A homeless Oklahoma man has been accused of issuing politically motivated death threats against President Donald Trump and his supporters, with prosecutors alleging that he blamed both groups for the circumstances that left him without a home.

"'I'm going to kill the President,' Howard Gimmey, 47, of the Oklahoma community of Midwest City," reportedly told people, according to a Monday report by Law and Crime's Chris Perez. Perez wrote that Gimmey insisted Trump and those who put him in power created the conditions that cost him his home. On a separate occasion, Gimmey allegedly declared: "I'm going to make those who put me here pay. And it's a long list of people now and sadly every single Trump voter is now added to that list. May God have mercy on you if you voted for Trump and you cross my path because you're gonna feel some ------- pain."

There is no information indicating whether Gimmey ever acted on his alleged wishes. Perez reported that, in Gimmey's case, "prosecutors allege that he 'knowingly' and 'willfully' threatened to take the president's life and inflict bodily harm, while acting 'with recklessness' as to whether his statements would be viewed as true threats of violence, according to a DOJ press release." He also noted that "Gimmey's public defenders have asked the court to require the government to prove that Gimmey understood that his words were considered threats."

That mental-state question is often where such cases turn. Knowingly and willfully threatening to take the president's life or inflict bodily harm on him is a federal offense under 18 U.S.C. § 871, punishable by up to five years in prison, and the Supreme Court raised the bar for true-threat prosecutions in Counterman v. Colorado (2023), holding that the First Amendment requires proof that a speaker at least recklessly — consciously disregarding a substantial risk that his words would be viewed as threats of violence. That standard built on the court's 2003 Virginia v. Black ruling, which defined a true threat as a statement meant to communicate a serious expression of intent to commit an act of unlawful violence. How the court handles the defense's request against that backdrop will help determine how much of the government's case hinges on what Gimmey understood his own words to mean.

The administration has frequently accused Trump's opponents of being inherently violent toward the president. In 2024, when an Alternet journalist asked the Trump campaign about people who compare the president to Adolf Hitler, his press secretary Karoline Leavitt rejected the premise of the question, saying, "it's been less [than] 72 hours since the second assassination attempt on President Trump's life and the media is already back to comparing President Trump to Hitler. It's disgusting."

She added, "This is why Americans have zero trust in the liberal mainstream media."

By contrast, Trump voters have been linked to numerous acts of violence, from the January 6th insurrection and attacks on protesters at rallies to threats against judges, lawmakers, and other officials whom the president has publicly attacked.

"There is a close relationship between Trump and violence — not just the attempts on his life but also the violence he's unleashed on the world, the violence his ICE and Border Patrol agents have caused inside America, the violence he has incited among his followers," former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich wrote for AlterNet in April. "Trump's violence has resulted in thousands of deaths and injuries. That is no justification for last night's attack, of course, but it is part of what he has wrought in America. He has changed the script in Washington."