Trump supporters threaten jury with violence

Supporters of Donald Trump are up in arms against the verdict in the hush money trial. In internet forums they are calling for violence – including against the jurors.

After the hush money verdict against Donald Trump, in which the former US president was found guilty 34 times, supporters are openly calling for violence. The focus is on the members of the jury. There have been threats against the jury members in several internet forums that were also used during the storming of the Capitol in January 2021.

“We need to identify every juror. Then we'll make them unhappy. Maybe even suicidal,” the US broadcaster NBC News quoted the website “The Donald” as saying. Other posts called for the names of the jurors to be found out and made public – so-called doxxing. “I hope every juror is doxxed and they pay for their actions,” wrote another user on Trump's Truth Social platform on Thursday. “May God kill them. That's what we're going to do on November 5th and they're going to pay for it!” read a post on Trump's Truth Social network.

A 12-member jury found Trump guilty on Thursday of falsifying documents to cover up a payment to silence a porn star.

Judge Juan Merchan, who is scheduled to announce Trump's sentence on July 11, is even being threatened with death. “Someone in New York who has nothing to lose needs to take care of Merchan,” wrote a commentator on the “Patriots.Win” platform, the Reuters news agency reports. “It's time to cut off some leftists,” says another post. “This is not something that can be resolved through elections.”

Trump had already incited his supporters shortly after the guilty verdict. “I am a political prisoner,” said an email from the Trump team. “I was just convicted in a rigged witch-hunt trial: I did nothing wrong.”

Unlike his supporters, however, he is not calling for violence, but has so far only portrayed himself as a victim. “This will make your blood boil,” said a fundraising appeal from the Trump team. It shows a grinning Joe Biden, who was asked what he said about allegations that he was behind the verdict. However, there is no evidence of any influence from the Biden administration. The jury was vetted by both the prosecution and Trump's defense attorneys.

There are even initial calls to march on the American capital again and become violent. “1,000,000 men (armed) must go to Washington and hang everyone. That is the only solution,” wrote one person, and another agreed: “Trump knows he has an army that would fight and die for him.”

Other posts explicitly called for Democrats to be targeted and, in some cases, suggested shooting them. Even though the threats are drastic, Reuters believes they do not constitute a criminal offense – that would require a specific announcement of a crime.

Nevertheless, the posts are worrying. “We continue to see a dangerous erosion of democratic norms,” ​​said Daniel J. Jones, president of the organization Advance Democracy at NBC News. It is no surprise that threats against jurors are now being made. “I think many of these people have been looking for an excuse to mobilize for a while,” Amy Cooter of the Center for Terrorism, Extremism and Counterterrorism at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies told Reuters. “I hope I'm wrong. But I have long said that I would not be shocked if a guilty verdict led to violence, either against the jurors or against others connected to the case.”