Man who vowed on TikTok to kill Trump will plead guilty, court records show

A Pennsylvania man who federal authorities said vowed on TikTok before President Donald Trump’s inauguration in January to kill him to stave off a “literal oligarchy” has agreed to plead guilty to making the threats, according to court documents.

The man, Jacob Buckley, 22, of Port Matilda, Pennsylvania, is facing a maximum sentence of five years in prison in connection with the remarks, part of a cycle of threats and political violence in the United States punctuated by the July 2024 attempted assassination of Trump at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.

In a plea agreement filed Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, Buckley accepted responsibility for his social media posts, which authorities said had violated a federal law that makes it illegal to threaten the president, president-elect or vice president.

Responding to a TikTok stream on Jan. 16, Buckley wrote a series of violent posts that referred to Trump’s pending inauguration on Jan. 20, authorities said.

“Bro we going into a literal oligarchy in 4 days and im going to kill Trump,” Buckley wrote, according to a charging document.

Twice that day, Buckley threatened to assassinate Trump and also target Trump’s supporters, authorities said.

Prosecutors said that Buckley wrote: “I hate MAGA republicans bro on god I’ll kill all of them.”

Buckley’s sentencing has not been scheduled.

A lawyer for Buckley did not immediately respond Wednesday to a request for comment. Neither did the White House.

The threats attributed to Buckley reflected the intense climate of political violence and tribalism in the United States in which Republicans and Democrats have been targeted.

While holding a campaign rally in Butler in July 2024, Trump was grazed on his right ear by gunfire from a would-be assassin, who killed a bystander and injured two others before the Secret Service shot and killed him.

Since then, several people have been charged with threatening Trump.

In April, another Pennsylvania man was arrested after saying he had planned to assassinate Trump, Elon Musk and other government officials in comments that he posted on YouTube, authorities said.

Democrats have also been confronted by hostile actors.

In 2022, an intruder broke into the San Francisco home of Nancy Pelosi, the former speaker of the House, and beat her husband, Paul Pelosi, with a hammer. The attacker, David DePape, was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

In 2017, Rep. Steve Scalise, R-La., who is now the House majority leader, was gravely wounded at a congressional baseball game practice session in the Washington, D.C., area by a lone gunman who was said to be distraught over Trump’s election in 2016.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.