https://edition.cnn.com/2024/01/11/opinions/trump-2024-election-threat-violence-ghitis/index.html

Opinion: The fear of physical harm that keeps even #Trump’s #supporters in line
Opinion by Frida Ghitis

..."We may finally have the answer to why the #GOP has bent to Trump’s wishes so willingly and why people of principle simply refuse to call out Trump’s lies about the 2020 election or any of his countless outrages: The party’s leaders are afraid. And not just for their political careers. They are afraid for their and their families’ personal safety. The possibility of #violence threatens to tear apart a country whose people, surprisingly, agree about much more than we think.

Former President Donald Trump speaks to the media at a Washington hotel, Tuesday, Jan. 9, 2024, after attending a hearing before the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals at the federal courthouse in Washington. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)
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“Americans are not as ideologically polarized as they believed themselves to be,” says Rachel Kleinfeld of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, “but emotions (my italics) are being polarized for political purposes.” Emotions are the stock-in-trade of demagogues, and Trump is a master at manipulating them, including with calls for violence.

Who can forget his exhortation to supporters during a 2016 campaign rally, to “knock the crap” out of protesters. “Just knock the hell – I promise you, I will pay for legal fees,” he said to cheers.

An expert on political violence, Kleinfeld said that “violence and threats against elected leaders are suppressing the emergence of a pro-democracy faction of the GOP.”

If more Republicans were willing to speak out against Trump, to forcefully acknowledge that he lost the 2020 election, that his phony claims that legal cases against him are politically motivated are lies, then more Republican voters might be persuaded. But few are willing to do so, so Trump’s false, self-serving version of reality has taken hold with an astonishingly large segment of the country, dominating the Republican Party.

Beyond Washington, death threats, swatting assaults and the prospect of violence are silencing moderate, reality-based Republicans across the country, persuading local officials to keep quiet or step out of politics altogether in the face of death threats and harassment."...