The New York Police Department announced Friday that Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, whose office is investigating Trump over an alleged hush money payment, had received a package that contained a death threat and “suspicious white powder.”
The package was detected only hours after former President Donald Trump threatened “potential death and destruction” on his social media platform should he be charged in the case regarding his alleged $130,000 payment to former adult film star Stormy Daniels to keep quiet about an alleged affair with him.
Multiple reports in the capitalist press claim that the FBI and the NYPD are investigating the letter addressed to Bragg which contained a small amount of white powder and read “ALVIN: I AM GOING TO KILL YOU!!!!!!!!!!!!!”
Police confirmed that the white substance found in the letter was non-hazardous. A report by NBC claims that the letter was mailed from Orlando, Florida and postmarked this past Tuesday. Trump had previously claimed that he would be arrested on Tuesday in the Daniels case. Last week, NBC reported that the NYPD and federal law enforcement had begun preparing security plans in the event of a potential Trump indictment.
A “senior law enforcement source” told NBC on Friday, that this was just the latest out of “several hundred threats” Bragg and his office have received in recent weeks.
There is no question the deluge of threats received by the New York DA is due to Trump and Republican incitement against him and his office.
In a post on his Truth Social platform shortly after 1:00 a.m. Thursday morning, Trump attacked Bragg, writing, “What kind of person can charge another person ... when it is known by all that NO Crime has been committed, & also known that potential death & destruction in such a false charge could be catastrophic for our Country?” The would-be dictator added, “Only a degenerate psychopath that truely (sic) hates the USA!” could prosecute him.
As the World Socialist Web Site wrote last week, Trump is guilty of numerous crimes for which he should already be in prison. The most egregious are his multiple attempts to overturn the 2020 election, which culminated in the failed coup attempt on January 6, 2021, in which a mob of thousands of Trump supporters, summoned by him to Washington, stormed the Capitol and tried to prevent Congress from certifying his election defeat.
The Stormy Daniels hush money case, the WSWS wrote, “is a reactionary diversion” from Trump’s “legion of crimes” against the working class, focused on Trump’s private sexual conduct rather than his repeated efforts to establish a presidential dictatorship and overthrow the US Constitution.
President Joe Biden, Attorney General Merrick Garland and the Democratic Party have refused to hold Trump and his high-level accomplices to account for attempting to overthrow the government, more than two years after the events of January 6. Instead, the Democrats and their media allies are focusing enormous attention on the sex scandal, pushing ahead with charges that both the Federal Election Commission and the US Attorney had previously declined to prosecute. This has only bolstered Trump’s claims that the prosecution is politically motivated and that he is being unfairly targeted by his opponents in the “deep state.”
Trump’s threats against Bragg are just the latest in a concentrated salvo of fascistic, racist and anti-Semitic rants the fascistic ex-president has leveled against the African-American prosecutor in the last week.
After it was leaked to the press last week that a grand jury in Manhattan was close to indicting Trump over the hush money payment, Trump and his Republican allies have repeatedly threatened Bragg on social media and in television appearances.
Last Saturday, Trump, in language nearly identical to his speech delivered outside the White House on January 6, 2021, called on his right-wing supporters to “take our nation back” should he be charged.
The day before he warned of “death and destruction,” Trump attacked Bragg for refusing to drop the case, calling him a “SOROS BACKED ANIMAL, WHO JUST DOESN’T CARE ABOUT RIGHT OR WRONG…”
For decades the Republicans have cultivated and incited their fascist base of supporters by constantly railing against the Hungarian-born Jewish billionaire, Holocaust survivor George Soros, who has been a major financial backer of the Democratic Party and other liberal anti-communist causes, such as support for political movements in Eastern Europe aligned with the US-NATO proxy war against Russia in Ukraine.
While Soros spent $128 million on the 2022 midterm elections, according to Open Secrets, a nonpartisan campaign finance research group, he is just one of several billionaires responsible for the pumping over $2 billion in the 2020 and 2022 elections. Republican billionaires Elizabeth and Richard Uihlein spent over $67 million in 2022 on behalf of their preferred capitalist politicians, and Charles Koch, Miriam Adelson and others have been big supporters of the Republicans.
Despite the fact that billionaires, Wall Street and the military-industrial complex control both big business parties in the United States, nearly every day on the Rupert Murdoch-owned Fox News channel, the main Republican Party media network, right-wing talking heads and guests insinuate that it is Soros alone “pulling the strings” of Democratic politicians behind the scenes.
In the last week, Republican party leaders from Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, to Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy and Chair of House Republican Conference Elise Stefanik have railed against “Soros-backed” district attorneys.
The attacks by the Republicans on a Jewish billionaire are a deliberate appeal to anti-Semitic and neo-Nazi elements. Among the fascists, Soros is cast as the chief puppet master in the “Great Replacement Theory.” The fascist conspiracy theory posits that there is a Jewish conspiracy, led by Soros, to “replace” European/White Americans with “inferior stock” from South America, Africa and Asia.
The Republican’s appeals to anti-Semitism has been bolstered by the Democratic Party’s insistence on framing every problem in society in racial terms, concealing the real class divisions in society. These reactionary politics have resulted in an increase in violent attacks against Jewish people in the last year.
In a report released this past Tuesday, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) found in 2022 there were 3,697 anti-Semitic incidents throughout the United States, a “36 percent increase from the 2,717 incidents tabulated in 2021 and the highest number on record since ADL began tracking” incidents in 1979, according to the organization.
Alarmingly, the ADL found a 26 percent increase in antisemitic assaults from 2021 to 2022. The ADL wrote that the “vast majority of anti-Semitic assaults (107 out of 111) were perpetrated without the use of a deadly weapon” however there was “one fatality.” The assaults according to the ADL “impacted 139 victims.”