It is quite clear that Donald Trump and his supporters who took part in planning and executing the January 6th insurrection in Washington, DC aimed to kill as many members of Congress, government employees, and journalists as possible. Thanks to the January 6 Select Committee’s investigation to date, we know that the insurrection was planned weeks in advance by Trump and his inside and outside advisers. The J6 Committee played a video of one such Trump supporter, a YouTube blogger who goes by the handle “Salty Cracker,” exhorting his 750,000 subscribers to join in what was planned to be a bloody uprising in Washington on January 6. He said, “You better understand something, son. Red wave, bitch! There’s gonna be a Red Wedding going down Jan. 6 . . . Motherfucker, you better look outside. You better look out Jan. 6, kick that fucking door open and look down the street. There’s going to be a million-plus geeked-up, armed Americans.”
“Red Wedding” is a scene in the television series “Game of Thrones” that depicts unsuspecting attendees of a wedding feast becoming victims of a planned massacre.
Trump knew that many of the insurrectionists were armed and that they had a list of who they planned to murder. That list included Vice President Mike Pence and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, the second and third in the presidential line of succession. For some Trump supporters, the planned mass killing in Washington may have conjured up images from the Red Wedding in the Game of Thrones, but for Trump, who had been educated in the glory of the Third Reich by his Nazi-loving father, Fred Trump, Sr., January 6th was to be more like June 30, 1934. That was the evening when Adolf Hitler launched what was to become known as “The Night of the Long Knives,” a three-day killing spree that saw the execution of around a thousand of those who Hitler believed were his opponents. The executions took place around Germany and Hitler personally oversaw some of the executions at the Hanselbauer Hotel in Bad Wiessee, the headquarters of the Sturmabteilung (SA). Among those Hitler ordered shot outside the hotel were Breslau SA leader Edmund Heines and his 18-year-old gay lover, who Hitler had surprised in bed. One can hear Fred Trump, Sr. recounting to Donald how Hitler had personally dealt with the “degenerates” and “traitors” in the ranks of the SA, Nazi Party, and German government.
With that in mind, it is not surprising that Trump was counting on his armed mob to hang his own Vice President. After all, it was SA leader Ernst Röhm and his Brownshirt Stormtroopers who helped Hitler gain power. Röhm, however, was also seen as a potential rival to Hitler. The Night of the Long Knives was intended to eliminate anyone who could challenge Hitler. Similarly, January 6th and succeeding days, with Trump acting as a dictator with martial law implemented, would see to it that all of what he called “Never Trumpers,” RINOs (Republicans in Name Only), and “Radical Left Democrats” paid the ultimate price for disloyalty to Trump.
In addition to Röhm and his personal adjutant, Karl von Spreti, others executed included Nazi leader Gregor Strasser, the leader of an anti-Hitler faction of the Nazi Party; former German Chancellor Kurt von Schleicher; former Bavarian Minister-President Gustav Ritter von Kahr, who had forcefully put down Hitler’s 1923 Beer Hall Putsch; Herbert von Bose, the Secretary for Vice Chancellor Franz von Papen; General Ferdinand von Bredow, the head of the Abwehr, German military intelligence; Edgar Jung, von Papen’s speechwriter; and Erich Klausener, the head of Catholic Action and a close ally of von Papen. Vice Chancellor von Papen was also arrested by Hitler, who decided to spare his life and dispatched him to Vienna to serve as German ambassador. There are loud echoes of Trump’s plans for Pence in Hitler’s purge of his rivals for power and opponents. Had the January 6th mob seized Pence, they would have not only hanged him on the gallows erected on the west lawn of the Capitol, but Second Lady Karen Pence; their daughter, Charlotte; and Pence’s entourage would have likely also been victims. Trump, who continues to believe that Hitler did great things for Germany, obviously knows that when Hitler’s SS agents stormed into former Chancellor von Schleicher’s home to kill him, they also killed his wife, Elisabeth von Schleicher. For someone like Trump, whose businesses were successful largely due to his alliance with Italian and Russian mafiosi, “painting houses”—killing victims in their own homes—was a rite of passage in becoming a criminal overlord.
Salty Cracker called Trump’s planned bloody coup a Red Wedding. The Red Wedding, of course, is fiction. What is not fiction is The Night of the Long Knives, an event well known to Trump, thanks to the Nazi catechism in which he was strictly schooled by his ruthless and overbearing German-speaking father.
Using The Night of the Long Knives as Trump’s actual template for seizing power, the list of those marked for execution may be longer than Hitler’s. It is known that, in addition to Pence and Pelosi, those marked for assassination included prospective Senate Democratic Majority Leader Charles Schumer and Senator Mitt Romney (R-UT). Capitol video surveillance of insurrectionists casing the halls of Congress on January 5, 2021, provide evidence that others on the Trump “hit list” included Representatives Jerry Nadler (D-NY), the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee; Vice Chair Madeleine Dean (D-PA); and Democratic Judiciary Committee members Zoe Lofgren of California, Sheila Jackson-Lee of Texas, Steve Cohen of Tennessee, Hank Johnson of Georgia, Ted Deutch of Florida, Karen Bass of California, Hakeem Jeffries of New York, David Cicilline of Rhode Island, Eric Swalwell of California, Ted Lieu of California, Jamie Raskin of Maryland, Pramila Jayapal of Washington, Val Demings of Florida, Luis Correa of California, Mary Scanlon of Pennsylvania, Joe Neguse of Colorado, Lucy McBath of Georgia, Greg Stanton of Arizona, Veronica Escobar of Texas, Mondaire Jones of New York, Deborah Ross of North Carolina, and Cori Bush of Missouri; as well as Vice President-elect and Senator Kamala Harris (who was present in the Democratic National Committee headquarters when a pipe bomb was placed outside the building) and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY). There is also evidence, as seen in Trump’s ordering the Internal Revenue Service to conduct “special audits” of former FBI director James Comey and his assistant director, Andrew McCabe, that they remained at the top of Trump’s hit list.
Trump’s “termination,” as he called it, of senior Pentagon officials, including Defense Secretary Mark Esper, following the November 3, 2020 election and replacing them with loyalists like Kash Patel, Ezra Cohen-Watnick, Douglas Macgregor, and others, plus the presence of Michael Flynn’s brother, General Charles Flynn, on the Joint Staff, was obviously an effort to ensure military backing for the January 6th coup. That strategy was only partially successful when the Pentagon failed to quickly dispatch the National Guard to protect the Capitol complex. Just as General von Bredow was targeted by Hitler for assassination in 1934, Joint Chiefs Chairman, General Mark Milley, known to have issued countermanding orders in the event Trump had launched an unprovoked attack on China or Iran, may have likewise been a target for elimination in the January 6th putsch.
A nine-page plan called “1776 Returns” by Trump’s own version of the Brownshirts, the Proud Boys, outlines a scenario for them seizing control on January 6th of not only the Capitol Building, but all of the Senate and House office buildings, the Supreme Court, and the CNN broadcast center. There is no telling how many more names were on the hit lists for the insurrection, including the three liberals remaining on the Supreme Court and various cable news reporters and anchors.
Had it been successful, the January 6th coup would have been a Red Wedding. But for Trump, the romanticist for the Third Reich, it was to have been a Night of the Long Knives, which has become synonymous in the English language for the treacherous, violent, and ruthless removal of opponents and disloyal underlings. While Hitler’s list included Röhm, von Schleicher, von Bredow, von Kahr, and others, Trump’s list bore and still bears the names of Mike Pence, Nancy Pelosi, Mitt Romney, Chuck Schumer, Jerry Nadler, Dick Durbin, Bennie Thompson, Brad Raffensperger, Mark Milley, Liz Cheney, U.S. Judge David O. Carter, Adam Kinzinger, Adam Schiff, Eric Swalwell, Hillary Clinton, Jim Mattis, Paul Ryan, Tony Fauci, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Larry Hogan, Justin Trudeau, Lisa Murkowski, Jeff Flake, John McCain (who is deceased), Cassidy Hutchinson, Robert Mueller, Tom Rice, Letitia James, Fiona Hill, Stephanie Grisham, Kamala Harris, Joe Biden, and several others, including Democrats, Republicans, independents, U.S. citizens, and non-citizens.
Donald Trump clearly represents the greatest current threat to the United States, foreign or domestic. If Attorney General Merrick Garland, who has strangely not appeared on Trump’s enemies list, isn’t prepared to eliminate the threat of Trump, someone or something else should.
Previously published in the Wayne Madsen Report.
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Wayne Madsen is a Washington, DC-based investigative journalist, author and nationally-distributed columnist. A member of the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) and the National Press Club. He is the editor and publisher of the Wayne Madsen Report (subscription required).
