(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Instead of a baseball bat, previous guy implies violence prior to Tuesday surrender in Miami [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.'] Date: 2023-06-10 Not the first time Trump implied an attack on POTUS Biden with a golf ball. The prior one used a clip from Biden falling while riding his bicycle. The latest version used a jump cut to Biden’s fall over a sandbag at the Air Force Commencement. He’s just a crappy golfer who lies about his scores but has already suggested violence at his rallies. The federal indictment of former President Donald J. Trump has unleashed a wave of calls by his supporters for violence and an uprising to defend him, disturbing observers and raising concerns of a dangerous atmosphere ahead of his court appearance in Miami on Tuesday. [...] Political violence experts say that even if aggressive language by high-profile individuals does not directly end in physical harm, it creates a dangerous atmosphere in which the idea of violence becomes more accepted, especially if such rhetoric is left unchecked. “So far, the politicians who have used this rhetoric to inspire people to violence have not been held accountable,” said Mary McCord, a former senior Justice Department official who has studied the ties between extremist rhetoric and violence. “Until that happens, there’s little deterrent to using this type of language.” [...] On Instagram on Saturday morning, Mr. Trump posted a mash-up video of himself swinging a golf club on the course and an animation of a golf ball hitting President Biden in the head, superimposed with footage of Mr. Biden falling at a public event in recent days after he tripped over something onstage. www.nytimes.com/... Bandy Lee insists that Trump’s propensity for violence has increased over the past few years—particularly since his rejection by voters. She publicly predicted, in the summer of 2020, that Trump “will likely refuse to concede the results, call the election a fraud, and refuse to leave office.” As she told me more recently, “after Trump assumed the unparalleled power of the presidency, he began to expect he would forever be treated with extreme deference. His ego is so fragile that he is often unable to accept reality; for him, the fact that he lost the election was too painful to bear.” Trump’s normalization of violence may have inspired its spread in the United States and around the world. Lee points to a paper published this year showing that Texas counties that hosted Trump campaign rallies in 2016 subsequently experienced significant increases in reported hate crimes per capita relative to counties that didn’t host rallies. Nationally, meanwhile, the FBI documented a nearly one-third increase in hate crimes from 2016 to 2020. “Unfortunately, many other countries are now also encouraging and elevating mentally impaired ‘strongmen’—or, in truth, fragile men—to positions of power,” Lee says, resulting in “a huge international public health crisis.” Like other epidemic diseases, she told me, violence is contagious if not contained early, so “Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric and behavior over the past few years” can be seen in large segments of the GOP. Indeed, Robert Pape of the University of Chicago extrapolates from a recent survey he conducted that nearly 50 million American adults believe the 2020 election was stolen—and 21 million, about one-third of whom own guns, believe force would be justified to restore Trump to the Oval Office. www.motherjones.com/… [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/story/2023/6/10/2174630/-Instead-of-a-baseball-bat-previous-guy-implies-violence-prior-to-Tuesday-surrender-in-Miami Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/