An elderly New York man has been charged with threatening to kill Donald Trump, whom the wannabe assassin compared to Adolf Hitler.
Thomas Welnicki, 72, of Rockaway Beach, was charged on Monday with threatening to kill the former president multiple times between July 2020 and December 2021.
Speaking with the US Capitol police in July of 2020, Mr Welnicki allegedly said he would “acquire weapons” and “take [Trump] down]” if the president refused to leave office.
Two days before the anniversary of the 6 January riots, the 72-year-old again allegedly threatened the former president, telling a Secret Service agent in a voluntary call that, "I will do anything I can to take out (Trump) and his 12 monkeys,” according to court documents.
During calls with law enforcement, the man reportedly also referred to an alleged $350,000 bounty on Donald Trump’s head.
The Independent has reached out to the public defender representing Mr Welnicki for comment.
Although Donald Trump is not named in the criminal complaint, it is implied that the president was the target of the man’s threats, given the associated dates of his comments.
According to an affidavit from a Secret Service agent, the would-be assailant believed he was defending democracy, arguing in one call, “I don’t want to hurt anyone, but I will stand up to fascism”.
The threat against Mr Trump comes little more than a week after federal agents arrested Kuachua Brillion Xiong, 25, a California man traveling across the country to the White House with a cache of weapons and a kill list including President Joe Biden and Dr Anthony Fauci.
Police intercepted Mr Xiong in Iowa for driving aggressively, and found a rifle, body armor, and the White House on the car’s GPS system.
“Xiong began to attempt to control the conversation and began talking about his disapproval for the government due to the sex abuse of children,” a local sheriff’s deputy said of the man.
With events like the 6 January Capitol riot, and the continued opposition from large swathes of Republicans to accept the 2020 election results, political scientists have been warning of a general devolution in US politics towards intractability and violence more commonly seen in less stable nations.
“We are closer to civil war than any of us would like to believe,” Barbara F. Walter, a political science professor at the University of California at San Diego who serves on a CIA advisory panel called the Political Instability Task Force, told The Washington Post.
“If you were an analyst in a foreign country looking at events in America – the same way you’d look at events in Ukraine or the Ivory Coast or Venezuela – you would go down a checklist, assessing each of the conditions that make civil war likely. And what you would find is that the United States, a democracy founded more than two centuries ago, has entered very dangerous territory.”
Earlier this year, observers at the the think tank International IDEA labeled the US a “backsliding democracy,” and America sunk to a new low in 2021 in Freedom House’s ranking of democratic nations.
