The 'Vigilante' President

Donald Trump Is America’s First Vigilante President
The consequences of a U.S. president encouraging extralegal violence.
by AUSTIN SARAT AND JONATHAN OBERT

Twice in a 24-hour period, the president of the United States took to Twitter to endorse violence. The first time, at 12:00 a.m. on Thursday, he retweeted a video in which a supporter says, “The only good Democrat is a dead Democrat.”

Then, early Friday morning, as protests over the police killing of George Floyd erupted in Minneapolis and turned violent, Donald Trump tweeted that “THUGS” were “dishonoring” Mr. Floyd’s memory. He concluded with a chilling warning: “when the looting starts, the shooting starts.”

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The president’s recent tweets were just the latest example of his penchant for threatening, encouraging, or obliquely endorsing violence directed against individual political opponents and/or racial minorities.

His embrace of such violence marks such a stunning departure from the pattern of his predecessors that we might fairly regard him as America’s first vigilante president.

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