With Donald Trump facing indictment and arraignment on multiple fraud charges on Tuesday, the Trumpworld response is to flood the zone with House GOP Circus of the Damned sideshows.
SOME OF DONALD Trump’s close advisers are calling on top Republicans in Congress to accelerate criminal referrals against President Joe Biden, demanding revenge after Trump became the first former president in history to be indicted.
“Now the House GOP has to continue to investigate the Biden bribes and refer for indictments,” says John McLaughlin, a top Trump pollster. “Just the beginning of the end for the Bidens.”
Michael Caputo, a former Trump official who remains close to the ex-president, says he agrees that the House GOP should accelerate its Biden-related probes — and added a 2025 twist: “In fact, I think President Trump should appoint an attorney general who will arrest Joe Biden for his China corruption on Inauguration Day 2025. There’s a far stronger case against Biden for his crimes and now the precedent is set.” (Trump’s team often speaks as if a 2024 victory is a foregone conclusion.)
Behind the scenes, Trump spent Thursday night on a barrage of phone calls to House Republican leaders and other MAGA lawmakers to confirm they had his back following the indictment, according to two sources with knowledge of the matter. He also, the sources say, vented about Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg and his other Democratic foes. CNN first reported on this blitz of evening calls, noting that some of these lawmakers “serve on committees that are trying to investigate the Manhattan DA.”
The demand for revenge against Biden stems from two ideas circulating in Trumpworld. The first is that Bragg is doing Biden’s bidding by pushing an indictment of Trump. The second is an effort to recreate a strategy he successfully used against Hillary Clinton in 2016, repeatedly calling her “crooked” and accusing her of corruption at a time when his own ethical lapses were under scrutiny.
“This is all about Biden through Bragg countering the GOP investigation of the millions in communist Chinese bank wires to the Bidens. Classic political diversion,” claims McLaughlin.
Trump has been baselessly accusing Bragg of doing the new president’s bidding, predicting Bragg’s work will “backfire massively on Joe Biden.” Even before the GOP won back control of the House in last year’s elections, Trump had been calling top allies on Capitol Hill, grilling them on different strategies for investigating Biden, his family, and his administration, people familiar with the matter recall. At times, Trump would ask “how many” times Republicans planned on impeaching Biden.
While Trump’s team publicly demands revenge on Biden, they’ve already drawn up efforts to punish Bragg for his prosecution of the former president. Rolling Stone reported earlier this month that Trump has been demanding his advisers draw up legal plans for how they could punish the DA if they were to retake the White House. And his advisers have already located specific areas of the legal code they could use to take their revenge — including via the Justice Department’s civil rights division.
So yes, expect the House GOP investigations into Biden to kick into high gear, resulting in House GOP Committee votes to refer Hunter and Joe Biden for criminal prosecution to the Department of Justice, and for Merrick Garland to hand these over to Special Counsel Jack Smith.
What will come of these cases is anyone's guess, but Republicans will be talking about these criminal referrals every time a Trump indictment is brought up.
Expect more Trump indictments, too.
Of course, the more immediate problem is that Trumpworld is calling for supporters to take revenge as well.
Minutes after former President Donald Trump was indicted by a grand jury in New York, his supporters flooded social media and extremist message boards with violent and racist threats against the officials prosecuting Trump, as well as bloody civil war.
“This cannot go unpunished,” one member of the rabidly pro-Trump message board The Donald wrote on Thursday night. “The DA needs to pay dearly.”
“None of this will stop unless there is blood in the streets,” another poster wrote.
In Trump’s own statement, the former president called the indictment a “political persecution” and referred to Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg as “hand-picked and funded by George Soros,” and stated that Bragg is “doing Joe Biden’s dirty work.”
His far-right supporters mobilized quickly online to echo these comments. Through their vitriol, and calls for war, some supporters also promoted a narrative where Trump’s indictment was actually going to help him win victory in 2024. In some cases, supporters falsely said the indictment was simply a ruse to distract everyone from the shooter in Nashville earlier this week.
“The whole trans terrorist thing must have been polling badly so they decided to indict Trump based on the testimony of a lying jew and lying whore,” one influential neo-Nazi account on Telegram wrote, alongside an AI-generated image of a tattooed, topless Trump in a prison yard.
While Trump supporters did not publicly make specific plans for protests or violence, there were numerous examples of violent rhetoric in response to Trump’s indictment, including calling for violence against Bragg, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland, and law enforcement.
On platforms like The Donald, where all five of the top pinned posts on the homepage on Thursday night related to Trump’s indictment, commenters openly called for violence that was largely racist in nature.
Under a post with a photo of Bragg captioned “FAT PIECE OF SHIT!” another user commented: “There once was a time when he would have been lynched for much less.”
“Can’t we put a bounty on Bragg’s head? Time to fight lawlessness with lawlessness,” one user wrote. In response, someone said: “Hey man a lot of us are thinking the same thing, but if I said what should really happen I'd be charged with ‘terroristic threats.’” Another added: “The unjustified prosecution of President Trump is state terrorism. Respond to terrorism with terrorism.”
99.999% chance this is all empty bluster.
But it only takes that .001% for someone to get hurt or worse, and the Feds to win 100% of the time.
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