Recently, I was talking with Patricia Evangelista, a journalist from the Philippines, who is about to publish an astonishing book, called “Some People Need Killing.” Evangelista, a fearless reporter in her late thirties, covered the regime of Rodrigo Duterte, a provincial mayor who won the Presidency promising to execute, without trial or even arrest, drug users or anyone else whom he deemed threatening to public order. Evangelista is not a pundit. She was a police reporter working for Rappler, an independent Web site co-founded by Maria Ressa, who was a co-winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, in 2021. Every night, Evangelista went into the streets and alleyways of Manila to see the wreckage of Duterte’s state-sanctioned violence, the bullet-riddled bodies cooling in the gutter, the bored cops muttering uselessly into their radios. She wrote down the names, the histories, taking care to get the details right—her way of honoring the dead and their families. In her news reports, and in her longer investigations, Evangelista was, in essence, recording the “achievements” of an elected tyrant who had fulfilled his campaign promises. His was an honesty written in blood. A Duterte-era vigilante gave Evangelista her title: “I’m really not a bad guy,” he said. “Some people need killing.” According to human-rights organizations, Duterte’s extralegal rampage killed more than ten thousand people.
Over time, Donald Trump has been no less truthful about his intentions than Rodrigo Duterte. (In fact, Trump is an admirer; in 2017, he congratulated Duterte for “the unbelievable job” he was doing “on the drug problem.” Trump was also undoubtedly delighted that Duterte had referred to Barack Obama as “the son of a whore.”) In recent weeks, Trump has made it plain that his plans for a second term are no less unbelievable than Duterte’s, no less vengeful or unhinged. We should listen. These are campaign promises. For many years, Trump has hidden in plain sight—he makes no effort to conceal his bigotries, his lawlessness, his will to authoritarian power; to the contrary, he advertises it, and, most disturbing of all, this deepens his appeal. What’s more, there is no question that Trump has so normalized calls to violence as an instrument of politics that it has inflamed countless people to perverse action. Trump has always delighted in the way he could arouse a crowd with implicit or explicit calls to vengeance, from his admonition to “Lock her up!” to his smirking at a protester at one of his rallies, “I’d like to punch him in the face.” He was the inspiration for Charlottesville. The insurrection of January 6th was a direct response to his callout to his supporters: “Be there, will be wild!” During the protests that followed the murder of George Floyd, Trump asked his advisers, according to the former Defense Secretary Mark Esper, “Can’t you just shoot them? Just shoot them in the legs or something?” According to a recent report in the Times, since the legal search of Mar-a-Lago last year and the subsequent confiscation of confidential documents there, which caused Trump to vent his rage against federal authorities, threats against F.B.I. personnel and facilities have skyrocketed by more than three hundred per cent.
Now Trump has intensified the rhetoric. There is nothing he will not say. Suggesting that Mark Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was guilty of a “treasonous act,” he has suggested that the best sanction would be execution. (“This is an act so egregious that, in times gone by, the punishment would have been DEATH!”)
At a recent speech in Anaheim, California, Trump explained how, if reëlected, he would approach the problem of shoplifting: “Very simply: If you rob a store, you can fully expect to be shot as you are leaving that store.” Trump added, “The word that they shoot you will get out within minutes, and our nation, in one day, will be an entirely different place. There must be retribution for theft and destruction and the ruination of our country.” This is consistent with Trump’s general view of law enforcement: he has raised the prospect of shooting migrants attempting to cross the border. (Migrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” he has said, which is a particularly fascistic formulation.)
Trump’s reëlection campaign is, by necessity, being conducted as much in and around various courtrooms as it is on traditional podiums. The once and future autocrat has decided to make his legal jeopardy a virtue, to portray himself as the persecuted Everyman standing up to a prosecutorial system riddled with hypocrisy. In August, one day after a federal magistrate judge in Trump’s 2020 election-interference case in Washington warned him not to threaten or intimidate witnesses, he went online to post this: “IF YOU GO AFTER ME, I’M COMING AFTER YOU!” In New York, the judge in Trump’s civil fraud case, Arthur Engoron, had to issue a gag order after the former President baselessly branded a court clerk as “Schumer’s girlfriend” and added, “How disgraceful! This case should be dismissed immediately!!” Engoron ordered Trump to take down the post, though, of course, the damage was done: the word was out, and the court clerk could expect endless harassment online and worse.
Trump reveals his troubled mind even in his casual asides. Speaking to Republicans in California, he railed against “crazy” Nancy Pelosi “who ruined San Francisco.” He then grinned and improvised: “How’s her husband doing, by the way? Anybody know?” (The reference, of course, was to Paul Pelosi, who had been attacked and badly wounded last year by a hammer-wielding man who broke into the Pelosis’ house.) The laughter of the crowd was as disturbing as the speaker, from whom we expect nothing less.
These are not mere anecdotes, “colorful” moments of unscripted temper from a familiar source. (“Just Donald being Donald!”) No, these moments are the essence of Trump and his campaign. In the coming year, you will rarely, if ever, hear discussion of policy from Trump. You will hear expressions of rage and impulse. It is tempting to ignore them, to dismiss them as inconsequential, repetitious, corrosive. They are so painful to listen to, both in their hatefulness and in their frequency, that some have argued the media should ignore them entirely, the better to avoid elevating them. But ignoring them will not make them go away. They are the center of a candidacy that is polling very highly and that threatens so much of what is decent or promising about our politics. Trump’s rage is the inspiration for everything from the Proud Boys to the mailing of pipe bombs to political targets, to say nothing of the deranged behavior of much of the Republican caucus in the House of Representatives. In the meantime, the gaggle of Republicans who are ostensibly Trump’s rivals for the nomination barely criticize him. In their moral cowardice, they run for attention, for branding purposes, or, perhaps, for a spot in a new Trump Administration.
At the same time, careful attention needs to be paid to a contrasting temperament and set of values. This past week, Joe Biden delivered a stark and important speech in Arizona that focussed not on his considerable achievements in economic, domestic, and foreign policy but on the threat to democratic ideals and institutions posed by his likely 2024 opponent and his followers. Trump, he said directly, derived his inspiration not from the Constitution or human decency but from “vengeance and vindictiveness.” No less worrying to Biden was the reaction—or lack of it—to Trump’s incessant threats. The general silence following Trump’s comments about Milley, he said, was “deafening.”
“We should all remember: democracies don’t have to die at the end of a rifle,” Biden said. “They can die when people are silent, when they fail to stand up.”
Biden may utter this in a less-than-booming voice. Age has taken the high notes off his delivery. But what he said, the stakes he is describing, demand amplification.
In 2016, when Rodrigo Duterte was running for the Presidency in the Philippines, he spoke in the familiar voice of strongmen everywhere: “Forget the laws on human rights. . . . You drug pushers, hold-up men, and do-nothings . . . I’ll dump all of you into Manila Bay and fatten all the fish there.” Were he or his security forces ever to face prosecution, he said, he would issue letters of immunity: “Pardon given to Rodrigo Duterte for the crime of multiple murder, signed Rodrigo Duterte.”
This is the mental universe, the sensibility of Donald Trump, who seems like a lock to win the Republican nomination and has an excellent chance of returning to the White House. So much—the rule of law, global and national security, the fate of the environment—depends on whether Americans reject his rage or endorse it and thus transform this country beyond recognition. Patricia Evangelista describes herself in her book as a “citizen of a nation I cannot recognize as my own.” Are we prepared to feel the same? ♦
