While it remains to be seen whether Donald Trump will run for president again, he’s already raising the possibility of mobilizing his supporters en masse for another purpose. Discussing ongoing investigations into conduct in New York and Georgia at a rally in Texas on Saturday, the former president called for mass demonstrations to defend his name.
“If these radical, vicious, racist prosecutors do anything wrong or illegal, I hope we are going to have in this country the biggest protest we have ever had in Washington, D.C.; in New York; in Atlanta; and elsewhere, because our country and our elections are corrupt,” Trump declared.
Trump’s threat presents the possibility that Jan. 6 was not a one-off event.
The Georgia prosecutor looking into Trump’s attempts to interfere with the election in her state took the call for action seriously enough that she asked the FBI for security assistance.
“We must work together to keep the public safe and ensure that we do not have a tragedy in Atlanta similar to what happened at the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021,” she wrote in a letter to the FBI. “My staff and I will not be influenced or intimidated by anyone as this investigation moves forward.”
Trump’s threat is concerning: it presents the possibility that Jan. 6 was not a one-off event, but perhaps the inaugural action of a political movement that seeks to attack any institution standing in the way of his authoritarian vision.
Trump did something unusual for a politician during his speech Saturday when he called for mass mobilizations that had nothing to do with voting or otherwise participating in the American electoral process. He proposed action that would further undermine its credibility and would carry on the extrainstitutional tradition that he sparked with the Jan. 6 riot, albeit with a different target: While Jan. 6 focused on blocking a peaceful transfer of power, these mobilizations would seek to undermine the criminal justice system.
Combined with remarks he made about pardoning Jan. 6 protesters if he were to re-enter the White House, what emerges is an expansion of Trump’s vision of will-to-power politics. Trump is committed to attacking institutions that uphold democracy and law, and promising impunity for those who do.
Given past trends among right-wing protests during the Trump era, there’s reason to think that such demonstrations could turn violent. As Lilliana Mason, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins University, told me in November, right-wing protests “tend to be armed, and armed protests tend to be most dangerous.” Her research shows that partisans of both parties grew increasingly accepting of violence to achieve political goals over the course of the Trump era — but notably Republicans, in particular, became disproportionately likely to accept political violence as legitimate in the wake of Trump’s first impeachment. In other words, perception that Trump is imperiled or being unjustly indicted may act as a green light for protestors on the right to get rowdy. But even if anti-prosecutorial protests didn’t turn violent, their emergence as grievances would have serious implications for the right’s evolving views about the legitimacy of the political system — it would further radicalize the right’s mistrust of the institutions governing the country. And it would more fully cleave “law” from “order” when the right talks about the importance of those concepts. If the law is illegitimate, order can be achieved through vigilante violence. The Democrats’ commitment to democracy should intensify, too. As Trump’s commitment to subverting democracy deepens, the Democrats’ commitment to democracy should intensify, too. That means not just keeping legislatures and courthouses physically secure and trying to pass necessary legislation that will ensure greater access to the voting booth, but also investing energy into the kinds of structural political reforms that will make the country more meaningfully democratic and more responsive to citizens’ needs. That means seriously homing in on big pro-democracy proposals like reforming the Senate by abolishing the filibuster; statehood for Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico; and expanding the Supreme Court. Simultaneously the movement left will need to apply pressure to Democrats with even more ambitious ideas for making our political and economic system more democratic in nature. In 2016, the Democrats made the mistake of thinking that a defense of the status quo would be good enough to fend off the threat posed by Trump. That can’t happen again. In an era of political turbulence and sharply declining trust in institutions, it’s important to offer something bigger, brighter and more just. Ambitious democracy projects will excite voters, and they’re simply the right thing to do for a party if it wants to show its commitment to a government of the people, by the people and for the people.
Zeeshan Aleem is a writer for MS NOW. Sign up for his newsletter. 
