Washington.- Calls by former President Donald Trump to protest ahead of the anticipated criminal proceedings against him have drawn little reaction from his supporters, with even some of his staunchest supporters saying the idea is a waste of time or a trap to get them arrested.
The ambivalence raises questions about whether Trump, while still the leading contender for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination and still enjoying a highly loyal caucus, still has the power to mobilize his far-right supporters as he did more than two years before the attack. to the Capitol that occurred on January 6, 2021. It also seems to indicate that the large number of arrests, court rulings, and jail sentences following that attack are inhibiting any attempt at destabilization.
Still, law enforcement agencies in New York are monitoring the situation carefully, watching online for calls to protest or commit violence if Trump is arrested, four official sources told The Associated Press. In online messages or in group chats, there have been some calls for armed protesters to blockade police agencies in an attempt to thwart any attempts to arrest Trump, the sources said.
The Republican Youth Club of New York announced protests at an unspecified location in Manhattan on Monday, and inflammatory but isolated messages have emerged on radical platforms calling for clashes with police at Trump’s residence in Mar-a-Lago, Florida.
But nearly two days after Trump claimed on his Truth Social platform that he was going to be arrested on Tuesday and asked his supporters to come out and protest, there is little sign that his supporters are planning events like the one on Jan. 6. In fact, a prominent supporter who was an organizer of the rallies leading up to the storming of the Capitol wrote on Twitter that this time he will step aside.
Ali Alexander, who organized rallies promoting Trump’s false allegations of voter fraud, warned supporters this time that if they came out to protest in New York City they could face “jail or worse.”
“There they have no rights or freedoms,” he tweeted.
One of Alexander’s allies has been Alex Jones, who propagates conspiracy theories from his Infowars platform. Alexander wrote that he spoke to Jones and neither of them was coming out to protest.
“We are both already busy enough fighting this government. We don’t have any millionaires paying for our legal bills,” Alexander wrote.
