As the election nears, President Trump has used his rallies to attack his perceived enemies, both inside and outside his administration. Photo / Doug Mills, The New York Times
The plot to kidnap the governor of Michigan is only the latest in a growing list of election-related threats. Some experts say the president is emboldening extremists.
The arrest of more than a dozen right-wing extremists who are accused of targeting the governors of Michigan and Virginia is only the latest example of threats of violence, in some cases egged on by President Donald Trump, that loom over the final weeks of a historically divisive race.
In rural Iowa, Laura Hubka, the Democratic chair of Howard County, recently took out a concealed-carry gun permit after signs for Democratic candidates in her region were vandalized with bullet holes and she was personally threatened, she said.
In central Wisconsin, Tom Stepanek's wife sat him down last month at the kitchen table and warned him that the president might not accept a peaceful transfer of power if he lost in November. "Are you sure you want to be doing this?" she asked her husband, who is the chair of the Waushara County Democrats and had also been threatened. "You're going to be a target here," she told him.
In Pennsylvania, Elizabeth Burdick, a Trump supporter who owns a gun store with her husband in red-hued Mercer County, said, "Sales have been crazy."
"People are afraid," she said. "They're afraid of what's going to happen" after the election if Joe Biden, the Democratic nominee, wins.
With polls showing the president behind Biden nationally and in key states, Trump has descended into rants about perceived enemies, both inside and outside his administration, triggering in his staunchest supporters such fears for the outcome — possibly a "stolen" election, maybe a coup by the far left — that he is emboldening them to disrupt the voting process, according to national security experts and law enforcement officials.
National security experts said that American elections were usually nonevents for law enforcement, and that transitions from one president to the next were typically a peaceful pageant of democracy.
"But not this year," said Chuck Wexler, the executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, who said that multiple police chiefs were extending patrol shifts in the weeks before Election Day. "This year is unlike any year."
In a report released this month describing threats to the United States, analysts at the Department of Homeland Security warned of potential plots that mirror the schemes in Michigan and Virginia thwarted by the FBI.
The International Crisis Group, whose mission is to sound an alarm ahead of deadly conflicts in hot spots around the globe, last month turned its attention for the first time to possible election-related violence in the United States.
Warning that far-right militias could take matters into their own hands in key states if ballots are contested, Robert Malley, the president of the group, said, "We would never predict civil war, but isolated incidents of violence could be quite serious."
The months of anti-police protests this summer sometimes turned to looting and arson, and Malley said there were some armed extremists on the left. But he emphasised that the real concern came from the right, where violent messaging had already produced deadly results, including the shooting death of two people during protests in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Malley said that in assessing the potential for further violence, "the balance very clearly tilts toward the responsibility of President Trump."
The president has called on supporters to "go into the polls and watch very carefully," a phrase that some security experts interpret as a call to take up arms and patrol polling stations. During the first presidential debate, he alerted the Proud Boys, a group associated with white supremacy, to "stand by."
"It's so concerning the president just doesn't seem to have any kind of guard rails between what he thinks at the spur of the moment and what he says or writes," said Janet Napolitano, the former secretary of homeland security. "We've seen it in the rise of these right-wing militia groups and it's almost as if implicitly he's giving them permission to take whatever action they want up to and including kidnapping a sitting governor."
Governor Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, who was a reported kidnapping target of the suspects arrested by the FBI last week, said over the weekend that extremists found "comfort and support" in Trump's language, and in the president's failure to condemn them.
Two of the 13 men arrested had brandished military-style rifles in the gallery of the Michigan State Capitol in April to protest the governor's lockdown to fight the spread of the coronavirus. The men had talked of starting a civil war, according to authorities, who linked them to the Wolverine Watchmen, a far-right militia.
The FBI revealed this week that the men also talked of "taking" Governor Ralph Northam of Virginia. Both governors are Democrats.
Among some Republicans, there are fears that any election-related violence would be driven by far-left groups, such as the loosely organised antifa movement.
Attorney General William P. Barr has consistently identified left-wing extremists as the greater threat to domestic peace, even though federal prosecutors in scores of rioting cases stemming from anti-police protests have focused on the far-right Boogaloo movement, which seeks a second civil war.
On YouTube, a far-right organizer named Mike Dunn has called for a "Boogaloo unity rally" on Saturday at the Michigan State Capitol, in Lansing, saying that he was barred from Facebook after posting there.
State Rep. Sarah Anthony, a Black lawmaker from Lansing, who has used armed escorts to enter the statehouse after passing through protesters with Nazi and Confederate symbols, said: "Hopefully it will be peaceful, but groups like this are causing fear in my community. This is Trump's army, the same ones who will show up at our polling places."
None of this has stopped Trump from fear-mongering about leftist violence. "Biden will disarm law abiding Americans," the president told supporters in suburban Virginia last month. "At the same time, they'll have riots down your street and that's just fine."
Biden, campaigning in Pennsylvania over the weekend, said that the only way he could lose the election would be because of "chicanery" at polling places. He later clarified that he would accept the results.
In Philadelphia, officials who met last month in the Emergency Operations Center to work through Election Day scenarios, were worried about civil unrest if the president claimed victory before all mail ballots were counted, a process expected to drag past November 3 and tilt the returns toward Biden.
The Philadelphia district attorney, Larry Krasner, warned in an interview against armed militias and the Proud Boys, who marched recently in Center City, saying his office had "greatly expanded" a task force to respond to complaints of election interference.
"We have to be concerned about issues that have never concerned us," he said. "We are ready, and to quote the president we are standing by in the event his friends decide to do something more than stand by."
Krasner, a Democrat, cast doubt on how much cooperation he could expect from the city's uniformed police officers, whose union welcomed Vice President Mike Pence in July.
In Michigan, the secretary of state, Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat, plans to issue instructions to poll workers on what to do if they encounter threats to voters, including from self-appointed poll watchers who show up armed in a state with permissive open-carry laws.
"We are prepared," said the Michigan attorney general, Dana Nessel, adding that every polling place will have a direct line to her office and to local law enforcement — "who can be on the ground immediately."
With the president calling for, in his words, an "army" at the polls to "watch all the thieving and stealing and robbing they do," Nessel, a Democrat, warned that anyone crossing the line from permitted activities to voter harassment would be charged with a felony.
"What I'd say to those listening to the president is, follow the advice of the president of the United States at your own legal peril," she said.
The Justice Department and the FBI work with local law enforcement and election officials every year to investigate allegations of fraud and of voter intimidation, but this year they are ramping up efforts to deal with threats of violence, cyber threats and other issues. Federal prosecutors have been running tabletop exercises to game out disruptions.
Nevertheless, it was notable, national security experts said, that none of the nation's top officials from the Justice Department or the FBI spoke at the news conference to announce the arrests in the Whitmer case. Trump entirely ignored the gravity of the threat against Whitmer, choosing instead to castigate her for limiting public gatherings amid the pandemic.
"I see Whitmer today, she's complaining," Trump said in an interview with the Fox News host Sean Hannity. "It was our Justice Department that arrested the people that she was complaining about."
Trump has made statements that seem to support the radical right. In August, he defended Kyle Rittenhouse, a teenager who has become something of a celebrity on the far right after he was charged with killing two people during the recent protests in Kenosha.
After Christopher A. Wray, the director of the FBI, told a House panel last month that white supremacists made up the bulk of lethal domestic terrorism threats, Trump complained about the assessment to associates, according to two people briefed on those conversations.
"Trump, in my judgment, is emboldening the extremist right by conferring legitimacy on right wing extremist individuals and groups," said Carrie Cordero, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security and a former national security lawyer with the Justice Department.
In Waushara County, a rural region outside Oshkosh, Wisconsin, Stepanek, the Democratic chair, recalled that at last year's county fair, while he was handing out balloons at the party's booth to a group of young children, a man approached him and said, "If I had my gun right now, I'd shoot all of you."
Stepanek, a retired educator, gasped at the time. This week, he said, "That's what we've been kind of seeing, that kind of rhetoric."
Four years ago, Trump easily carried Waushara County. Biden seems to be cutting into that margin this year, Stepanek said, although some people have told him that they don't want to put a yard sign supporting the Biden campaign out for fear that their house will be vandalized.
"They have a permission," Stepanek said of right-wing extremists like the man he encountered at the county fair. "I don't know if I want to say that. I don't mean it literally. But they feel it's OK they can use that kind of language."
Written by: Trip Gabriel, Zolan Kanno-Youngs and Katie Benner
Photographs by: Doug Mills
© 2020 THE NEW YORK TIMES
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