WASHINGTON — The 34 guilty verdicts handed down Thursday against former President Donald Trump set off a wave of violent rhetoric aimed at the prosecutors who secured his conviction, the judge who oversaw the case and the regular jurors who unanimously agreed were that there was no reasonable doubt that the presumptive conviction The Republican presidential candidate falsified corporate records related to hush money payments to a porn star for his 2016 campaign.
Advance Democracy, a nonprofit that conducts public interest research, said there have been a large number of social media posts with violent rhetoric targeting New York Judge Juan Merchan and Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, including one post with Bragg’s alleged home address. The group also found posts containing the purported addresses of jurors on a fringe internet message board known for its pro-Trump content and intimidating and violent posts, although it is unclear whether actual jurors were correctly identified.
The posts, reviewed by NBC News, appear on many of the same websites used by Trump supporters to organize violence in the lead-up to the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol. These forums were hotbeds of threats inspired by Trump’s lies about the 2020 election, which he lost, and that the voting system was “rigged” against him. They now include new threats that echo Trump’s rhetoric and false claims about the hush money lawsuit, including that the justice system is now “rigged” against him.
‘Dox the judges. Dox them now,” one user wrote after Trump’s conviction on a website formerly known as “The Donald,” which was popular among participants in the attack on the Capitol. (That post appears to have been quickly deleted by moderators.)
“We have to identify every juror. Then make them unhappy. Maybe even suicidal,” wrote another user on the same forum. “1,000,000 armed men must go to Washington and hang everyone. That’s the only solution,” wrote another user. “This s— has gotten out of hand.”
“I hope every juror is duped and they pay for what they did,” another user wrote on Trump’s Truth Social platform on Thursday. ‘May God strike them dead. We will do that on November 5 and they will pay!”
“War,” read a Telegram message from a chapter of the Proud Boys, the far-right group whose former chairman and three other members were convicted of seditious conspiracy for their actions at the Capitol on Jan. 6, just a few months later. Trump infamously told the group to “stand back” during a 2020 debate.
“Now you understand. To save your nation, you must fight. Now is the time to respond. Franco Friday has begun,” wrote another Proud Boys chapter, apparently referring to fascist dictator Francisco Franco of Spain.
A Jan. 6 defendant, who had already served time in jail for his role in the attack on the Capitol, also spoke out about X, posting a photo of Bragg and a photo of a noose. “January 20, 2025, Traitors Get The Rope,” he wrote, referring to the date of the next presidential inauguration.
The threats fit into a continuous pattern. An NBC News analysis of Trump’s Truth Social posts earlier this year found that he regularly uses the platform as a megaphone to attack people involved in his lawsuits — and some of his supporters have responded. When the FBI searched Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in 2022, a Trump supporter who had been at the Capitol on January 6 sent angry messages about the search and then attacked an FBI field office. When Trump posted a social media post last June that included former President Barack Obama’s home address, a Jan. 6 rioter reposted it and then showed up at the home. When Trump was indicted in Georgia in August, his supporters posted the alleged names and addresses of grand jury members. Special counsel Jack Smith, who is overseeing Trump’s federal election interference case in Washington, was the target of a swatting attempt on Christmas Day. So did U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, who will oversee that trial if the Supreme Court moves forward (although that could change if Trump wins in November). When Michael Fanone — the former police officer who was nearly killed on Jan. 6 by Trump supporters who believed the former president’s lies about the 2020 election — criticized Trump at a news conference outside the hush money trial earlier this week, his mother was beaten. As Trump and conservative media spread false information this week about jury instructions in the hush-money case, threats against Merchan poured in.
“We continue to see a dangerous erosion of democratic norms,” Daniel J. Jones, president of Advance Democracy, said in a statement to NBC News. “Trump and his allies have been spreading disinformation about the trial for weeks, challenging Judge Merchan’s impartiality and describing the entire trial as ‘rigged.’ As such, it is no surprise that some of his most ardent supporters are now calling for doxxing and violence against jurors, the judge and the prosecutor.”
Jones said online activity has increased in the wake of Trump’s guilty verdict, making it important for elected officials to “speak out against the misinformation Trump spreads, as well as the calls for violence he inspires.”
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
