Trump fan targets MAGA foes with menace - and gets away with it

Geoffrey Giglio was enraged by the July assassination attempt on former U.S. President Donald Trump. So, the 57-year-old Californian did what he's done so many times before: he lashed out in a series of threatening messages.

“You TRIED TO KILL Trump,” Giglio posted on President Joe Biden’s official Facebook page, alluding to false conspiracy theories suggesting Biden was complicit in the July 13 shooting. “I hope you swing someday – you deserve it.”

Next, Giglio phoned Colorado state legislator Steven Woodrow, a Democrat who was critical of Trump after the shooting. “I hope they pop your head” and “it turns you into a pink mist,” he said in a voicemail.

Giglio is part of a potent phenomenon: far-right Trump supporters who use threats and menace to intimidate the former president’s opponents, but are careful to avoid language suggesting they’ll actually carry out violence – a key threshold for prosecution.

Giglio’s onslaught coincides with the greatest spike in political violence in decades, including the assassination attempt on Trump in July and another apparent attempt on his life Sunday. Those attacks underscore the risks of today’s incendiary political environment. While politically motivated threats are more prevalent on the right, according to academic studies, they occur across the ideological spectrum.

Trump has fanned the flames in recent weeks, using increasingly heated language to demonize people he sees as obstacles to his re-election bid, from rival Democrats and Republicans to lawyers and local election officials. At times, he has painted the race as an apocalyptic battle to save America, echoing the inflammatory rhetoric he used ahead of the U.S. Capitol riot in 2021. Academics and legal experts say such language can stoke threats or outright violence.

Artist Scott LoBaido paints a portrait of Republican presidential nominee and former U.S. President Donald Trump during a rally at Nassau Veterans Memorial Coliseum, in Uniondale, New York, U.S., September 18, 2024.Reuters

In a series of interviews, Giglio acknowledged that he wants to intimidate Trump’s antagonists so they believe that “maybe there is somebody out there crazy enough to come after us.” But he insists his language falls within the U.S. Constitution’s free-speech protections, making him untouchable by law enforcement.

And, he told Reuters, he plans to add an assault rifle to his weapons collection, fearing violence after the election.

Giglio’s story illustrates the challenges facing U.S. law enforcement officials amid a historic rise in threats and harassment directed at public officials. Giglio has been investigated or questioned by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the U.S. Capitol Police, the U.S. Marshals Service and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. But he’s never been charged.

“I push the envelope,” Giglio told Reuters, adding that he would never hurt anyone. “If I have to go to jail because somebody thinks I'm really a threat, oh well, so be it.”

Trump’s campaign said it had no connection to Giglio and that it was unfair to link his hostile messages with the former president. In an interview, Trump campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said Trump is particularly sensitive to threats as someone who was wounded in the July attempt on his life. “Of course, he condemns political violence and hatred in all forms,” she said.

Trump accused Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, his Democratic rival for the White House, of inciting the attacks on him, in part by casting him as a threat to democracy. Trump, however, engages in far more invective than they do. He has regularly denounced opponents as “treasonous,” has framed his campaign as a quest for “retribution,” calls journalists the “enemy of the people” and said that illegal immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.”

Tirades like Giglio’s are increasingly common. Threats to judges, members of Congress, election officials and other public servants are at or near record highs, according to government data. Reuters has previously documented how Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election unleashed a deluge of threats from his supporters, many of them violent and resulting in federal investigations. Scores of people have been arrested, including more than a dozen for threatening election workers.

Supporters of U.S. President Donald Trump climb on walls at the U.S. Capitol during a protest against the certification of the 2020 U.S. presidential election results by the U.S. Congress, in Washington, U.S., January 6, 2021.Reuters

But the messages sent by Giglio occupy a legal gray area, making them harder to prosecute. The Constitution’s free-speech guarantees cover all but the most serious threats. Police and security agencies can try to stop perpetrators with personal visits and stern warnings. They typically can’t file charges, however, unless there’s an explicit, direct threat that conveys intent to cause harm – a line that can be subject to interpretation.

“Nobody – not even prosecutors and judges – knows exactly where the line is, and if you’re somebody who wants to make threats you can take advantage of that,” said Jared Carter, a Vermont Law School professor specializing in constitutional free-speech issues. Giglio and those like him appear to understand the risk of arrest and have “become more sophisticated” at testing the boundaries of free speech, added Carter.

The U.S. Justice Department has seen “a sharp increase in threatening communications” to officials in every branch of government over the past two years, a spokesperson said in a statement. The department declined to comment on Giglio. “Vigorous debate is healthy and protected speech,” the statement said, “but crossing the line to threatening people’s lives is illegal, and the Justice Department has no tolerance for it.”

The FBI, Department of Homeland Security and Marshals Service all declined to say whether Giglio is an active or potential subject of investigation. The White House had no comment on Giglio’s violent message on Biden’s Facebook page, but condemned “any form of political violence, threats, or intimidation.”

Giglio’s turn to menace followed a string of personal setbacks and his embrace of right-wing media provocateurs. He describes his campaign to terrorize those enemies as “an existential battle between good and evil.” By Giglio’s estimate, he has aimed his rage at scores of targets, from judges to members of Congress to public officials at every level of government.

He argues he has a constitutional right to go after them. But some scholars believe he may have crossed the line.

'You're going to get arrested'

Giglio often adopts the us-versus-them rhetoric of Trump and the far-right influencers who helm the former president’s Make America Great Again movement. Perceived enemies are denounced as elites and traitors.

He relishes harassing Republican members of Congress who oppose Trump’s agenda.

“Those RINO wussbags, I want them way more than I want Democrats,” Giglio said, using a derisive acronym for “Republicans in name only.”

Giglio said he also has targeted judges and prosecutors handling the civil and criminal prosecutions of Trump in New York. At least one of his threatening voicemails was cited in court as an example of threats against New York State Justice Arthur Engoron, who ruled against Trump in a civil fraud case involving his real estate business.

Giglio acknowledged to Reuters that he was the caller. His rambling voicemail, laced with antisemitic slurs, contained at least five calls for Engoron’s death. “You should be killed,” he said. “You should be executed.” It was included as evidence to support Engoron’s order to limit Trump’s public comments on the case, on the grounds that the ex-president’s remarks were spurring threats against court personnel.

The voicemail was among more than two dozen of Giglio’s threatening and intimidating messages that Reuters confirmed with the public officials or spouses who received them.

One of his targets was Fani Willis, a county district attorney in Georgia who charged Trump with illegally trying to overturn his 2020 election loss in the state. Willis told Reuters that intimidating messages from Giglio and others are an attack on “the principle that everyone is subject to the law’s accountability and entitled to the law’s protection.”

The judges and prosecutors in Trump’s New York cases declined to comment on specific threats.

Last year, federal officers confronted Giglio about a menacing email he sent to Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan. Reuters hasn’t independently reviewed the email, but the thrust of the message was made clear in the encounter – which Giglio himself filmed on his phone and later posted on Facebook.

Khan, whose office declined to comment on the incident, was being excoriated at the time by some of Trump’s most extreme political and media allies for her agency’s aggressive regulation of big tech companies.

Three Homeland Security agents in flak jackets approached Giglio in a southern California parking lot to discuss the email. In the video Giglio posted, one officer warned him about the email’s use of phrases such as, “you’re going to be raped, or you are going to be killed, or I am going to come after your husband.”

“I didn’t say I am going to,” Giglio shot back. “I said someone was going to come after your husband, right?”

After Giglio insisted that he had no plans to commit violence, the officer warned him about his language. “At some point a judge is going to say, ‘Okay, enough’s enough,’” he said. “Then you’re going to get arrested. ”Giglio told the officers they were being manipulated by a corrupt government, but assured them, “I will stop.”

But Giglio’s campaign of menace didn't stop. And despite the fear his messages may instill in the public officials he targets, his language makes it difficult to prosecute him, some legal analysts say.

By raising the prospect of violence as something he wishes others would do but doesn’t intend to do himself, Giglio creates hurdles for prosecutors, says Erica Hashimoto, a Georgetown University Law Center professor and former assistant federal public defender. “He’s said really insulting and awful and scary things to people, but they don’t necessarily clearly cross the line” of a chargeable threat, she told Reuters after reviewing a sampling of Giglio’s messages.

Still, Hashimoto and others noted that the volume and vitriol of Giglio’s messages could ultimately prompt prosecutors to charge him.

Giglio’s strategy for avoiding charges is far from foolproof, said Peter Simi, a Chapman University sociology professor who leads a research project that documents arrests related to threats against public officials. The past two years have seen the highest number of federal prosecutions to date, with 78 indicted in 2023 and 72 through August this year, the research shows.

Who gets charged can come down “to careful although imperfect linguistic analysis,” Simi said. He added that much is up to prosecutors’ discretion. He referred to the boundary between a threat and protected speech “as a huge gray area.”

At Reuters’ request, Simi reviewed a transcript of Giglio’s call to the Colorado state legislator Woodrow. In the voicemail, Giglio mused about the Democratic lawmaker being murdered. Giglio told Reuters he was incensed because Woodrow had responded to the Trump assassination attempt with a social media post describing well wishes for the former president as “sympathy for the devil” – a remark for which Woodrow later apologized.

Giglio said in the July 15 voicemail. “You think we’re the bad people?” he added. “Your time’s coming.”

Simi said Giglio’s use of “we” in his message, and the intensity of his statement, potentially implicate him as one of the people who might carry out future violence against Woodrow. “This one is very close and could go either way,” he said.

'You're gonna be molested'

Giglio saves some of his harshest language for women, including the wives of public figures who have crossed Trump or his allies.

In October 2023, Giglio went after the wife of Congressman Don Bacon, a Nebraska Republican and retired Air Force general. Bacon was being savaged in far-right media for not backing Representative Jim Jordan, a Trump ally, to be speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives.

Giglio said in one voicemail to Bacon’s wife. “You’re gonna be molested like you can’t ever imagine. And again, nonviolently.”

U.S. Capitol Police officers interviewed Giglio but opted not to charge him after concluding that he didn’t intend to act, Bacon told Reuters. Still, Bacon said, his wife began sleeping with a gun after receiving Giglio’s message.

Bacon’s wife declined an interview request. A Capitol Police spokesperson declined to comment on any potential investigations involving Giglio but noted that the police “will enforce the law anytime someone crosses the line from free speech to harassment or threats.”

Experts expressed concern about the potential for violence from people like Giglio, who own weapons and taunt officials, in the charged atmosphere around November’s election. “At what point do they feel like they have nothing to lose, other than to think they need to go out in the blaze of glory and kill somebody?” said Billy Williams, who coordinated responses to right-wing and left-wing violence during his tenure as U.S. Attorney for Oregon from 2015 to 2021.

Williams also highlighted the risk of election-related violence from the left, a point echoed by Simi, the academic. Simi reviewed 500 cases of people prosecuted for making threats between 2013 and 2022 and found about 45% had a clear political ideology, with the majority being from the far right. But for threats specifically linked to Trump, the disparity was less pronounced, with pro-Trump threats only slightly outpacing anti-Trump threats.

Trump critics often describe him as a dangerous and divisive threat to American democracy, while Republicans say the former president’s opponents foment violence with their rhetoric. Trump’s campaign notes, for example, that just before he was targeted in the July shooting, Biden said in a private call with donors that it was “time to put Trump in a bullseye.” Biden, who was talking about spotlighting Trump’s record, later called the wording “a mistake.”

But Trump has been especially willing since his political ascent in 2016 to use language that conjures violence and menace. He has praised the Jan. 6 Capitol rioters, called for the jailing of political foes, threatened the use of military force against social justice protestors, and said there were “ very fine people on both sides” after a deadly 2017 rally by white nationalists in Charlottesville, Virginia.

At least one person was killed and 30 others injured in Charlottesville, Virginia when white nationalists protesting plans to remove the statue of a Confederate general clashed with counter-demonstrators and a car plowed into a crowd on August 13, 2017.Reuters

Political violence occurs across the ideological spectrum, but the worst cases – fatal shootings and assaults – are more likely to be tied to the far right, according to a Reuters review last fall of more than 230 political violence incidents since the 2021 Capitol riot.

Of 22 fatal incidents during that period in which the culprit’s political views were identifiable, 15 were right-wingers. Conversely, left-wingers were far more likely to be responsible for incidents of political violence involving property destruction, such as vandalism associated with anarchists at social justice protests.

Path to radicalization

Giglio grew up in a Democratic family in Orange County, California’s historically conservative heartland. A high school drop-out, he hustled for business opportunities and eventually made a living from buying and reselling used computer equipment, he said.

Giglio has never been married but has a son from a brief relationship with a woman. He said a custody battle over his son, then a child, exacerbated his struggles with anger and depression.

In 2015, he launched a youth lacrosse program. The following year, he suffered a stroke that temporarily paralyzed his right arm and leg. In late 2017, the Internal Revenue Service ruled that he owed more than $100,000 in business taxes, Giglio said, but he couldn’t afford to pay. The IRS said it’s unable to comment on individual tax cases.

Giglio said he ended the lacrosse program after quarreling with parents over its direction and is now unemployed and on federal disability benefits due to lingering effects of the stroke.

Giglio said he never cared much about politics. But something clicked when he watched the 2019 effort by Congress to impeach Trump over allegations that he abused power by pressuring Ukraine to help him get re-elected.

Giglio had always considered CNN and MSNBC to be “real news.” But as he watched Fox News’ pro-Trump coverage of the hearings, he began to question the legitimacy of the impeachment.

The 2020 pandemic sharpened Giglio’s angst. He said he grew alarmed by the Black Lives Matter anti-racism protests and the resulting TV news images of looting and riots. He began to embrace claims by Trump and right-wing media personalities that socialists and anarchists were fomenting chaos. He became a regular listener of Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host who has amplified conspiracy theories. Carlson “became my go-to mainstream media,” he said. “Nobody is better than Tucker.”

Giglio hit the road, eager to see for himself what was happening. Sleeping in motels or his car, he visited social justice protests in Portland, where looting and vandalism drew national attention. After Trump lost the election that November, Giglio attended a MAGA rally in Washington, certain the vote was rigged.

Following Biden’s inauguration, Giglio grew convinced that leftists were colluding with corporate and media elites to create an authoritarian state “driven by money, power and greed,” he said. He expanded his media diet beyond Carlson to include vitriolic right-wing podcaster Dan Bongino and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. Carlson and Jones didn’t respond to requests to comment for this story.

Bongino didn’t reply to a Reuters request for comment, but he addressed it on his show, calling the reporter “a lying sack of sh*t”. Bongino also said he has repeatedly condemned political violence on his program as “absolutely an unacceptable red line we shouldn’t cross.”

By 2021, Giglio was calling congressional offices. Initially, he said, he “teased” the interns who answered the phones. He soon realized “shock calls” gained more attention. He wanted to hold politicians accountable for what he considered the systematic destruction of the country and send them a message: “Do you think you're untouchable?”

Last month, tired of roaming the country, Giglio settled near Florida's Vero Beach in a camper trailer.

On Aug. 27, he said he tuned into Info wars, an online conspiracy show run by Jones. The segment featured a clip from a CNN interview in which Booker, the Democratic senator, speculated on whether a loss by Trump in the 2024 presidential election would “kill” his influence over the Republican Party.

Furious, Giglio dialed Booker’s office and unloaded in a voicemail. He warned the New Jersey senator about “spouting your lies, that Trump did this and that.” Booker’s office declined to comment on the message.

Giglio said he is now bracing for chaos after November’s election and preparing to defend himself. He has fine-tuned the sights on his existing weapons – a rifle and two handguns – and bought a “huge knife.” He also has plans to buy an AR-15-style semiautomatic rifle. He believes America is heading for a lethal showdown between the left and the right, no matter who wins the election.

“I want to be wrong,” he said. “I fear for all the innocent people.”