Overnight Donald Trump promoted a video featuring an extreme close-up photo of his face in black and white, and audio of him making an obvious threat: “If you f— around with us, if you do something bad to us, we are going to do things to you that have never been done before.”
Trump “retruthed” the video, posted by an account that appears to belong to a “MAGA” website, on his social media platform Truth Social, sometime after 1 AM.
Trump did originally say those words and did make that threat, but under different circumstances than today’s.
In October of 2020, just weeks before Joe Biden would beat him at the ballot box to become the 46th President of the United States, Trump delivered that screed in an interview with Rush Limbaugh.
“Down in the polls and isolated by illness, President Trump retreated to the safe spaces of two Fox networks and Rush Limbaugh’s radio program in a 36-hour burst of media interviews three weeks before Election Day,” The Washington Post reported on October 9, 2020. “The sprawling, somewhat manic phone-in interviews put Trump front and center on the radar of many of his most loyal supporters, via the most conservative-friendly media outlets, but arguably did little to reach the independent and moderate voters Trump will need to close the gap with former vice president Joe Biden.”
Trump did not close the gap with Biden, and became a one-term president.
Trump’s promotion of the threatening video in the early hours of Thursday morning comes just after one federal judge on Wednesday refused his request to transfer his criminal trial in the porn star hush money case being prosecuted by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg to the federal court system, where the ex-president had hoped to be able to use federal law to protect him from prosecution. It also comes just after a different federal judge refused his request for a new trial in a civil case where a jury awarded E. Jean Carroll $5 million after determining he was liable for defamation and sexual assault.
In that case, Trump argued that since the jury did not find him liable for rape, he should be able to get a new trial and not be required to pay Carroll millions of dollars.
Instead, the judge, in his official memorandum denying Trump’s request stated that the jury had found Trump committed rape, in the common usage of the word.
Trump’s promotion of the video also comes after the Special Counsel sent Trump’s attorneys a letter on Sunday informing them their client is a target in the investigation into Trump’s alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 election he lost to Joe Biden, including the events surrounding the January 6 insurrection.
Watch the video below or at this link.