On social media and web forums, users called for jurors, judges and prosecutors to be killed after the former president was found guilty on 34 felony counts.
WASHINGTON — The 34 felony guilty verdicts returned against former President Donald Trump on Thursday spurred a wave of violent rhetoric aimed at the prosecutors who secured his conviction, the judge who oversaw the case and the ordinary jurors who unanimously agreed there was no reasonable doubt that the presumptive Republican presidential nominee falsified business records related to hush money payments to a porn star to benefit his 2016 campaign.
Advance Democracy, a nonprofit that conducts public interest research, said there has been a high volume of social media posts containing violent rhetoric targeting New York Judge Juan Merchan and Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, including a post with Bragg’s purported home address. The group also found posts of the purported addresses of jurors on a fringe internet message board known for pro-Trump content and harassing and violent posts, although it is unclear if any actual jurors had been correctly identified.
The posts, which have been reviewed by NBC News, appear on many of the same websites used by Trump supporters to organize for violence ahead of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. These forums were hotbeds of threats inspired by Trump’s lies about the 2020 election, which he lost, and that the voting system was “rigged” against him. They now feature new threats echoing Trump’s rhetoric and false claims about the hush money trial, including that the judicial system is now “rigged” against him.
“Dox the Jurors. Dox them now,” one user wrote after Trump’s conviction on a website formerly known as “The Donald,” which was popular among participants in the Capitol attack. (That post appears to have been quickly removed by moderators.)
“We need to identify each juror. Then make them miserable. Maybe even suicidal,” wrote another user on the same forum. “1,000,000 men (armed) need to go to washington and hang everyone. That’s the only solution,” wrote another user. “This s— is out of control.”
“I hope every juror is doxxed and they pay for what they have done,” another user wrote on Trump’s Truth Social platform Thursday. “May God strike them dead. We will on November 5th and they will pay!”
“War,” read a Telegram post from one chapter of the Proud Boys, the far-right group whose former chair and three other members were convicted of seditious conspiracy because of their actions at the Capitol on Jan. 6, just a few months after Trump infamously told the group to “stand back and stand by” during a 2020 debate.
“Now you understand. To save your nation, you must fight. The time to respond is now. Franco Friday has begun,” another Proud Boys chapter wrote, apparently referring to fascist dictator Francisco Franco of Spain.
One Jan. 6 defendant who already served time in prison for his role in the Capitol attack also weighed in on X, posting a photo of Bragg and a photo of a noose. “January 20, 2025 traitors Get The Rope,” he wrote, referring to the date of the next presidential inauguration.
The threats fit into an ongoing pattern. An NBC News analysis of Trump’s Truth Social posts earlier this year showed that he frequently uses the platform as a megaphone to attack people involved in his legal cases — and some of his supporters have responded. When the FBI searched Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in 2022, a Trump supporter who had been at the Capitol on Jan. 6 sent angry posts about the search and then attacked an FBI field office. When Trump made a social media post last June that included former President Barack Obama’s home address, a Jan. 6 rioter reposted it and then showed up at the residence. When Trump was indicted in Georgia in August, his supporters posted the purported names and addresses of members of the grand jury. Special counsel Jack Smith, who is overseeing Trump’s federal election interference case in Washington, was the target of an attempted swatting on Christmas Day. So too was U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, who will oversee that trial, if the Supreme Court allows it to go forward (though that could change if Trump wins in November). When Michael Fanone — the former police officer nearly killed on January 6 by Trump supporters who believed the former president’s lies about the 2020 election — criticized Trump at a press conference outside the hush money trial earlier this week, his mother was swatted. When Trump and conservative media outlets spread false information about the jury instructions in the hush money case this week, threats against Merchan rolled in.
“We are continuing to see a dangerous erosion of democratic norms,” Daniel J. Jones, president of Advance Democracy, said in a statement to NBC News. “Trump and his allies have been spreading disinformation about the trial, challenging Justice Merchan’s impartiality, and describing the entire process as ‘rigged’ for weeks. As such, it’s not a surprise that some of his most fervent supporters are now calling for doxxing and violence against jurors, the judge, and the district attorney.”
Jones said online activity has been increasing in the wake of Trump’s guilty verdict, which makes it important for elected officials to “speak out against the disinformation Trump is spreading, as well the calls for violence he’s inspiring.”
By RYAN J. REILLY/NBC News
