People who understand Trump's personality from watching him for the past several years have noted that if he loses his bid for another presidency or is in danger of paying a real price for his criminality, he'd attempt to "burn it all down," and I think that's a good assessment. It appears to me from his rantings and "bleats" (as Tim Miller calls Trump's Truth Social posts), and his choice of first rally location, he's preparing the "burn it all down" path.
A brief accounting of what went down at the Branch Davidian compound in Waco in 1993 is in that article.
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
Let's hope the sheriff is right. But I'm guessing he's not on alt right chat forums. He could be.In the chapel at Mount Carmel, the longtime home of the Branch Davidian sect outside Waco, Texas, the pastor preaches about the coming apocalypse, as David Koresh, the sect’s doomed charismatic leader, did three decades ago.
But the prophecies offered by the pastor, Charles Pace, are different from Koresh’s. For one thing, they involve Donald Trump.
“Donald Trump is the anointed of God,” Pace said in an interview. “He is the battering ram that God is using to bring down the Deep State of Babylon.”
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Pace said he believed it was “a statement — that he was sieged by the FBI at Mar-a-Lago and that they were accusing him of different things that aren’t really true, just like David Koresh was accused by the FBI when they sieged him.”
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“Waco was an overreach of the government, and today the New York district attorney is practicing an overreach of the government again,” said Sharon Anderson, a retiree from Etowah, Tennessee, who is traveling to Waco for Saturday’s event, her 33rd Trump rally.
[...]
Alex Jones, the conspiracy-theorist broadcaster who helped draw crowds of Trump loyalists to Washington on Jan. 6, 2021, rose to prominence promoting wild claims about the Waco standoff. Roger Stone, the longtime Trump associate and former campaign adviser, dedicated his 2015 book, “The Clintons’ War on Women,” to the Branch Davidians who died at Mount Carmel.
“Waco is a touchstone for the far right,” said Stuart Wright, a professor of sociology at Lamar University in Beaumont, Texas, and an authority on the standoff.
[...]
Funds for the construction of the chapel at Mount Carmel were raised by Jones, whose obsession with Waco conspiracy theories led to his firing in 1999 from Austin radio station KJFK and the start of his own media empire, Infowars.
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Trump has a long history of statements that feed the far right, even as he claims that was not his intent. That list includes his equivocating response to the 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, that left one woman dead; his message to the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by” in a presidential debate; and his exhortations to supporters in Washington just before many stormed the Capitol in an attempt to overturn his defeat.
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In a speech at the Conservative Political Action Coalition conference this month, he described the 2024 presidential election as “the final battle” and vowed “retribution.”
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Parnell McNamara, the sheriff of McLennan County, home to Waco, said he did not believe there were security concerns beyond the ordinary preparations for a presidential campaign rally.
“Him coming here, to me, is just a totally different situation, and really has nothing to do with that,” he said in reference to the 1993 raid, for which he was present as a U.S. marshal. “I have not heard anybody even bring that up.”
Yahoo
A brief accounting of what went down at the Branch Davidian compound in Waco in 1993 is in that article.
Trump is aware of all that. He's going to Waco as another signal and nod to the violent faction of MAGA.Invocations of Waco persisted into the next generation of militias and other extremists that emerged in response to Barack Obama’s presidency and supported Trump’s. In 2009, the founder of the Three Percenters movement warned of “No More Free Wacos” in an open letter to then-Attorney General Eric Holder. The Oath Keepers issued a statement warning that the Bundy family could be “Waco’d” in their standoff with the federal government in 2014.
According to Newsweek, in 2021, Enrique Tarrio, the leader of the Proud Boys and a onetime FBI informant, denounced the agency as the “enemy of the people” in a Parler post, writing: “Remember Waco? Are your eyes opened yet?”
A Texas Proud Boys chapter made a pilgrimage to the Mount Carmel chapel on the anniversary of the raid last year, according to Pace, whose politicized, QAnon-inflected theology is rejected by some other Branch Davidians.
I'll post a follow-up after the rally. So check back later today.Donald Trump resumes high-profile political rallies Saturday in a unique place in the political world: Waco, Texas.
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Trump is accused of possibly playing to extremists for scheduling the rally during the 30th anniversary of the deadly siege of the Branch Davidian religious sect in Waco.
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[T]here are a lot of reasons for a Republican politician to visit Waco, although focus has turned to one: The 1993 raid-and-fire that claimed more than 70 lives.
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Trump’s campaign said it chose Waco because Texas is a Super Tuesday primary state and the city is as close a central location as you can find within the sprawl of Texas.
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Some far-right conservatives regard the 1993 fiasco as a deadly example of federal power. One of them, Timothy McVeigh, retaliated by bombing the Oklahoma City federal bombing exactly two years later, on April 19, 1995.
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In a video posted this week, Trump told his followers, "They're not coming after me. They're coming after you." In a Truth Social post, he berated prosecutors for even considering indictments when it is "known that potential death & destruction in such a false charge could be catastrophic for our Country."
[...]
Waco also has large pockets of religious conservatives, a big part of Trump's political base.
The biggest example, Baylor, describes itself as a "Private Christian University and a Nationally Ranked Research Institution."
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Trump may well use this rally for "emboldening Far Right forces."
[...]
While Trump is calling for massive protests, many analysts are skeptical the rally would turn violent. And one said the choice of venue could more be about annoying liberals than riling up extremists.
USA Today
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
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