Donald Trump's recent outrage at the campus demonstrations over the war in Gaza is less of an expression of support for Israel than it is in handing his hardcore MAGA a justification to riot if he loses the 2024 presidential election.
In her column for Salon, political observer Amanda Marcotte maintains that the former president is "laying the groundwork" for a new wave of violence that will allow his more violent supporters to point to the slap-on-the-wrist treatment of the student protesters if called to account.
As Marcotte pointed out, Trump has already served notice that he may not be willing to accept a potential defeat during a recent Time magazine interview, explaining, "And if we don't win, you know, it depends."
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Added with a recent Trump rant outside the Manhattan courthouse where he is facing 34 felony counts, he addressed the student protests at Columbia University by claiming, "They took over a building. That is a big deal. And I wonder if what’s going to happen to them will be anything comparable to what happened to J6, because they’re doing a lot of destruction, a lot of damages, a lot of people getting hurt very badly. I wonder if that’s going to be the same kind of treatment they gave J6. Let’s see how that all works out."
Marcotte claimed that this was Trump's "ham-handed" attempt to provide his supporters with a rationale to defend future "maximum violence."
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"If the left 'gets' to be violent, why can't his people be violent, too?" the columnist suggested. "The whine is dishonest in every way, of course. First, the leftist protesters are largely non-violent. Second, the few who do act up end up arrested, despite Trump's insinuations to the contrary. But his tactics have never needed to be fact-based to accomplish their goal of permitting his followers to be their worst selves. They already want to believe that the left is violent, so they feel justified in actually being violent."
As she notes, a common refrain within the far right is to cite the Black Lives Matter protests when the Jan. 6 insurrectionists are criticized and that Trump's fans will play a similar card with the Gaza protests.
"Even though his supporters are ignoring Trump's pleas to descend on his criminal trial, they do seem far more interested in heeding the call for election violence. As with the attack on college kids, the reason is that election violence is about their grievances, not just Trump's. It taps into the ongoing MAGA outrage that they are a minority, even as they identify as the only 'real' Americans," she wrote before adding, "While there's no logical link between the Gaza protests and Trump's anti-democracy conspiracy theories, the two share an emotional connective tissue in the MAGA imagination. For many Trump supporters, the protesters symbolize the young progressives that MAGA wants to eject from the body politic."
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