When describing the difference between his first and second terms during a recent interview at the White House, President Donald Trump told a reporter, “I was the hunted. And now I’m the hunter. It’s a big difference.”
Trump’s words make him sound more like a vigilante starring in a remake of “Cape Fear,” “Death Wish” or Clint Eastwood’s “Dirty Harry” films than the president of the United States. The menace in his statement is palpable: He is driven by vengeance and sadism, and he possesses a deep fixation on violence.
These are much more than character defects or failures of morality and virtue. Like other autocrats and aspiring dictators, Trump “governs” through personalist rule and corrupt power, where his character traits and personal goals become defining features of public policy and the state.
These are much more than character defects or failures of morality and virtue. Like other autocrats and aspiring dictators, Trump “governs” through personalist rule and corrupt power, where his character traits and personal goals become defining features of public policy and the state. His threats and menace are an example of how he views the world through the lens of friends and enemies, and where power is used primarily, if not exclusively, as a means to punish the latter as opposed to advancing the social good.
During the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump bragged he could shoot someone in broad daylight on Fifth Avenue and his voters would still support him. He was and continues to be correct. Like a king, he is now empowered by the Supreme Court to do such a thing as long as he is engaging in “presidential duties.”
Trump has shared images on social media and elsewhere of himself as a mafia boss, a professional wrestler, a heavyweight champion boxer, a superhero, the character “Rambo,” an evil Force user from the “Star Wars” film universe (with his obligatory red lightsaber) and other figures who rule through violence and intimidation. He has also suggested, repeatedly, that he is a leader or prophet divinely chosen by God.
Trump’s fantasies are made real by how MAGA followers view “their president” as possessing great and unstoppable power. This is central to his strongman appeal and the leader-follower relationship where, as explained to pollsters and other researchers by his supporters, “Donald Trump breaks the rules” to get “stuff done for people like us.”
The authoritarian spectacle that was his military (and birthday) parade failed to live up to his grand expectations and need for narcissistic fuel in service to his male power fantasy. Afterward, he took to Truth Social to vent his rage against “illegal aliens” and “Radical Left Democrats” who “hate our Country, and actually want to destroy our Inner Cities.”
As I have previously warned, such threats by the president against the American people are unprecedented in the country’s history. Trump is supposed to be the president for all Americans, not just those who support him.
Members of his administration are following his lead. In a recent post on X, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy described Democratic-led cities that do not cooperate with the administration’s mass deportation plans as “rogue state actors” that will not receive federal funding.
Now, after weeks of threats or instigations of violence against undocumented immigrants, protesters in Los Angeles and majority-blue cities, Trump has begun targeting the Democratic nominee for mayor of New York City. Zohran Mamdani, Trump said, is “a 100% Communist lunatic” and a “total nut job.”
Responding to Mamdani’s victory in a Sunday interview on Fox News, Trump threatened to cut off the city’s federal funds. “If he does get in, I’m gonna be president and he’s gonna have to do the right thing or they’re not getting any money,” Trump said. “He’s gotta do the right thing. I can tell you this: Whoever’s mayor of New York is going to have to behave themselves or the federal government is coming down very tough on them financially.”
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Trump followed up on his comments on Tuesday in a press gaggle on the South Lawn. “[Mamdani] has to come right through this building to get his money,” he said, pointing to the White House. “Don’t worry. He’s not going to run away with anything.”
By Tuesday afternoon, Trump had escalated his rhetoric against Mamdani in both tone and language. In remarks to the press after he toured “Alligator Alcatraz,” a new migrant detention center in Florida, the president weaponized Mamdani’s birth in Uganda by falsely insinuating he is not a naturalized American citizen. “A lot of people are saying he’s here illegally,” Trump said. “We’re going to look at everything.” When he was asked about Mamdani’s comments in his victory speech that he would oppose ICE roundups in New York, Trump went even further. “Well then, we’ll have to arrest him.”
Within a span of a few hours, the president of the United States went from framing Mamdani as a potential thief and anti-American to questioning his citizenship and threatening him with arrest.
This is part of a much larger pattern. Trump and his messengers have repeatedly threatened and attacked Americans who oppose their authoritarian agenda, often using the language of war and combat. In war, the enemy is destroyed.
The use of violent language by Trump and his boosters has taken on even more ominous meanings as his administration has sought to criminalize free speech and political dissent, and use federal law enforcement to harass and arrest Democratic politicians and judges. At minimum, his war-like rhetoric has helped to create a climate in which political violence is becoming normalized, if not actively encouraged.
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“What is most concerning is that the conditions for political violence today are worsening,” political scientist Robert Pape writes in a recent opinion essay published by the New York Times. “We may be on the brink of an extremely violent era in American politics.” He points to a “spate of political violence” that has occurred in recent years targeting politicians and judges “across the political spectrum,” including the two assassination attempts against Trump himself. Pape, who directs the Chicago Project on Security and Threats at the University of Chicago, has conducted quarterly national surveys on political violence. “These surveys are telling,” he writes, “because, as other research has shown, the more public support there is for political violence, the more common it is…”
These are chilling findings. What’s becoming clear, Pape says, “is that the American people — the ultimate power in the United States — need to stand against political violence. In practice, this means that protests must have a positive political goal, not merely the negative aim of stopping the other side at all costs.”
Time is a finite resource for Democrats and other pro-democracy Americans. This requires them to learn two basic lessons from military strategy and tactics. First, indecision and wasted time limit one’s latitude for action and will lead to defeat. Second, when trading space for time, an army will eventually run out of space and they will then be cornered and destroyed. Trump and the MAGA movement view politics as a form of battle. Democrats and the resistance need to quickly learn from their example.
Ultimately, Donald Trump is not an ideologue. He is a kind of nihilist who believes in domination and accumulating as much power as he possibly can. But the people in Trump’s administration and larger orbit are true ideologues. As we have seen with Project 2025 and Agenda 47, they have a theory of human nature, a set of normative priors and beliefs, and a plan to remake society in that image. In Trump, whose appetite for power and adulation is insatiable, it appears they have found their greatest weapon.
