They Want to Kill Americans: The Militias, Terrorists, and Deranged Ideology of the Trump Insurgency

By Malcolm Nance

NOW A NEW YORK TIMES, LOS ANGELES TIMES, USA TODAY AND GREAT LAKES INDEPENDENT BOOKSELLER ASSOCIATION BESTSELLER

New York Times bestselling author, Malcolm Nance, offers a chilling warning on a clear, present and existential threat to our democracy… our fellow Americans

“Malcolm Nance is one of the great unsung national security geniuses of the modern era." —Rachel Maddow

To varying degrees, as many as 74 million Americans have expressed hostility towards American democracy. Their radicalization is increasingly visible in our day to day life: in neighbor’s or family member’s open discussion of bizarre conspiracy theories, reveling in the fantasy of mass murdering the liberals they believe are drinking the blood of children. These are the results of the deranged series of lies stoked by former President Donald Trump, made worse by the global pandemic.

The first steps of an American fracture were predicted by Malcolm Nance months before the January 6, 2021 insurrection, heralding the start of a generational terror threat greater than either al-Qaeda or the Islamic State. Nance calls this growing unrest the Trump Insurgency in the United States or TITUS.

The post-2020 election urge to return to a place of “normalcy”—to forget—is the worst response we can have. American militiamen, terrorists, and radicalized political activists are already armed in mass numbers and regularly missed in the media; principally because Trump’s most loyal and violent foot soldiers benefit from the ultimate privilege—being white.

They Want to Kill Americans is the first detailed look into the heart of the active Trump-led insurgency, setting the stage for a second nation-wide rebellion on American soil. This is a chilling and deeply researched early warning to the nation from a counterterrorism intelligence professional: America is primed for a possible explosive wave of terrorist attacks and armed confrontations that aim to bring about a Donald Trump led dictatorship.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Jul 12, 2022
• ISBN: 9781250279019

Malcolm Nance

Malcolm Nance is a globally renowned, highly engaging expert on terrorism, extremism, and insurgency, and a multiple New York Times bestselling author, whose books include The Plot to Hack America. A 34-year, Arabic-speaking veteran of the US intelligence community's Combating Terrorism program, he has been called the “Neil DeGrasse Tyson of Counterterrorism” and is considered one of the Great African-Americans in Espionage by the International Spy Museum. He is counter-terrorism analyst for NBC News and MSNBC.

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INTRODUCTION

When I sat down on the set of the HBO TV show Real Time with Bill Maher just three days after the 2020 election, I knew what I was going to say would be exceedingly unpopular. The counting of the votes to determine who had won the election took almost three days. By the time the show was taped in Los Angeles, all that remained to do was declare then former vice president Joe Biden the president-elect of the United States. A feeling of relief was in the air. For the first time in a year, I felt it too.

On the masked, high-precaution flight from New York to LAX, one could feel the lighter attitude. Gone were the sullen feelings and dark shadow over the country. The Trump voters were still standing by for him to be declared the winner, but it was apparent to everyone else in America that the spell of hatred was breaking. The numbers were against him. Trump was losing badly. The last states to be called, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, were all falling solidly in the Biden camp. The closest vote counts were in Georgia and Arizona, but by Friday evening Biden was ahead with small but insurmountable leads in both. He already had enough votes to win the presidency, but few in the mainstream media were ready to make that call publicly. Bill Maher relished in calling it and so he did, with his usual boldness and swagger. Twelve hours later, the rest of the national media would join him.

So, there I sat. Ready to spoil the party, trip up the parade, and pop the bubble of Kumbaya that was forming over America. I was doing my usual job of marring an otherwise happy occasion by warning that a grave threat was looming. And journalists, commentators, analysts, and pundits of all stripes started to anticipate the prospect of being able to sleep in without Trump’s tweets waking them in the middle of the night. The joy of the election’s results would form a crust of tears when the risk outgrew the adrenaline rush of happiness.

Not me. I’m going to give you doom and gloom, I said to Maher. We are going to have a political paramilitary insurgency in which Donald Trump will be Saddam Hussein; we already have his sons, Uday and Qusay. Maher was a bit incredulous but asked the right question and caught on quickly. He said, Paramilitary—in other words, not the military like in these countries; they don’t want to use the official military, so they have their Boogaloo Bois.

I agreed that paramilitary meant the Boogaloo Bois, Proud Boys, and all the rest of the Vanilla ISIS crew. We then discussed what would happen when Trump’s supporters rejected the election results and started active armed resistance.

I went on that show with an agenda. I wanted to associate the events that were to come with the word insurgency, and I wanted to do so as soon as possible and from a highly visible platform.

I had been tracking a disturbing trend all throughout 2019 that had reached a crescendo by the 2020 election, and so I could not enjoy the momentary silence. A new movement was slowly emerging from the embers of the American right-wing extremists known as the alternative right, or alt-right. They were angry. They were armed. And they would reject the Biden victory vocally and violently. They were primed to become insurgents in a low-grade civil resistance.

As predicted, they started with an act of blatant insurrection. Based on Trump’s seditious words, his supporters attacked the U.S. Capitol Building on January 6, 2021, with the intent to stop the certification of the election by force. Most came to storm the building and to stop the vote. Others may have come to hunt and possibly kill Vice President Mike Pence and Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Only a miracle and the bravery of the Capitol Hill and Washington, D.C., police officers prevented there being more than the five deaths that resulted that day.

In my role as a counterterrorism expert on MSNBC News, I have a track record of offering well-grounded warnings based on intelligence analyses that have proved uncanny in their accuracy. There is a reason for that. As an intelligence professional, I don’t guess. My work is years ahead of most media investigations because I collect hard data and analyze events through the lens of my thirty-plus years of intelligence community experience. My career in monitoring, tracking, and destroying foreign threats to America gives me the ability to call out risks and incoming challenges that might not reveal themselves easily to others. That body of knowledge and a natural alacrity at detecting the right pattern means I identify risks faster, more accurately, and with greater depth than the average journalist or amateur web sleuth.

In July 2016, I was the first person in U.S. news media to warn that the United States was under attack through a massive political warfare operation using foreign disinformation created by a hostile agency, the Russian Directorate of Military Intelligence, the GRU. This operation corrupted the mindset of more than a third of Americans. It was successful in generating so many false narratives that most journalists looked in the wrong direction not just for the origins of the attack but to determine Russia’s objectives.

In my first Trump-Russia scandal book, The Plot to Hack America: How Putin’s Cyberspies and Wikileaks Tried to Steal the 2016 Election, I accurately predicted the strategy, tactics, players, and foreign intelligence operations that worked to put Donald Trump into the presidency. And I did it six weeks before the 2016 election. Two years later, the Mueller report, a House Intelligence Committee report, a joint intelligence community report, and a Senate Intelligence Committee report all validated every assertion I made.

They Want to Kill Americans also has disturbing links to my 2018 book The Plot to Destroy Democracy: How Putin and His Spies Are Undermining America and Dismantling the West, in which I present cooperative links between Russian-backed European far-right extremists and the new American alt-right. The alt-right is a hodgepodge of American hatred—an unglued assemblage of racist and anti-Semitic neo-Nazis, fascism-loving white supremacists, white evangelical dominionists, and dead-ender Southern neo-Confederates. The alt-right had its international coming out in Charlottesville, Virginia, on August 11 and 12, 2017, at the Unite the Right rally. Their aim: to show the world America had a serious fascist army that would bring this country into the fight to defend the white race.

The right-wing extremists first held a torch-lit night march reminiscent of the Nazis’ Nuremberg rallies. The next day, they tore into the lines of liberal protesters and a melee ensued. One alt-right militant drove his car into a crowd of protesters and killed a young woman named Heather Heyer. The youth wing of the conservative movement had made its mark. By evening, all of America and, by extension, the world knew who the alt-right were.

At the time, they were all unabashed supporters of President Trump, but the love was not publicly or openly reciprocated until the day of Heather Heyer’s death. President Trump knew who they were; they were Trump voters. Instead of condemning their actions, he called them very fine people. The savageness of the national rejection stunned Trump, but it also stunned the alt-right. Seemingly overnight, even the limited public support for their activities disappeared.

However, the violence did not. Over the next two years, flashes of their pro-Trump extremism would emerge: a series of attacks on synagogues in Pennsylvania and California that killed Jews; an anti-immigrant mass shooting in Texas that massacred Mexican Americans; the mailing of sixteen pipe bombs to the Democratic party leadership in an attempted assassination by Cesar Sayoc, an unabashed Trump supporter, who built the bombs in a van festooned with Trump images and dozens of bumper stickers spewing hatred of liberals and Democrats and who was subsequently arrested by the FBI. All of these terrorist attacks revealed a trend. The perpetrators were almost exclusively supporters of President Trump and his most hateful policies.

These incidents also revealed that the alt-right had not actually disbanded after being called out in Charlottesville. In the run-up to the 2020 election, they assimilated so deeply into the pro-Trump Make America Great Again masses that they just seemed to disappear from the political stage. In fact, they went underground … in the open. They adopted the red MAGA hat as a form of camouflage and became indistinguishable from the average angry Trump voter. In the chrysalis of Trump rallies, few recognized their transformation into a giant multiarmed hate monster. Like the fictional radiation-eating Mothra, they fed and grew more powerful on their enemies’ detestation. During the summer of 2020, they finally revealed themselves as a much larger armed militant force determined to use the Second Amendment as both a shield and a potential cudgel to bully the nation.

Hundreds of armed gunmen showed up at the steps of the Michigan State House to demand that the governor, Gretchen Whitmer, stop shutting down businesses and mandating wearing a mask in the middle of a global pandemic. The Proud Boys, a militant all-white street-fighting gang, attacked Black Lives Matter protesters in numerous cities. The Boogaloo Bois, a group of young white accelerationists, rallied to hasten the fall of the current government through armed struggle to bring about an all-white ethnostate. Traditional state militiamen were recruiting and were now showing up on the streets of America to visibly confront minorities who opposed Trump’s policies. Their guns were almost everywhere you looked.

A new factor emerged as well. An internet cult. A fringe of a fringe inspired by secret messages from a mysterious supposed military intelligence official who called himself Q. Q preached a gospel that Donald Trump was a global hero secretly dismantling a cabal of Satan-worshipping liberals and Hollywood elites who kidnapped and murdered children. The rantings of the devout Q-Anon believers predicted a Trump-led storm, during which tens of thousands of liberals would be arrested or killed.

By the end of the summer, it was clear to intelligence professionals that these groups, the most vociferous of Trump’s adherents, were being honed into a dagger designed to slit the throat of democracy. They were planning for war.

They Want to Kill Americans is an evidence-based assessment of events and activities that uncover the insurgency that started well before the insurrectionists’ attack on the U.S. Capitol. While many regarded Donald Trump’s antics as just narcissistic insanity, a few of us recognized that there was a serious threat—that there was an un-American malevolence rising within the seventy-four million people who voted to keep him in power.

They have already started to transform themselves into a malicious political-opposition machine that intends to destroy the Biden administration and liberalism in America on every level. The Chinese communist leader Mao Tse-tung optimized modern insurgency, giving it three phases. The first phase is the most important, when insurgents try to gain legitimacy by tearing down a solidly elected government through extreme political positions, propaganda, armed resistance, and terrorism.

With the election of President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, I made the relatively easy prognostication that the Trump movement would evolve into four wings: Trump and his family, the Republican Party and their mainstream voters, armed militias and terrorists, and the Q-Anon conspiracy cult. Over time, as they continue to reject the 2020 election, they will merge into an active American insurgency. They will attempt to bring good governance into chaos and set the stage for the collapse of the Democratic Party coalition that defeated Trump. The armed contingents could well join into an alliance of physical-resistance forces to threaten and agitate for the largest armed rebellion since the Civil War. Then they will attempt to return to power.

Just as Sinn Féin was composed of a political party and a terrorist group, so too with the American insurgency the Republicans could become its political wing. Its leaders could cue a completely deniable militant wing to sow chaos, conduct terrorism, and carry out armed actions with and without direct orders.

I call this gathering movement the Trump Insurgency in the United States (TITUS).

The people who support TITUS look like your neighbors, because right-wing violent-extremist terrorists, insurrectionists, and insurgents are your neighbors. And they want America to take a hard right turn away from democracy toward authoritarianism—by force if that’s what it takes.

They Want to Kill Americans shows how the last five years have, to varying degrees, transformed as many as seventy-four million Americans into advocates for dictatorship and enemies of democracy. The steps of the radicalization that created TITUS—and the symptoms of that radicalization—are visible. You may no longer be able to have Thanksgiving dinner with members of your family who advocate violence; you may be horrified by their open discussion of hatred and mass murder. And the conditions that created susceptibility to radicalization have not been changed by the pandemic, but have, in fact, been made worse.

The urge to return to a place of normalcy—to forget about Trump and his followers—though emotionally understandable, is the worst possible response we can have to potential future dangers. Trump’s losing the election did not remove him from our lives or remove him as an animating figure in the Republican Party. He is not going anywhere. Trump will likely continue to stoke the fires of hatred to an unimaginable level; he has never behaved within the norms of previous former presidents. The actions of Trump that led to the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol and his impeachment trial provide more than enough evidence that he will continue spinning a dangerous mythology of himself as folk hero and conquering knight.

American militiamen, terrorists, and radicalized political activists are already armed in numbers that must be taken seriously. The strategy, tactics, and evolving beliefs that drive the raw street-level acts have been regularly missed in the media, principally because Trump’s most loyal and violent foot soldiers benefit from white privilege.

They Want to Kill Americans is the first highly detailed look into the heart of the potential low-grade insurgency that will either lose steam or explode and set the stage for a social-media-driven internal rebellion. I reveal who the insurgents are and the roots and current manifestations of this threat, providing a way for readers to understand the past, present, and future of radical, domestic right-wing violent extremism in America. I offer strategies that empower individuals, civic groups, and local, state, and federal government to counteract and prevent the agitation that threatens our democratic system of governance.

They Want to Kill Americans is an early warning to the nation. America may once again come under a wave of terrorist attacks. But unlike our foreign enemies, the chaos agents and subversives who attacked our democracy from overseas in the global war on terrorism, the enemy that threatens our democracy now is within our borders. They are American. And they are radicalizing, arming, and planning to kill Americans to install a dictatorship. They must be stopped, hopefully before blood flows in earnest.

PART I

THREAT ASSESSMENT

1

SURPRISE ATTACK ON DEMOCRACY

MAGA CIVIL WAR

JANUARY 6, 2021

—Slogan on T-shirt sold at a Trump rally

Kill him with his own gun! the insurrectionist shouted. Kill him!

January 6, 2021. Washington, D.C., policeman Mike Fanone was being wedged by the Trump supporters storming the white marble U.S. Capitol Building. For Fanone it was about to become a crime scene filled with cop killers, and he was the cop. Fanone was part of the small contingent of D.C. police fighting furiously alongside the Capitol Police to try to stave off a takeover of the U.S. Capitol, the citadel of American democracy. For Fanone and the officers next to him, it was looking more like a possible abattoir. He felt the rioters pulling at his shield; then they tore off his badge. A moment later, hands were stripping his belt of its pepper spray and radio. Other hands grasped his arms and then roughly pulled out the two spare ammunition magazines for his Glock pistol. Losing the thirty extra bullets was bad. If he needed to draw his weapon and defend himself, he would only have the fifteen shots already loaded. But that was the least of his problems. His stun gun was pulled out of its holster, and someone shocked him with it. The concentrated electricity knocked him down. His body jerked violently in the sea of batons, fists, and feet pummeling him. A few seconds later, he felt hands pull hard on the grip of his Glock 19. The gun stayed in only because of the internal retention system designed to prevent criminals from swiping the weapon. If the mob got behind him, they could successfully pull it out.

In a haze, he stared up at the mass of mostly middle-aged white faces, screaming, teeth bared and spittle flying. These people wanted to kill him. There were thousands of them and they had anointed themselves warriors for President Donald Trump. This was their war. Officer Fanone was outnumbered one hundred to one.

The men who were about to try to murder him were aggrieved that their candidate, President Donald Trump, had lost the presidency. They believed that they were following his orders to storm the Capitol and stop the certification of the election won by the former vice president, Joe Biden. Fanone later told CNN that he usually worked undercover in narcotics. The angry spiderweb tattoo on his neck provided good camouflage on the streets. Today he was in uniform. The red-faced rioters did not care. A mass of fury, the ones closest to him screamed: Fuck you! Fuck the police! The building was awash in a sea of American flags and TRUMP 2020 NO BULLSHIT! banners. There were thin-blue-line flags meant to show support for police. They were being thrown at the D.C. Metropolitan Police like spears.

Fanone and the other officers at his location were under a murderous siege. At 1:29 PM the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) watch supervisor placed an emergency call to the D.C. emergency operations center and officially declared the situation at the Capitol a riot. Soon, emergency calls of 10-33! 10-33! were reverberating across the city’s police radios. That call was equally chilling. It meant Emergency! Officers need assistance! Fanone and his brother and sister police were being violently assaulted. Fists, feet, and objects flew at them. Long burnt-umber-orange streams of bear spray, a harsh, pressurized caustic pepper chemical designed to ward off grizzlies, were arcing over the rioters and into the face shields of the police officers. The insurrectionists were trying to blind the cops and then physically storm over them. The thousands of rioters were using pure massed weight against the thin rows of police and crushing them into narrow corridors.

And this one group was set on killing Fanone. If they got his gun, it would all be over.

Trapped between the two groups and shocked a second time with the stun gun, Fanone felt his life was about to be forfeit. An officer with twenty years’ experience, he knew he could break the assault by drawing his weapon, bracing it at his hip, and firing directly into the men who were beating the life out of him. He pondered the result if he gunned these men down. He could visualize it in his head. Draw. Brace. Fire. The first shot would give him a few seconds to withdraw. He could then bring the pistol up to his chest and empty the magazine. Fifteen shots into that mass, and they would fall all around him like dominoes. He would be free. As quickly as he thought it, he also knew that it would be a massacre. It would also spell his end as the anger of being shot at would whip the crowd up into a red-eyed fury of bloodlust and adrenaline like the wild ancient Scandinavian berserkers.

In a matter of seconds Fanone would be out of ammunition, and then the next hundred rioters would storm the doorway, stepping over the dead and wounded, and tear him apart. The melee would force the other officers to shoot as well. In truth, if the entire line of police opened fire, hundreds would die at that door. If they reloaded their 9mm pistols and concentrated their aim in three volleys of forty-five bullets per officer, it would look more like the paintings of Custer’s last stand at Little Big Horn. The assault would end, but Americans would die wholesale, and the hidden guns, knives, and cudgels would come out to retaliate.

Some protesters must have seen the desperation of Fanone’s situation. Some heard the calls echoing around the crowd to kill him. A few who actually back the blue got in between Fanone and the surging mob. After the beating and the shocks, which doctors would later determine caused a mini heart attack, he was almost literally dead on his feet. Officer Fanone looked at the crowd and appealed to their humanity. He shouted, I’ve got kids. He did. Four beautiful girls. Under the protection of a few civilians, he managed to slip back behind police lines.

Yet the day was young, and others would die, including Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick, a U.S. Air Force security police veteran turned cop. He died from an unknown cause, but it likely included injuries sustained from beatings and bear spray. In a way, he was lucky. Fanone looked into the eyes of his attackers, who were likely very disappointed that he would not die for his efforts to prevent them from ending American democracy.

The plan to take the Capitol was simple. Organize to attend the Fight for Trump rally, informally called Stop the Steal. Then storm the white-domed building. Next, punish those who were inside committing what the insurrectionists capriciously called treason. And finally, declare Trump as the rightful president of the United States.

During the push to the Capitol, the throng awaited news of whether Vice President Pence would stop the certification and hand the election to Trump. They had been fed the lie that he had the power to do so as president of the Senate. But to the Trump rioters, laws were irrelevant now. They wanted a result, and they were more than willing to end the lives of the police and politicians alike to get it. A hangman’s platform with a solid noose had been assembled at the edge of the rally. It featured a sarcastic sign: ART DISPLAY.

American democracy had been under threat years before the January 6 insurrection. The deadly hydra-like heads of racism, murder, lynching, and anti-Semitism had snapped at the throat of the country before. However, the entire multiheaded monster had now been freed to rampage and destroy its own home. America was under direct attack, but this time from its own citizens.

For the first time since the Civil War, seditious words led to the incitement of insurrection against the American state. They would lead to Donald Trump’s second impeachment. But that was no matter. He was fighting a long war. He maintained the fantastic delusion that he won the 2020 election by tens of millions of votes. To President Donald J. Trump, if he could not be America’s leader legitimately, then he would mobilize his supporters to retain the presidency … by force.

Storm Warning

November 3, 2020, should have been a triumphant day for American democracy. The Trump administration, and what could be arguably called one of the darkest periods in the nation’s history, ended when more than 150,000,000 Americans came out to vote and elected Joe Biden the forty-sixth president of the United States. When the election was finally called for Biden, much of the nation exploded in happiness and relief. It was a victory that was celebrated in the nation with as much gusto and vigor as VE and VJ Days, the two celebratory days in 1945 when Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan surrendered. One Twitter commentator remarked that Americans were celebrating in the streets the way oppressed peoples do when they topple a hated dictator. In response, I tweeted, We have.

The election of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris was a decision to bring America out of the virus-plagued wilderness. The nation could go back to breathing again. Donald Trump went into hiding. For ten days, he made no comments and did not appear in public except to play golf.

But while there was celebration and jubilation on one side, the election of 2020 turned out quite differently than Trump voters expected. Over eighty million Americans had turned out in the middle of a global pandemic to make Donald Trump a singularly unique figure in American history. He hit the 2020 trifecta of being a one-term, impeached president who lost the popular vote—twice. Trump had spent the summer of 2020 waging a shadow campaign through his surrogates and Fox News, where he threatened to declare himself the winner if he was ahead in the polls at the end of Election Day … and by late evening of November 3, he was. But the states stuck to the law and kept counting the ballots. Election night turned into election days.

Trump was a man firmly committed to bringing America into a network of global autocracy led by Russian president Vladimir Putin. In my 2018 book The Plot to Destroy Democracy, I dubbed it the axis of autocracies. Trump ruled America like a king and treated 60 percent of the nation like vassals. He did not give a tinker’s damn about American constitutional republicanism. His petty tyrant-like behavior ensured that his four years were mired in scandal after scandal—any one of which would have destroyed any other president. However, a passive news media and a submissive Republican Party were terrified of his increasingly malevolent base.

The election of 2020 also revealed that his die-hard base constituted 40 percent of America’s voters. These voters thought that they should give an openly racist, white-supremacist-loving, bigoted pathological liar another four years to carry out his promises to make America great again. They did not care what the news media thought. They loved Trump’s no bullshit, in-your-face, obnoxious attitude and his unstable antics and turned out almost seven million more voters in 2020 than 2016 to prove their near-fanatical loyalty. They wanted a man whose administration was proud of the fact that they villainized immigrants in a nation of immigrants. A man who openly ordered border guards to steal and cage children. A man who worked with some of America’s worst enemies as opposed to our traditional allies. A man who could be said to be personally responsible for the deaths of four hundred thousand of his own citizens through his incompetence and inaction during the pandemic.

On the other side of the electoral coin was a coalition that looked like America. It was led by a man who has devoted his whole life to working for his nation. Joe Biden was the kind of man Trump despised, mainly because he had deigned to work for the first African American president. Mostly because he was a good person with few flaws to exploit. To Trump that was an unforgivable crime. He so hated Biden that he spent almost two years trying to destroy and discredit him by asking foreign powers to help him cheat in the upcoming election. He was impeached for those crimes.

For those who opposed Trump, the tension during the counting was terrifying. On the ballot was nothing less than the continuation of the American experiment itself. Democracy hung in the balance. The years of liberals waiting for Trump to fall because of his own corruption had proven futile. But Trump had lost and it was decisive. He refused to accept the L. It was time to straight-up steal the election. For this to work, he would need to hit the nation with the last hammer in his nearly empty toolbox: the big lie.

Engineering the Big Lie

The big lie falsely claimed that Donald Trump had won the election and that Joe Biden had stolen it. Trump falsely claimed Biden was working with the Communist Party of China, who had mailed in millions of fake votes for Biden. The alleged Chinese interference was supposedly supplemented by Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez, Iran, and the two computer-voting-machine companies Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic. No matter that Chávez had been dead for thirteen years. Every word of these crazy assertions was a lie. But for Republicans, it was not much of a stretch because Trump’s capacity to lie was astronomical. As president he had told over thirty thousand documented lies. Trump would openly think up lies off the top of his head. He would then frame his imaginings and hearsay as facts. He even believed his own lies.

In typical Trump fashion, the big lie campaign started off in the summer of 2020 with a tweet. On June 22, 2020, the president tweeted, RIGGED 2020 ELECTION: MILLIONS OF MAIL-IN BALLOTS WILL BE PRINTED BY FOREIGN COUNTRIES, AND OTHERS, adding that IT WILL BE THE SCANDAL OF OUR TIMES!¹ A week later, the full-scale campaign to call the election into doubt started in earnest. Trump stated, Well, it’s had an interesting impact. I didn’t know it was going to be the impact it had. What people are now looking at is: Am I right? But not me—are all these stories right about the fact that these elections will be fraudulent, they’ll be fixed, they’ll be rigged? And everyone’s looking at it. And a lot of people are saying, ‘You know, that probably will happen.’²

Trump learned early that using a combination of his status, incessant whining, and the claim that the system was against the little guy like him would get him one yard further toward riches than those who used honor, grit, and sweat-filled hustle. He used his never-ending grievances to get billion-dollar bank loans he should never have been given or just to get the best table at a restaurant. He was often given what he wanted simply to stop his complaining. Trump used the admirable characteristics of human decency against his competitors. Desirable traits like honesty and dignity were for suckers. He always acted like he wanted the poorest of the poor to join him in the ranks of luxury. That was how he suckered rubes into giving him money.

Trump would use avarice to bend people to his will. By the election of 2020, he was ready to weaponize them. When he was done, they would believe the big lie in the face of all evidence. Then he would lead a political uprising against the duly elected government of the United States. He openly hinted rebellion and martial law were within his purview.

Trump’s big lie strategy was actually nearly a decade old. During the 2012 presidential campaign between President Barack Obama and Senator Mitt Romney, Trump would go on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show and imply that Romney lost because of voter fraud. Specifically, fraud in Cleveland and Philadelphia, two cities with large Black populations.³ He told Hannity, I’m telling you, November 8th, we’d better be careful, because that election is going to be rigged. And I hope the Republicans are watching closely, or it’s going to be taken away from us.⁴ Trump told a rally in Green Bay, Wisconsin, So many cities are corrupt and voter fraud is very, very common.⁵ Interestingly, these same two cities would come to stick in his mind as hubs of rigged elections in 2020. Almost as if Black Americans did not live or vote anywhere