But first, today is Donald Trump's 77th birthday. After his court presence yesterday in Miami, he stopped by Versailles, a Cuban Restaurant. They sang Happy Birthday to him. Note that if he re-wins the presidency next year, at the end of his term, he will be Joe Biden's current age.A colleague sent me this summary of musings from Jonathan Swan, Alan Feuer, Michael Schmidt, Maggie Haberman and Adam Goldman of the New York Times:
The federal indictment of former President Donald J. Trump has unleashed a wave of calls by his supporters for violence and an uprising to defend him, disturbing observers and raising concerns of a dangerous atmosphere ahead of his court appearance in Miami on Tuesday.
Experts on political violence warn that attacks against people or institutions become more likely when elected officials or prominent media figures are able to issue threats or calls for violence with impunity. The pro-Trump mob that attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, was drawn to Washington in part by a post on Twitter from Mr. Trump weeks earlier, promising that it would be “wild.”
“I have a message tonight for Merrick Garland and Jack Smith and Joe Biden — and the guys back there in the fake news media, you should listen up as well, this one is for you,” Ms. Lake said. “If you want to get to President Trump, you are going to have go through me, and you are going to have to go through 75 million Americans just like me. And I’m going to tell you, most of us are card-carrying members of the N.R.A.”
Political violence experts say that even if aggressive language by high-profile individuals does not directly end in physical harm, it creates a dangerous atmosphere in which the idea of violence becomes more accepted, especially if such rhetoric is left unchecked.
“So far, the politicians who have used this rhetoric to inspire people to violence have not been held accountable,” said Mary McCord, a former senior Justice Department official who has studied the ties between extremist rhetoric and violence. “Until that happens, there’s little deterrent to using this type of language.”
“Rhetoric like this has consequences,” said Timothy J. Heaphy, the lead investigator for the select House committee that investigated the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and Mr. Trump’s efforts to remain in the White House after his presidency. “People who we interviewed for the Jan. 6 investigation said they came to the Capitol because politicians and the president told them to be there. Politicians think that when they say things it’s just rhetoric, but people listen to it and take it seriously. In this climate politicians need to realize this and be more responsible.”
On Instagram on Saturday morning, Mr. Trump posted a mash-up video of himself swinging a golf club on the course and an animation of a golf ball hitting President Biden in the head, superimposed with footage of Mr. Biden falling at a public event in recent days after he tripped over something onstage.
“This. Means. War,” The Gateway Pundit, a pro-Trump outlet wrote at the time, setting the tone for others. Hours later, Joe Kent, a Trump-endorsed House candidate in Washington State, went on a podcast run by Stephen K. Bannon, Mr. Trump’s onetime political adviser, and declared, “This just shows everyone what many of us have been saying for a very long time. We’re at war.”
Indeed, within days of the heated language that followed the search of Mar-a-Lago, an Ohio man (Ricky Shiffer) armed with a semiautomatic rifle tried to breach the F.B.I. field office near Cincinnati and wound up killed in a shootout with the local police.
My sense is that those above deadly traits are secondary to his megalomania and real threat to American Democracy. Anyway, here is a book by 37 psychiatrists and mental health experts you can also consider. The downside to this publication is that it was released in 2019 before his coup attempt.
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