Trump’s darkening language sparks fears of violence

By Frankie Taggart

Washington, United States — Donald Trump’s populist, politically incorrect language is often framed as an asset but a troubling escalation in his incendiary rhetoric is prompting fears over the potential for violence among his inflamed supporters.

In recent days, the irascible former US president and 2024 candidate has implied that the country’s top military officer should be executed and joked about the elderly husband of a political foe being attacked in a home invasion.

Critics say he hit a new low last week with comments about illegal immigrants so extreme that the Anti-Defamation League, a Jewish advocacy group, saw echoes of Nazi rhetoric.

“Nobody has any idea where these people are coming from, and we know they come from prisons, we know they come from mental institutions, insane asylums, we know they’re terrorists,” Trump told conservative news site The National Pulse.

“Nobody has ever seen anything like we’re witnessing right now. It is a very sad thing for our country. It’s poisoning the blood of our country.”

The ADL’s Jonathan Greenblatt told MSNBC television that Trump appeared to have been fed the line by someone familiar with Hitler’s infamous complaint of Jews “causing a blood poisoning of Germany.”

Gag order

Trump’s exhortations to violence are nothing new — he suggested that protesters should be “roughed up” at a rally in 2016 and that looters should be shot during the 2020 racial protests over the police murder of George Floyd.

His months-long campaign of lies claiming that he had been cheated in his 2020 election loss culminated in addressing an angry crowd in Wasington on January 6, 2021, which then went and attacked the US Capitol.

Many participants in the ransacking of the seat of US democracy later told investigators that they considered that they were acting on Trump’s orders.

Trump’s inflammatory remarks used to shock America, generating days of coverage. His language no longer raises the stir it once did in a fatigued political and media establishment watching him cruise to the Republican nomination as the 2024 presidential election candidate.

Yet recent comments — particularly his mocking of a hammer attack on