Donald Trump is on Truth Social most days of the week attacking the judges and prosecutors overseeing his various criminal indictments, and his followers are taking notice—threatening, racist, and already at times, criminal notice. A Texas woman has been charged with threatening to kill U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, the judge in the federal case charging Trump with crimes related to his efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
Abigail Jo Shry of Alvin, Texas, left Chutkan a voicemail opening with a double-barreled racist insult and going on to threaten, “If Trump doesn’t get elected in 2024, we are coming to kill you, so tread lightly, bitch,” according to the charging document. Shry went on to say, “You will be targeted personally, publicly, your family, all of it.” She additionally threatened, in the voicemail, to kill Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, all Democrats in Washington, and all LGBTQ+ people. When the FBI knocked on her door, she admitted to having made the call. She wasn’t planning to go to Washington, D.C., to actually kill anyone, she told the FBI agent, but “if Sheila Jackson Lee comes to Alvin, then we need to worry,” the agent reported her saying. That doesn’t seem like the kind of thing you want to tell the FBI when they’re asking about death threats you’ve made against federal officials.
Shry’s father has offered the defense that she’s just a nonviolent alcoholic who becomes “agitated by the news” while “drinking too many beers.” That may be a majority of the people who respond to Trump’s efforts to incite his supporters with attacks on judges and prosecutors—but all it would take is one of those people getting off the couch and grabbing one of their plentiful guns to cause a real tragedy.
Chutkan isn’t the only person associated with the criminal charges against Trump whose safety is at risk. Georgia reveals names of grand jury members, and they’re being doxxed on far-right message boards, with their personal information accompanied by direct threats and racist slurs:
One user wrote that the grand jurors’ names was a “hit list” to which another user responded, “Based. Godspeed anons, you have all the long range rifles in the world,” while another wrote that they were “about ready to go Turner Diaries on these treasonous n***** fucks” (referring to a violent white nationalist book). And another user ominously wrote that the jurors were “committing election interference” and so they “should indeed be careful.”
Trump is setting the tone here, even if his supporters are taking it several steps further. One of Trump’s Truth Social posts alleged, “They never went after those that Rigged the Election. They only went after those that fought to find the RIGGERS!” That’s a single letter of pretense that you’re not using an all-capped racial slur, and Trump’s supporters have enthusiastically taken up yelling about “riggers”—when they’re even bothering to swap in an R for an N.
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There’s a reason that Chutkan is the person on Trump’s attack list getting death threats almost immediately after becoming a public part of the case. It’s the same reason Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis had to warn her staff, “I am not concerned with the calls, emails, or ads and you should not concern yourself with them.” Trump and his supporters have a particular vengeful focus on Chutkan and Willis because they are Black women, and some members of the Georgia grand jury will get that special attention as well. Racists gonna racist, in short.
If Trump’s supporters can walk right up to the line of direct threats before facing criminal charges, Trump himself—in theory—should be on a tighter leash. The conditions of his release bar him from making “inflammatory statements” and in particular attempting to intimidate witnesses. Yet Trump is doing exactly that and has yet to face consequences. The New York Times reports, “Some lawyers have said that if Mr. Trump were an ordinary citizen issuing these attacks, he would be in jail by now.” It’s one of the many ways Trump has been given special, lenient treatment as he moves through the legal system.
Any judge, though, who puts Trump in jail over his efforts to intimidate witnesses and incite his supporters to violence will face a major burst of rage from those supporters, along with accusations by Trump and much of the Republican Party that it’s a political persecution of a presidential candidate. Trump is banking on continuing special treatment for exactly that reason.
