“When they go low, we go high!” was an inspiring line from then-First Lady Michelle Obama during the 2016 Presidential election. 

Unfortunately, it proved only that good guys finish last.

During the campaign, supporters of Republican candidate Donald J. Trump repeatedly threatened violence against his opponent, Hillary Clinton.  

Among those threats:

• In Cincinnati, a Trump supporter threatened to forcibly remove Clinton from the White House if she won the race: “If she’s in office, I hope we can start a coup. She should be in prison or shot. That’s how I feel about it,”
• Dan Bowman, a 50-year-old contractor, said of Clinton: “We’re going to have a revolution and take them out of office if that’s what it takes. There’s going to be a lot of bloodshed. But that’s what it’s going to take….I would do whatever I can for my country.”

Even Fergus Cullen, former chairman of the New Hampshire GOP, expressed fear of what might happen if Trump lost the election.

Fergus Cullen

“That’s really scary,” Cullen said, recounting the violence at Trump rallies around the country leading up to the Republican National Convention. “In this country, we’ve always had recriminations after one side loses. But we haven’t had riots. We haven’t had mobs that act out with violence against supporters of the other side. 

“There’s no telling what his supporters would be willing to do at the slightest encouragement from their candidate,” he said. 

Trump even began encouraging his mostly white supporters to sign up online to be “election observers” to stop “Crooked Hillary from rigging this election.” He urged them to act as poll watchers in “other” [non-white] communities to ensure that things are “on the up and up.”

And many of his supporters promised to do so.

“Trump said to watch your precincts. I’m going to go, for sure,” said Steve Webb, a 61-year-old carpenter from Fairfield, Ohio.

“I’ll look for…well, it’s called racial profiling. Mexicans. Syrians. People who can’t speak American,” he said. “I’m going to go right up behind them. I’ll do everything legally. I want to see if they are accountable. I’m not going to do anything illegal. I’m going to make them a little bit nervous.”

Knowing that large numbers of angry—and possibly armed—Right-wingers planned to descend on polling places could only have had a chilling effect on untold numbers of Democratic voters. And this would have been especially true in heavily conservative states. 

Both the USA Patriot Act and the Racketeer Influenced Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act have statutes dealing with making terrorist threats against government institutions to influence their members.  

If Trump’s remarks did not violate one or both of those laws, certainly remarks made by his surrogates did. 

Thus, the Justice Department could have cited the Patriot Act in indicting Trump and/or any number of his followers for “activities that…appear to be intended…to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion [and]…occur primarily within the territorial jurisdiction of the United States.” 

The Justice Department could have also demanded that the results of the election be invalidated on the basis that widespread voter and candidate intimidation played a massive role in it.

But that, of course, did not happen.

So far, only one person has proven Trump’s equal—if not superior—in fighting fire with fire: Omarosa Manigauot-Newman, his onetime “Apprentice” protégé. 

The relationship between Donald Trump and Omarosa dates to 2004, when she became a participant in the first season of “The Apprentice,” NBC’s “reality” TV series.

Her rudeness and ruthlessness toward other contestants quickly made her “the woman America loved to hate,” according to Jet magazine. 

TV Guide included her in its 2013 list of “The 60 Nastiest TV Villains of All Time.” 

In 2008, she appeared on “Celebrity Apprentice”—where she was again fired after failing to sell more artwork than a rival team. 

During the 2016 Presidential race, she served as Trump’s Director of African-American Outreach, although she had absolutely no credible ties to the black community. 

Omarosa Manigault-Newman

(By Photography by Glenn Francis of PacificProDigital.com)

And, in September, 2016, she famously predicted: “Every critic, every detractor will have to bow down to President Trump. It’s everyone who’s ever doubted Donald, who ever disagreed, who ever challenged him. It is the ultimate revenge to become the most powerful man in the universe.”

When  Trump moved into the White House on January 20, 2017, Manigault moved in with him as his director of communications for the Office of Public Liaison. 

Her arrogance and rudeness quickly won her as many enemies among White House staffers as among her former “Apprentice” rivals. 

A typical example: On April 8, 2017, she married John Allen Newman, the senior pastor at The Sanctuary at Mt. Calvary, a church in Jacksonville, Florida. Afterwards, in full bridal attire, Omarosa took her 39-member bridal party to the White House for an extended photo shoot. 

According to Politico, White House senior aides and security officials were caught by surprise. Omarosa hadn’t alerted them in advance. Her visitors—lacking security clearances—“loudly wandered around” the Rose Garden and West Wing. 

Throughout the 2016 Presidential election, then-First Lady Michelle Obama famously exhorted: “When they go low, we go high!”

Inspiring, yes. But it didn’t prevent Republican Presidential nominee Donald Trump from employing Russian Intelligence officers and computer-hackers to win the election.

On June 9, 2016, high-ranking members of his campaign met with Russian Intelligence agents at Trump Tower.

The purpose: To obtain derogatory information about Democratic Presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.

Among those attending:   

• Trump’s son, Donald Trump, Jr.;
• His son-in-law, Jared Kushner;
• His then-campaign manager, Paul Manafort;
• At least two lobbyists with ties to Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, including Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya; and
• Rinat Akhmetshin, a former Soviet counterintelligence officer suspected of “having ongoing ties to Russian Intelligence.”

Trump Tower  

(By Jorge Láscar from Australia)

This was nothing less than treason—meeting with officials of a hostile foreign power to manipulate an American Presidential election.

After The New York Times broke the story, Trump “helped” his son draft a false statement to explain the purpose of the meeting. 

On July 8, 2017, Donald Trump, Jr., issued the following statement: “It was a short introductory meeting. I asked Jared and Paul to stop by. We primarily discussed a program about the adoption of Russian children that was active and popular with American families years ago and was since ended by the Russian government.”

Confronted with overwhelming evidence, President Trump tweeted on August 5, 2018: 

“Fake News reporting, a complete fabrication, that I am concerned about the meeting my wonderful son, Donald, had in Trump Tower. This was a meeting to get information on an opponent, totally legal and done all the time in politics – and it went nowhere. I did not know about it!”

On July 22, 2016, Trump said at a press conference in Doral, Florida: “Russia, if you are listening, I hope you are able to find the 33,000 emails that are missing [from Hillary Clinton’s personal email server].  I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.” 

Thus, Trump called upon a foreign power, hostile to the United States, to interfere in its Presidential election.  

Hours later, the Main Intelligence Directorate in Moscow targeted Clinton’s personal office and hit more than 70 other Clinton campaign accounts. 

Donald Trump

On December 16, 2016, then-FBI Director James B. Comey and Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. agreed with a CIA assessment that Russia intervened in the 2016 election in part to help Donald Trump win the White House.

“When they go low, we go high” did not deter Trump from threatening his Republican and Democratic opponents with violence. 

No other candidate—Republican or Democrat—had ever made such repeated and brutal use of threats of physical assault in pursuing the Presidency.

• On March 16, 2016, he warned Republicans that if he didn’t win the GOP nomination in July, his supporters would literally riot: “I think you’d have riots. I think you would see problems like you’ve never seen before. I think bad things would happen. I really do. I wouldn’t lead it, but I think bad things would happen.”
• An ABC reporter summed this up as: “The message to Republicans was clear on [March 16[: ‘Nice convention you got there, shame if something happened to it.'”
• Republicans clearly saw this as a threat: Paul Ryan, their Speaker of the House, said on March 17: “Nobody should say such things in my opinion because to even address or hint to violence is unacceptable.” 
• Philip Klein, the managing editor of the Washington Examiner, wrote on the eve of the Republican National Convention in July: “Political commentators now routinely talk about the riots that would break out in Cleveland if Trump were denied the nomination, about how his supporters have guns and all hell could break loose, that they would burn everything to the ground. It works to Trump’s advantage to not try too hard to dispel these notions.”
• On August 9, Trump told a rally in Wilmington, North Carolina: “Hillary [Clinton] wants to abolish, essentially abolish, the Second Amendment. If she gets to pick her [Supreme Court] judges, nothing you can do folks. Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is, I don’t know.”
• “Well, let me say if someone else said that outside of the hall, he’d be in the back of a police wagon now, with the Secret Service questioning him,” said Michael Hayden, former head of the CIA and National Security Agency (NSA). 

Making threats against anyone under protection by the U.S. Secret Service is a felony. Yet Donald Trump was never held legally accountable by the Justice Department.   

Threats of this type continued to be made by Trump supporters right up to the day of the election.

• On July 29, Roger Stone, a notorious Right-wing political consultant acting as a Trump strategist, told Breitbart News: “The first thing Trump needs to do is begin talking about [voter fraud] constantly. If there’s voter fraud, this election will be illegitimate, the election of the winner will be illegitimate, we will have a constitutional crisis, widespread civil disobedience, and the government will no longer be the government.”
• At a town hall meeting where Trump’s Vice Presidential nominee Mike Pence appeared, a woman named Rhonda said: “For me personally, if Hillary Clinton gets in, I myself am ready for a revolution.”