Lawyers for Cesar Sayoc say Trump's rhetoric inspired his terrorist plot on Democrats
Cesar Sayoc, the fanatical Donald Trump fan who mailed package bombs to the president’s political opponents, is a cognitively limited sexual abuse survivor who thought of the now-president as a “surrogate father” and came to believe in an “alternative reality” fueled in part by Trump’s attacks on his political opponents, his attorneys told a federal court on Monday.
“President Trump did nothing to dissuade this message,” they write. Their filing cites Trump’s Twitter attacks on the figures Sayoc targeted. Sayoc, his lawyers wrote, “began watching Fox News religiously at the gym, planning his morning workout to coincide with Fox and Friends and his evenings to dovetail with Hannity.” With his use of steroids, they said, he became paranoid and delusional about the false news stories that clogged his social media feeds.
Federal prosecutors, in their own sentencing memo, said Sayoc should spend the rest of his life behind bars. Sayoc’s mother has called on Trump to tone down his rhetoric. “Our political leaders, like our President Donald Trump, need to recognize that there are many sick people in this country who take their rhetoric and words of ‘War with the Media’ and ‘War with the Democrats’ to heart,” Madeline Sayoc said in a statement last year.
Sayoc’s sentencing will come a few weeks after Trump launched a racist attack on four members of Congress and his supporters chanted “send her back” about Rep. Ilhan Omar .
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