The posts are ominous.
“Pick a side, or YOU are next,” wrote conservative talkshow host Dan Bongino on the Truth Social media platform in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s 34 felony convictions.
The replies were even more so.
“Dan, seriously now,” one user wrote in response to Bongino. “I see no way out of all this mess without bloodshed. When you can rig an election, then weaponize the government and the courts against a former President, what other alternative is there? I’m almost 70 and would rather die than live in tyranny.”
That’s a common version of how many people on the US right reacted to the ex-president’s verdict, drawing on a “mirror world” where Trump is seen as the selfless martyr to powerful state forces and Joe Biden is the dangerous autocrat wielding the justice system as his own personal plaything and a threat to US democracy.
Calls for revenge, retribution and violence littered the rightwing internet as soon as Trump’s guilty verdict came down, all predicated on the idea that the trial had been a sham designed to interfere with the 2024 election. Some posted online explicitly saying it was time for hangings, executions and civil wars.
I would suspect that even if it is an engineered crisis, it’s not our own wealthy class doing the engineering. They can have what they want in a more stable way by not having this nonsense happen. It’s not like the democrats are suddenly going to actually start making their lives notably harder. In fact, a lot of the ‘MAGA’ is stuff they would not want (high tariffs when they want to import cheap and sell high instead, abusing immigrants by detaining and deporting instead of abusing them by making them be a cheap labor source afraid to exercise any rights they might have for fear of getting deported).
Foreign interests are about the only ones that stand to gain from this sort of instability.