The criminal Donald Trump has told an interviewer that if he is indicted for stealing and endangering classified documents “… I think you’d have problems in this country the likes of which perhaps we’ve never seen before.” Trump must have been watching Birth of a Nation, for “never seen before” put me immediately in mind of the parade of the Ku Klux Klan down Pennsylvania Avenue on 13 September, 1926. You can see a photo of this parade on the Library of Congress site (https://www.loc.gov/resource/cph.3b39318/). I don’t think the Trumpies could organize a parade like the KKK’s. We saw their idea of a parade on Jan 6.

Now Trump said about his prediction “That’s not inciting. I’m just saying what my opinion is.” I think that in place of “opinion” one should insert “heartfelt wish.” Lindsay Graham, Trump’s punk and senator from South Carolina, the Birthplace of the Confederacy, was more precise last month in threatening “riots in the streets.”

These “predictions” or “opinions” are, of course, dog whistles — they are a call to action addressed to Trump’s crazies and a warning to the government and the American people that indicting Trump means war. Our overly lax understanding of freedom of speech perhaps does not allow us to prevent incitements to violence like this, but we can take them as the warnings they are intended to be and get ready for the “problems the likes of which” and the “riots in the street.” These are threats of recourse to violence if the law is enforced, not unlike the case with the Mafia in Sicily. If you jail the mafiosi, the Mafia will declare war on the government.