section_path: Comparisons/Political violence
section_name: Political violence
paragraph_text: Political violence
  
  Trump has repeatedly expressed support for violent actions by law enforcement and his supporters since the early days of his first presidential campaign in August 2015. He was reported to, during his presidency, have called for undocumented immigrants to be shot in the leg as a way of deterrence. He suggested that his hecklers be "knocked the hell" out by his supporters and praised then-House candidate Greg Gianforte after he body-slammed The Guardian reporter Ben Jacobs while he was asking questions, stating that, "any guy who can do a body slam is my kind of guy." Trump said at a 2016 rally that, "I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn't lose voters." He had previously joked about the topic of killing journalists several times prior, including when he said that he "would never kill them", before reconsidering: "Uh, let's see, uh?... No I wouldn't. I would never kill them, but I do hate them. And some of them are such lying, disgusting people, it's true." Some historians consider Trump's praise of violence against his critics, among other behaviors, as fitting a characteristic of fascism.
  
  In a Missouri rally that resulted in multiple fights and arrests, Trump complained, after being interrupted by protesters, that there were no longer any "consequences" for protesting and stated that, "You know, part of the problem and part of the reason it takes so long is nobody wants to hurt each other anymore, right?" In a 2017 speech directed at law-enforcement officers, Trump encouraged them to be "rough" on suspects. Trump has described, in 2016, instances of violence at his rallies as "appropriate".
  
  He said during the 2016 election that "the Second Amendment people" could prevent the nomination of Democratic Supreme Court justices. In 2019, he stated that, "I have the support of the police, the support of the military, the support of the Bikers for Trump, I have the tough people, but they don't play it tough, until they go to a certain point, and then it would be very bad, very bad." In a 2018 interview with Axios reporter Jim Vandehei, the interviewer asked, "when you're saying 'enemy of the people, enemy of the people',... what happens if all of a sudden someone gets shot, somebody shoots one of these reporters?", to which Trump answered, "it is my only form of fighting back." Trump has praised modern authoritarian leaders several times. In 2016, he expressed respect for Kim Jong Un for murdering his uncle, saying, "It's incredible. He wiped out the uncle. He wiped out this one, that one." He has praised Vladimir Putin several times, and, in 2018, he spoke positively of Xi Jinping 's ability to eliminate his term limits. About the Tiananmen Square protests, he said that, "When the students poured into Tiananmen Square, the Chinese government almost blew it. Then they were vicious, they were horrible, but they put it down with strength. That shows you the power of strength." Trump has often used negative terms to describe democratic leaders, calling Germany's Angela Merkel "stupid", Canada's Justin Trudeau "two-faced" and France's Emmanuel Macron "very, very nasty". He called Egyptian president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi "my favorite dictator".
  
  During the George Floyd protests, Trump urged his general Mark Milley to take charge of dealing with the protesters. After Milley resisted, saying that the National Guard should be deployed instead, Trump told his staff, "You are all losers!" and asked Mark Milley, "Can't you just shoot them? Just shoot them in the legs or something?" Subsequently, Milley wrote a letter of resignation for Trump, which stated, referring to America's role in the Second World War, that, "That generation, like every generation, has fought against that, has fought against fascism, has fought against Nazism, has fought against extremism... It's now obvious to me that you don't understand that world order. You don't understand what the war was all about. In fact, you subscribe to many of the principles that we fought against." He ultimately decided not to send the letter to Trump and stayed on his position.
  
  Bob Dreyfuss, writing for The Nation, notes that Trump has been offered support and security by paramilitary groups including the Oath Keepers, the Proud Boys, and the Three Percenters, and Dreyfuss proposes a parallel to the civilian militias that Hitler and Mussolini engaged. He describes Mussolini's Fasci Italiani di Combattimento, which was established in the early 1920s as a decentralized street militia that would attack his political opponents, and Hitler's Sturmabteilung (SA), which provided protection to Hitler during his street events and engaged in violence against political opponents, violently taking control of the city of Coburg in November 1922. Trump told the Proud Boys to "stand back and stand by" in 2020, before the group participated in the January 6 attack, and during Trump's presidency, several of his armed supporters occupied several state capitols, organized around the Mexican border, and engaged in street fights with Antifa and Black Lives Matter protesters. After a Black protester was beaten by his supporters during a 2015 rally, Trump said that the man "should have been roughed up". Fascism scholar Steve Ross said that, although he did not believe that Trump was Hitler, "We had the same thing happening in Germany in the 1920s with people being roughed up by the Brownshirts and they deserved it because they were Jews and Marxists and radicals and dissidents and gypsies. That was what Hitler was saying."
  
  After a protestor was removed from his rally in 2016, Trump said, "Try not to hurt him. If you do, I'll defend you in court. Don't worry about it." In the same year, he said, "If you see someone getting ready to throw tomatoes knock the crap out of them, would you? Seriously. OK. Just knock the hell... I promise you, I will pay for the legal fees." He said, "I love the old days, you know? You know what I hate? There's a guy totally disruptive, throwing punches. We're not allowed to punch back anymore. I love the old days. You know what they used to do to guys like that when they were in a place like this? They'd be carried out on a stretcher, folks." Trump said in the same year, about an anti-Trump protestor that was being removed from his rally, that, "I'd like to punch him in the face."