the jurisdictions in which Trump faces legal consequences.
“If New York were a country, the U.S. would be imposing sanctions,” Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) wrote on X.
Sean Davis, the founder and CEO of The Federalist, proposed taking financial revenge: “If you are a fund manager of retirement or other large assets in a red state, and you hold an elected position, now would be a very good time to exercise your fiduciary duty and pull assets from any state or legal regime which has shown a reckless disregard for the rule of law.”
