'Campaign of terrorism': Federal agents reportedly gearing up for wave of MAGA violence

Some argue former President Donald Trump has already incited political violence, as was the subject of his second impeachment for inciting the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol — and he appears to be ratcheting up to do it again, Mother Jones national affairs editor Mark Follman writes.

"Demagoguery in politics is as old as the republic, but no president has ever engaged in a campaign of incitement against Americans like Trump has," wrote Follman. "It has worked on individuals and mobs, the latter most infamously when Trump paved the way for the January 6 insurrection. After the 2020 election, I was among the first to report on this campaign of terrorism by the freshly defeated president, about three weeks and then just a few hours before the attack on the US Capitol. [then-House Speaker Nancy] Pelosi’s name was on the lips of the armed and violent Trump extremists there, too."

Pelosi's family would ultimately face the consequences of this violence, as a man broke into her house and brutally assaulted her husband with a hammer.

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According to Follman, federal law enforcement officials are already gearing up for an elevated risk period for another wave of MAGA-inspired violence from the extreme right.

"'It’s a top focus and has been for a while,' a senior federal law enforcement agent working in threat assessment and counterterrorism told me," he wrote. "'It’s been very busy, about as much as we’ve seen since after Mar-a-Lago,' he said, referring to the 2022 raid by the FBI to recover highly classified documents from Trump’s Florida estate, which was met with a wave of vitriol and disinformation from the ex-president and his allies. A state law enforcement official in counterterrorism I spoke with noted a heightened focus on far-left extremism in connection with the Israel-Hamas war, but concurred that domestic far-right extremism remains the top concern."

All of this comes as Trump uses increasingly violent language even in his fundraising emails to supporters; in one such correspondence this week, he proclaimed that law enforcement in Georgia "tortured" him when he was processed and mugshotted for his criminal charges in Fulton County.