What If Trump Wins?

Donald Trump was slamming his fist on the Resolute Desk and, once again, calling for blood.

It was the second year of his presidency, and Trump was seething about gang members and drug lords. He wanted to see their bodies piled up in the streets. Specifically, he sought a series of mass executions — with firing squads and gallows, and certainly without the quaintness of an appeals process — to send a chilling message about the scope of his power.

Trump, who’d taken office inveighing against “American carnage,” wanted to create some of his own.

This violent fantasy became an obsession, according to former Trump administration officials. The 45th president brought up the topic so often during the early years of his presidency that one former White House official tells Rolling Stone they lost count. “Fucking kill them all,” Trump would say. “An eye for an eye.” Other times he’d snap at his staff: “You just got to kill these people.” Invoking the brutality of dictatorial regimes that Trump wanted to emulate, he’d add, “Other countries do it all the time.”

For Trump, the spectacle was crucial. “He had a particular affinity for the firing squad,” says one of the former White House officials. He’d say, “They need to be eradicated, not jailed.” Administration officials privately referred to this demand as Trump’s “American death-squads idea,” comparing it to the drug-war bloodbath carried out by Filipino strongman Rodrigo Duterte. (The sources, some still very much within Trump’s circle, requested anonymity in order to speak candidly about sensitive conversations.)

That mass executions were not a feature of Trump’s term is a credit to the American justice system and the more sober-minded government officials who were unwilling to be complicit in his mad schemes. These aides and advisers typically put the president off, making vague promises to “look into” the idea, long enough to let Trump’s tyrannical tantrum blow over.

READ MORE