The FBI’s stunning search of former President Trump’s Florida residence this week inspired a fierce backlash from the right, fueling concern among experts about the escalating risk of political violence.
The response among Trump supporters has ranged from sharp criticism of the Justice Department’s tactics to outright inflammatory rhetoric, with Trump himself comparing the search of his home to the Nixon-era burglary of the Watergate complex.
Some of Trump’s most ardent supporters have described this week’s legal developments as reflecting a country in the midst of a civil war, and in isolated cases some far-right extremists have called for mobilization in response to what has been described as an act of tyranny by lawless federal agents.
Although the FBI’s search was based on a warrant approved by a federal judge, that hasn’t stopped Republicans from arguing that the investigation was prompted by a desire to damage the president’s primary rival, Biden, rather than potential criminal behavior linked to Trump.
“The GOP’s choice to turn the investigation into the mishandling of classified documents into a cause celebre is dangerous, especially given Trump’s history of invoking private violence, mobs and militias for support,” said Rachel Kleinfeld, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “Democracy cannot allow anyone to be above the law.
It may come as no surprise that a criminal investigation involving Trump, the de facto leader of the Republican Party and possible 2024 contender, would provoke a passionate response. At the same time, even the most provocative political speech, short of incitement to violence, enjoys broad protection under the First Amendment.
But the outrage over the FBI raid on Trump’s home comes at a particularly tense time in American politics, as the share of supporters who believe violence is sometimes justified to achieve political goals has grown significantly. According to researcher Nathan Calmoe, about one in five partisans say their own party’s violence is at least somewhat justified to achieve its goals.
“More partisan violence seems likely in the future, especially in response to particularly tense moments like the one Trump has escalated here,” said Kalmow, a professor at Louisiana State University who has tracked growing support for political violence.
In the immediate aftermath of the FBI raid at Mar-a-Lago, a chorus of voices on the right rose up in a swift backlash.
Experts said no concrete, agreed-upon real-world action plan had emerged, but warned that officials should keep a close eye on the tense online vitriol.
One prominent alt-right figure, Jack Posobiek, posted a series of inflammatory posts this week on Telegram, including one with more than 62,000 views that “the federal security state has declared war on Donald J. Trump and his supporters.”
According to Alyssa Kahn, a research associate at the Digital Forensic Research Lab, some of Posobiec’s messages were posted on local extremist channels, where users also talked about taking up arms, mobilizing and targeting the FBI.
Incendiary posts are not contained in marginal sites. Posobec, who has 1.8 million Twitter followers, tweeted on Wednesday that “our government has been taken over by the crazy eunuch class. It is up to us to oust them and dismantle their corrupt apparatus.”
Steven Crowder, a conservative commentator with 1.9 million Twitter followers, wrote Monday night, “Tomorrow is war. Restful sleep.”
Twitter has not taken action against these posts or accounts. A company spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.
Violent rhetoric also spreads on alternative social media sites, such as Gab, Parler, Getter, which boast little or no content moderation policies and attract right-wing audiences — especially users banned from mainstream sites.
Overall, the posts that appeared online, across platforms, highlighted “a nice little shopping list of far-right narratives,” said Jared Holt, senior research manager at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD).
“It’s like a big fire hose of incendiary content that’s kind of blown back to the news in these spaces,” he said.
Although the rhetoric has become more intense, the distance from the political fringes to the political mainstream has shortened.
According to Kahn, inflammatory rhetoric that may once have been limited to fringe sites and far-right figures has been adopted even by politicians with large followings on mainstream platforms like Twitter and Facebook, a dynamic that “encourages” far-right influencers to be “even more -violently,” she said.
“It also directs at the average person this kind of violent rhetoric that’s really scary to think about,” Kahn said.
Tweets by outspoken far-right Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green (R-Ga.) added to the right-wing chorus, with the political firebrand calling for the FBI to be “de-funded,” calling the raid “tyrannical” and likening the situation to an act of “civil war.”
Shannon Hiller, executive director of the nonpartisan Princeton Initiative to Bridge Divides, which seeks to track and mitigate political violence, said American politics is at a “sensitive moment” that calls for leaders to defuse tensions, not escalate them.
She pointed at Goves. Larry Hogan of Maryland and Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas as examples of Republican leaders who, while critical of the Department of Justice’s lack of transparency, had expressed their views without further inflaming the political discourse, unlike some of their GOP colleagues .
“I really think that other GOP leaders who wink and nod to extremist rhetoric are playing with fire,” she said. “We know from other research that leaders calling for calm and rejecting violence have a positive effect on reducing risk, that’s what we need to call on all our leaders now.”
Trump, for his part, continued to use his megaphone to raise the temperature. On Wednesday, the former president suggested, without evidence, that federal agents had planted evidence on his property, again casting himself as the victim of a shady “raid.”
Legal experts disputed Trump’s description of the FBI operation and highlighted the stakes of the investigation as well as the backlash.
“Despite a judge issuing a warrant to search Trump’s home, which requires probable cause to be established that a crime has been committed and that evidence will be found on the premises, Trump and his supporters are going on the offensive and engaging in heated rhetoric that the Justice Department somehow mishandled Trump,” said Barbara McQuaid, a University of Michigan law professor who spent seven years as a federal prosecutor during Barack Obama’s presidency. “It’s amazing to me how many people are willing to take the bait.”
“I think the risk of civil unrest is very real, but the Department of Justice cannot allow that fear to prevent it from enforcing the law,” she added, calling the Jan. 6 attack a “sobering” reminder not to underestimate “the threat of political violence of those who support Donald Trump.”
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Experts noted a key difference between online posts before the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol and the aftermath of the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago. While a concrete plan emerged before the January 6 attack, the posts circulating online this week did not have the same coherent connection to a specific time and place.
At least not yet, said ISD’s Holt, who added that the security situation will continue to be closely monitored.
“We’re starting to track some protest calls, we’ve seen a few floating around, but nothing really centralized at this point,” he said. “There are at least a few cases where this has inspired extremists to call for protests or mobilization.” We will monitor this and see how it develops.”
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