Trump wants his supporters to die for him.

This story has been posted to Daily Kos where you can read comments.

UPDATE:

Trump wants his supporters to die for him. He wants them to fight for his cause, but in reality his cause is him (or Him). Are they really ready to take a bullet for the person they consider a demigod (here’s a Google search for Trump and Jesus painting) and who they believe had the election stollen from him and think is the legitimate president?

I saw the article (shown right): “Biden speech denouncing Trump, 'MAGA ideology' sparks threats, calls for violence” in Yahoo!News this morning. Here are a few excerpts:

• Site Intelligence Group, which tracks online extremism activity, issued several threat alerts detailing calls for violence in response to Biden’s speech. The potential threats were posted in online forums tied to the Proud Boys, neo-Nazis and other extremist groups.
• “Users on several far-right and ultranationalist venues made violent threats against President Joe Biden following his speech addressing political extremism on September 1, 2022,” said one of the alerts. “Users advocated for Biden to be murdered and predicted violence if he continues speaking about the topic.”
• During Biden's speech, four current U.S. domestic counterterrorism officials told Yahoo News they were concerned the president’s words would further divide the nation and lead to increased threats against government and law enforcement officials.

 The following New York Times guest OpEd prompted me to think about whether Trump's cult threatening violent civil war if he is indicted would be willing to die for him. If the Jan. 6 insurrectionist they knew they would risk getting shot if they breached the Capitol barriers would there even have been an assault on the building? How many of Trump's cultists would really engage in the violent civil war they threaten if they knew they had a serious chance of being killed or wounded?

Artem Chekhisis the author of this guest essay in The NY Times Opinion section. He wrote

 “Absolute Zero,” an account of his time on the front line in the Donbas, and is currently a volunteer patrolling the Chernobyl exclusion zone.

Here are excerpts:

This is another kind of war (than the war in the Donbas where he served on the front lines for almost a year in 2015-16), and the losses are, without exaggeration, catastrophic. We no longer know the names of all the dead: There are dozens of them every day. Ukrainians constantly mourn those lost; there are rows of closed coffins in the central squares of relatively calm cities across the country. Closed coffins are the terrible reality of this cruel, bloody and seemingly endless war.

I too have my dead. In the course of the conflict, I’ve learned of the deaths of various friends and acquaintances, people I had worked with or people I’d never met in person but with whom I maintained friendships on social networks. Not all these people were professional soldiers, but many could not help but take up arms when Russia invaded Ukraine.

I read obituaries on Facebook every day. I see familiar names and think that these people should continue writing reports and books, working in scientific institutes, treating animals, teaching students, raising children, baking bread and selling air-conditioners. Instead they go to the front, get wounded, develop severe PTSD and die.

He concludes:

To quote Kurt Vonnegut, even if wars didn’t keep coming like glaciers, there would still be plain old death. But encounters with death could be very different. We want to believe that we and our beloved ones, the modern people of the 21st century, no longer have to die from medieval barbaric torture, epidemics or detention in concentration camps. That’s part of what we’re fighting for, the right not only to a dignified life but also to a dignified death.

Let us, the people of Ukraine, wish ourselves a good death — in our own beds, for example, when the time comes. And not when a Russian missile hits our house at dawn.

This is my posted comment:

Thank you for your poignant and powerful essay. I wish it could be read by Russian soldiers dragooned into their army and being fed lies that they are liberating Ukraine and will be greeted as heroes.

I also think about members of the Trump cult here threatening a violent civil war if their messiah is indicted and wonder if they would be willing to lay their lives down for him. My sense is that only a tiny minority of them would be willing to die for him.

There's a saying here, all hat and no cowboy, which means that someone is all talk and no action. I think it applies to most of these people.

Since posting the comment above I read this:

This article noted that Trump posted this on his TruthSocial private Twitter-like website:

What Trump means by sacrificing everything he is obviously exhorting his supporters to give up their lives for him. 

RawStory also noted the following:

Trump also shared another post demonizing President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris and other top Democrats as enemies to the nation.

"Your enemy is not in Russia," the meme said.

I think the man with Russia under his name is George Soros.

What Trump is saying here is that we have nothing to worry about as far as Russia goes. They are not our enemy according to Trump. By extension he is saying we shouldn't be paying attention to, let alone be concerned about, the thousands of Ukrainians that are being killed. If Democrats are enemies of the nation then Trump is as much as admonishing his supporters to be what he considers patriots and take up arms against them and to be willing to die to stop them.

Had I seen all of this when I posted my comment I would have elaborated on it. 

Ukrainians taking up arms to fight the Russians aren't willing to give up their lives for Volodymyr Zelenskyy, they are ready to make the ultimate sacrifice for the freedom of their country. President Zelenskyy doesn't entreat Ukrainians to risk their lives and limbs fighting the Russian invaders. He doesn't have to.

I seriously doubt that the vast majority of members of the Trump cult clamoring for a violent civil war if Trump is indicted would actually be willing to die for the cause. In fact, if those who invaded the Capitol on Jan. 6th knew they would risk being fired on and possibly killed or wounded I doubt many of them would have breached the barriers. 

The majority of the Jan. 6th mob weren't mentally ill the way most people who have tried to break into the White House have been. If the Capitol was protected the way the White House is with the Secret Service protecting it ready to use lethal force to protect those they are charged with the mission of keeping them safe I think Jan. 6th would have been a large  raucous crowd chanting slogans behind the barriers. No officers would have been injured and  no bike racks would have been knocked over. 

What if the rioters at the Capitol faced what peaceful Black Lives Matter protestors faced when they demonstrated in from of the Lincoln Memorial in June, 2021?

If one of the insurrectionists tried to go beyond the police line and was shot dead I suspect that most of the crowd who saw this would have turned and run in the opposite direction. 

In some states home owners can simply shoot anyone, armed or not, who breaks into their homes, in others they have to flee if they can.  If armed Trump cultists think of trying to break into a building, any building whether one housing a government office or not, I wonder if they would do this if they knew the police would shoot them. Do they think their Trumpian whiteness would protect them from the police who they with considerable justification think support their cause?

Addendum:

Here's a related column in The Washington Post. The title pretty much sums it up.

Excerpts:

Then, on Sunday, Trump acolyte Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) didn’t bother with the disingenuous niceties. He went straight to the threat. “Most Republicans, including me, believe when it comes to Trump, there is no law. It’s all about getting him,” Graham said on Fox News, citing the decision not to prosecute Hillary Clinton for having classified information on her private email servers. “And I’ll say this: If there’s a prosecution of Donald Trump for mishandling classified information after the Clinton debacle … there’ll be riots in the streets.”

The Post's View: Lindsey Graham’s prediction of riots reads more like a threat

Lest you missed his point, Graham said the phrase twice — and then Trump reposted his comments on his social media platform. A retired Air Force lawyer and chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Graham said nothing to convey dismay over the prospect of violence; to the contrary, his clear meaning was that outrage would be justified.

Ruth Marcus concludes:

The Justice Department’s Principles of Federal Prosecution lay out the considerations: “Where the law and the facts create a sound, prosecutable case,” prosecutors are told, “the likelihood of an acquittal due to unpopularity of some aspect of the prosecution or because of the overwhelming popularity of the defendant or his/her cause is not a factor prohibiting prosecution.”

A sound, prosecutable case. That’s the test — not intimations of mayhem from Trump and his allies only too happy to summon the mob, once again, to his defense.

 
Then there's this:

and this:

It could be argued that some of the QAnon believers are delusional but whether or not they are clinically delusional, or suffer from paranoid schizophrenia, can't be determined. It's possible a few of them hear command hallucinations, voices telling them they have to take up a firearm and join a mob. They might not consider, or even care, that they could be shot if they tried to engage in a violent protest where they went against law enforcement or National Guard with orders to shoot those who refuse orders to disperse.