Top 12 influencers who called for violence against Trump

Ahead of the second assassination attempt against former President Donald Trump, many influential actors, journalists, and influencers warned that Trump is an “existential threat” to democracy, compared him to Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler, and suggested he or his supporters should face violent attacks. Some continued attacking Trump even after the first assassination attempt July 13.

The New Tolerance Campaign, a nonprofit watchdog aimed at confronting “intolerance double standards” practiced by “establishment institutions, civil rights groups, universities, and socially conscious brands,” compiled a list of extreme rhetoric against Trump that may have contributed to the second assassination attempt.

“New Tolerance Campaign research has shown two kinds of consistent and consistently charged rhetoric surrounding President Trump: insistence that his reelection would lead to the collapse of the country, and calls for the former president’s death,” Gregory T. Angelo, New Tolerance Campaign’s president, told The Daily Signal in a written statement Monday. (New Tolerance Campaign has taken to exposing extremism on the Left, to balance the impact of left-leaning groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center.)

“These proclamations aren’t sarcastic; they’re literal, and they’re being spoken by high-profile politicians and members of the mainstream media with massive audiences,” Angelo added. “It’s shocking that there have been two attempts on President Trump’s life, but not surprising given the existential hyperbole about him pounding Americans’ ears day in and day out.”

Other Violent Threats to Trump

Both Thomas Matthew Crooks, 20, who authorities say shot Trump in the right ear July 13 in Butler, Pennsylvania, and Ryan Wesley Routh, 58, the man suspected of planning to assassinate the former president Sunday at Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, Florida, got surprisingly close to the former president.

However, New Tolerance Campaign identified five others who faced charges for threatening to harm or kill Trump.

In January 2021, a judge sentenced 53-year-old Connecticut resident Gary Joseph Gravelle to nine years in prison after his conviction for sending a letter threatening to kill Trump in September 2018.

In January 2022, police arrested and charged New York City resident Thomas Welnicki, 72, with calling the Secret Service and threatening to kill Trump. He proclaimed that he intended to “stand up to fascism” by assassinating the former president.

In August, police arrested Arizona resident Ronald Lee Syvrud, 66, and charged him with threatening Trump’s life during the former president’s campaign trip to the Copper State.

In July, police arrested and charged Florida resident Michael M. Wiseman, 68, with making written threats to kill Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, after the assassination attempt in Butler.

Last month, police arrested and charged Illinois resident Justin Lee White, 36, with repeatedly threatening Trump, police, and Republicans with violence if the former president didn’t “play fair” during the election campaign.

Where would Welnicki get the idea that standing up to “fascism” involves targeting Trump? The full list of left-leaning pundits, celebrities, and politicians who compared Trump to Hitler would be too long to compile. But New Tolerance Campaign highlighted many examples, and The Daily Signal has narrowed them down to the list below. (The worst is at the bottom.)

None of the people in the list below responded to The Daily Signal’s requests for comment by publication time.

1. Shalom Auslander

Most Americans may not have heard of novelist Shalom Auslander, 54, but in 2016 he penned an op-ed in The Washington Post claiming that comparing Trump to Hitler “belittles Hitler.”

Auslander first claimed that Hitler had evil plans, while Trump is “just a con man,” but then the novelist suggested that Americans today are “like Hitler’s willing executioners.”

“Will we look the other way, say we didn’t know, stand silently by while millions of our neighbors are rounded up, while women who get abortions are ‘punished,’ while immigrants are given ‘ideology tests’ and our leader heaps praise on oppressive tyrants?” he wrote.

The writer didn’t suggest that Trump would round up Jews and send them to concentration camps, but he did suggest Trump would “round up” Americans’ “neighbors” in a similarly ominous way.

2. Linda Ronstadt

Rock and country singer Linda Ronstadt, then 73, explicitly compared Trump to Hitler in July 2019.

Ronstadt, who is of Mexican descent, recalled that when Trump first announced his candidacy for president, she predicted, “It’s going to be like Hitler, and the Mexicans are the new Jews.”

“And sure enough, that’s what he delivered,” she said. “It’s exactly the same.”

3. Joe Scarborough

Joe Scarborough, host of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” repeated the line that Trump posed an existential threat to America’s representative form of government.

Scarborough said last November that Trump “is running to end American democracy as we know it.”

“He will imprison, he will execute whoever he is allowed to imprison, execute, drive from the country,” the MSNBC host said of Trump, whom he called an “authoritarian.”

4. Robert Kagan

Also last November, political scientist Robert Kagan argued in The Washington Post that if Trump wins the 2024 presidential election the odds are “pretty good” that his presidency will “turn into a dictatorship.”

Kagan warned that the “Trump administration will have many avenues to persecute its enemies, real and perceived.” He suggested that, if elected again, Trump would prevent free and fair elections in 2026.

5. Rachel Maddow

MSNBC host Rachel Maddow compared Trump to both Hitler and Italian dictator Benito Mussolini.

Last December, Maddow said Trump “keeps saying the kinds of things, the exact kind of things, that Hitler and Mussolini said.”

“There’s a reason Hitler and Mussolini said this stuff, too. It worked then, it works now,” she added. “It has worked abroad all over the world and yes, it has worked here, too. More than we like to remember.”

6. Will Stancil

Will Stancil, then a candidate for the Minnesota House of Representatives for District 61A, posted a suspicious question on the social media site X.

“So is there any reason [Joe] Biden couldn’t just drone strike Trump and end this,” Stancil, who currently has more than 89,000 followers, wrote in January. He then deleted the post.

This post arguably fits with an extremely negative view of those whom Stancil considers Trump’s supporters.

Stancil’s campaign platform stated that the candidate is “committed to listening to voices across the political spectrum—with a key exception.”

“For over a century, far-right extremists have not been motivated by sincere ideological belief but an inner desire to commit violence, dominate the weak, bully the unpopular, and mock the unusual,” his platform read. “Their policy commitments are typically insincere or even nonexistent; their motive force is the pleasure they take in causing pain.”

7. Keith Olbermann

In March, Trump said that the “hostile press” treats him worse than Abraham Lincoln. The Biden-Harris reelection campaign posted Trump’s clip, noting: “Trump says he has been treated worse than Abraham Lincoln, who was assassinated.”

Former MSNBC host Keith Olbermann reposted the Biden-Harris campaign video, saying, “There’s always the hope.”

Olbermann deleted the tweet and clarified that he hoped Trump gets treated badly, although his original post could be interpreted to mean that he hoped Trump got assassinated.

“I’m hoping Trump’s right, that he IS treated worse than Lincoln,” Olbermann said. “As I’ve said for 9 years: THAT HE’S CONVICTED, THEN DIES IN PRISON.”

8. Robert De Niro

In May, actor Robert De Niro echoed Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address by warning that “under Trump,” America’s current “kind of government will perish from the Earth.”

“If Trump returns to the White House, you can kiss these freedoms goodbye that we all take for granted,” the actor declared in a speech outside the building where Trump’s controversial trial for falsifying business records was taking place.

“And elections, forget about it. That’s over,” De Niro told reporters. “That’s done. If he gets in, I can tell. you right now, he will never leave. He will never leave. You know that.”

The month after the first Trump assassination attempt, on July 13, saw more extreme rhetoric.

9. Jacqueline Marsaw

A former congressional aide for Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., posted on Facebook that a potential Trump assassin should try not to miss “next time.”

“I don’t condone violence but please get you some shooting lessons so you don’t miss next time ooops that wasn’t me talking,” Jacqueline Marsaw wrote in the post.

Thompson said he fired Marsaw. His office didn’t respond to The Daily Signal’s request to connect with Marsaw for comment after the second assassination attempt.

10. Randi Weingarten

At the opening of the American Federation of Teachers convention in mid-July, AFT President Randi Weingarten condemned Trump as an “existential threat to democracy.”

Weingarten, head of the nation’s second-largest teachers union, spoke more than a week after the assassination attempt on the former president in Pennsylvania.

11. Billie Joe Armstrong

Billie Joe Armstrong, the 52-year-old lead singer of the rock band Green Day, lifted a Trump mask that many critics described as a “decapitated head” during a concert in Washington, D.C.

The mask had the word “idiot” scrawled on it.

12. Steven ‘Destiny’ Bonnell

Steven Kenneth Bonnell II, a 35-year-old influencer who goes by the name “Destiny” and gained a large audience by livestreaming video games on YouTube, said he did not have “much sympathy” for Trump supporters after the first assassination attempt.

“I don’t think I have much sympathy about the attempt enough to chastise people celebrating it,” he said.

Bonnell stood by this statement after English journalist Piers Morgan pressed him on it.

In a livestream video, Bonnell also stated: “I’m ready for the f**king great cleansing” when “we genocide conservatives in this country.”

[Editor’s note: This story originally was published by The Daily Signal.]

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