No more American Kristallnachts

Based on recent events, I am willing to predict that we shall see much less violence than expected in the days after the election should Donald Trump win. And if those protests occur, they will mostly be concentrated in Democratic Party strongholds where the protesters feel reasonably confident they can get away with it.

I base this optimistic prediction on the trends we have been seeing. As I first noted in April 2024, the strength of these leftist protests has clearly lost steam in the last four years. While in 2020 the protests and looting and violence occurred almost everywhere, destroying many inner cities, in the last year those protests have mostly been confined to college campuses, and have resulted in relatively little damage in comparison.

The reasons have been two fold. First, the authorities, while still generally treating these protesters too gently, have still responded more aggressively. Violent protesters are now arrested. Some face prison terms. Faced with real consequences, this violent leftist protest movement can no longer get the same numbers to turn out.

Second, the protests and violence has declined because of the utter failure of these protests to work. If anything, the looting and destruction has convinced vast numbers of Americans to oppose the left and to now vote with even greater energy against the politicians who support it.

Thought trends have been obvious for months, recently we have had even more evidence that the protests and violence will be less should Trump win. And that evidence is striking.

First there was Trump’s rally in Madison Square Garden. You might not remember this, but during the 2016 campaign Trump attempted to hold a rally in downtown Chicago. In the end he had to cancel the event because of threats of violence from what appeared to be an organized effort by Democrats and leftist activists, bringing thousands of protests to surround the event and threaten anyone who entered or left.

Similar violence later occurred at other 2016 rallies, as well as in 2019, often resulting in Trump supporters being attacked and beaten.

Yet when Trump arranged his rally in Madison Square Garden in 2024, none of this happened. The security might have been better, but it appeared that the violent Antifa forces no longer had the ability to organize in large numbers. More important, they probably were unwilling to face a now enraged conservative electorate no longer willing to turn the other cheek.

Nor was the New York rally a one-off. Trump has held many rallies in deep-blue locations, with no problems. In this sense freedom of speech has returned to America.

Turning Point USA event at University of
Nebraska October 8, 2024

The second recent datapoint has been the pro-Trump voter rallies being held by Charlie Kirk and Turning Point USA on many academic campuses in 2024. In the past, if you dared to wear a MAGA hat on an American campus you would have almost certainly been harassed and attacked. Thus, no one would do so. For years when polled privately conservatives on campuses admitted that they had to keep their mouths shut for fear of attacks and violence.

In the 2024 campaign Turning Point USA could not only hold pro-Trump events on campuses nationwide, handing out hundreds and hundreds of MAGA hats while registering many voters, the students flocked to the events in the thousands, and came away wearing those hats quite confidently. Without doubt some were later harassed on campus, but that they were wearing the hats and unafraid to gather suggests that much of the steam has gone out of the leftist campus movement of violence and intimidation.

Thus, based on this anecdotal evidence, I am willing to bet that the violence expected post-election day, should Trump win, will be relatively minor. We might see some looting and riots and violence in DC and in Oregon and Washington and California, but for the rest of the country, things will instead be celebratory and in fact quite joyous.

What will happen however in the next few months leading up to Trump’s inauguration remains unknown. Rather than violent mob protests, we should instead be prepared for more focused violence, such as additional assassination attempts against Trump, done by lone individuals who might very well be getting support from elsewhere.