Trump gloried in political violence for years. Will surviving an assassination attempt change his rhetoric?

Former president Donald Trump has promised a punishing agenda, ifelected president again.

News networks should be taken off air and publishers should be thrown in jail. Top military officials committed treason, which is punishable by death. Drug offenders should be executed. Migrants are “poisoning the blood of the country,” and the “largest deportation operation in American history” could mean hundreds of thousands of people thrown in detention centers. His political opponents are “vermin” who “live within the confines of our country.”

“If I don’t get elected,” he said at a rally in Ohio in March, “it’s going to be a bloodbath for the whole… that’s going to be the least of it. It’s going to be a bloodbath for the country.”

He later told Fox News that “if you don’t use certain words, that maybe are not very nice words, nothing will happen.”

But “bad things will happen” if a state supreme court ruling in the aftermath of the 2020 election didn’t go his way. His criminal prosecution in New York would lead to “potential death and destruction,” while “terrible things are going to happen” after law enforcement agents searched his Mar-a-Lago compound.

There would be “bedlam” if he is convicted, and the country is in “big trouble” if the Supreme Court ruled against his attempts to stay on the ballot. “Does everybody understand what I’m saying?” he said in January. “I think so.”

Law enforcement officials have repeatedly warned that Trump’s rhetoric has fuelled credible threats of violence, and that Trump-allied far-right extremism poses a threat to national security. He left office in the days after a mob of his supporters stormed the Capitol to block his election loss after he failed to win at the ballot box and in court.

But