Day: November 4, 2025

A man from suburban Chicago was arrested Monday for allegedly making a threat to kill President Donald Trump.

Trent Schneider, 57, of Winthrop Harbor, Ill., was charged with “making a true threat to injure another person in interstate commerce,” according to a criminal complaint filed by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Illinois, which also announced Schneider’s arrest.

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The complaint alleges that Schneider posted a video of himself on Instagram on Oct. 16, 2025, in which he said, “I’m going to get some guns. I know where I can get a lot of f-cking guns, and I am going to take care of business myself. I’m tired of all you f-cking frauds. People need to f-cking die, and people are going to die. F-ck all of you, especially you Trump. You should be executed.”

The video was posted several times on the account, which remains public as of Tuesday morning. The caption, which is repeated on all the posts of the video, reads: “THIS IS NOT A THREAT!!! AFTER LOSING EVERYTHING and My House Auction date is 11.04.2025 @realDonaldTrump SHOULD BE EXECUTED!!! SHE IS A #FRAUD and a #COWARD!!! SHE CARES NOTHING ABOUT YOU or ME!!!” The account also includes several posts of an image of Trump inside a red circle with a line through it (the prohibition symbol) alongside the same text.

According to the complaint, Schneider was the defendant in a foreclosure auction scheduled for Nov. 4.

“Most of what he does, they say you’re watching a movie, but people like me have suffered real f-cking crimes from f-cking judges, doctors, lawyers, police, they all should be killed. All of them should be executed for what they’ve done,” Schneider says in the video.

The caption on the posts also refers to former President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, claiming Israel was “behind” it. It also claims the earth is “hollow” and that Schneider is the “21st Century Messiah.”

Schneider made an initial court appearance Monday afternoon before a judge in Chicago and was ordered to remain detained in federal custody pending a detention hearing on Thursday.

According to the complaint, Schneider was previously investigated and arrested in 2022 for making threats to “shoot up” a T-Mobile store but was found unfit to stand trial.

Trump was the subject of several assassination attempts last year, and his Administration has taken responding to such threats seriously.   

Schneider’s threat against the President is just one of several against Trump since his second-term inauguration that federal and state authorities have acted on, but few have resulted in sentences, as the courts balance protecting the nation’s leader and constitutionally protected speech.

Here’s what to know about some of the cases.

Several threats since White House return

Federal and state authorities have arrested and charged numerous individuals for making death threats against the 47th President.

Richard James Spring from Michigan was sentenced to 18 months in prison, followed by two years of supervised release, on Oct. 20 after comments he made on X and TikTok—“I promise I will put a bullet in your head” and “I’ll kill Trump”—in January, after Trump’s inauguration.

In June, a complaint was filed against Peter Stinson, a former Coast Guard lieutenant from Oakton, Va., over posts he’s been making on microblogging platforms X and Bluesky that allegedly called for Trump’s assassination since 2020. According to prosecutors’ filings, Stinson made posts on Bluesky, including that he would “twist the knife after sliding it into his fatty flesh” and, “Can we crowd source a contract hit?” A grand jury indicted him on one count of soliciting Trump’s assassination for a February Bluesky post that read, “Take the shot. We’ll deal with the fallout.” But on Oct. 28, a grand jury acquitted him after his lawyers argued that what he said was constitutionally protected free speech.

In August, Nathalie Rose Jones was arrested over comments she posted on Facebook and Instagram, including: “I am willing to sacrificially kill this POTUS by disemboweling him and cutting out his trachea with Liz Cheney and all The Affirmation present.” The Justice Department said the Secret Service interviewed Jones twice: in the first, Jones had reportedly said “that if she had the opportunity, she would take the President’s life and would kill him at ‘the compound’ if she had to;” in the second, she denied that she had any present desire to harm Trump. In September, grand jurors in Washington, D.C., declined to indict her.

Also in August, Edward Alexander Dana, who was arrested on vandalism charges, was accused of threatening the President while in police custody. He allegedly said: “I’m not going to tolerate fascism…. And that means killing you, officer, killing the President, killing anyone who stands in the way of our Constitution…” But grand jurors also declined to indict him, with Dana’s lawyer Elizabeth Mullin telling the Associated Press that prosecutors are bringing “weak cases” to court and “the grand juries are seeing through it.” She added: “It’s a huge waste in resources.”

Joshua Levi Young, who served for 1 ½ years in the U.S. Air Force before his discharge in January 2024, was arrested late last month after allegedly posting messages threatening to kill Trump across his social media accounts. One Instagram post reportedly read: “I am going to kill trump raise him from the dead and kill him again.” Young’s case is ongoing.

Also in October, Derek Lopez was arrested and charged with threatening to kill the President on social media. The government affidavit said Lopez posted a video of a man holding up a gun before a picture of Trump with a crosshairs target illustrated on his head appeared on screen. And on X, Lopez allegedly posted: “I’m gonna kill Donald Trump, idaf.” That case is also ongoing.

The complex legal landscape of death threats

Threatening the U.S. President is a federal felony under Title 18 of the U.S. Code Section 871(a). Under that statute, it is a federal crime to “knowingly and willfully” make “any threat to take the life of, to kidnap, or to inflict bodily harm upon the President of the United States.” The statute carries a maximum penalty of five years imprisonment and a $250,000 fine.

But with the clause hinging on speech, courts have, over history, tried to bring more nuance in order to maintain a delicate balance between protecting the President and the First Amendment. The Supreme Court’s decision in Watts v. United States sets a foundation for distinguishing protected political speech from “true threats” against the President. That ruling said that political hyperbole does not constitute a true threat to the President.

The 2003 case Virginia v. Black defined “true threats” as “statements where the speaker means to communicate a serious expression of an intent to commit an act of unlawful violence to a particular individual or group of individuals,” adding that “the speaker need not actually intend to carry out the threat.”

“True threats” were further defined in a 2023 Supreme Court ruling in Counterman v. Colorado. The court held that to convict a person of making true threats, it must be proven that the speaker had a subjective understanding as to whether the intended recipients of the statements perceive them as threatening. 

But a memo from the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey on true threats against the President and local officials says that “threats that fall outside the boundaries of ‘true threats’ under the First Amendment may still warrant law enforcement attention and should be reported.”

U.S. Attorney for Washington, D.C., Jeanine Pirro, slammed juries for becoming “politicized” after the refusal to indict in a case her office pushed regarding Jones.

“A Washington D.C. grand jury refused to indict someone who threatened to kill the President of the United States. Her intent was clear, traveling through five states to do so,” Pirro told Fox News. “She even confirmed the same to the U.S. Secret Service. This is the essence of a politicized jury. The system here is broken on many levels. Instead of the outrage that should be engendered by a specific threat to kill the president, the grand jury in D.C. refuses to even let the judicial process begin. Justice should not depend on politics.”

Jen Golbeck, a University of Maryland professor studying extremism on social media, testified at Stinson’s trial as a defense witness. She told the Washington Post that, while she doesn’t encourage posting violent thoughts on social media, she was surprised to see Stinson charged with a federal crime for posting what she says was a “common” sentiment.

“There’s a lot of people online rooting for Trump to die,” Golbeck said, “and in that context, what he posted is so common that it feels like an alternate universe that he would be charged with anything, let alone solicitation of murder.”

Last fall, Salesforce debuted an AI agent so remarkably human-like it seemed like a vision from the future.

In a sleek demo, the company showed how luxury retailer Saks Fifth Avenue was using Salesforce’s new flagship AI software Agentforce to create “Sophie,” a charming, patient customer service representative. A Salesforce executive dialed a Saks hotline, the chipper-voiced Sophie picked up, and then deftly recommended a sweater based on his order history and talked through shipping options.

Sophie reflected the promise of AI agents, which have had no bigger booster than Marc Benioff.

Soon after unveiling Agentforce, the Salesforce CEO wrote an essay in Time Magazine, which he owns, declaring that agents would unleash “a revolution that will fundamentally redefine how humans work, live, and connect with one another from this point forward.” And he would lead this revolution, he boasted. In an interview with Business Insider around the same time, he said that Sophie was already live on Saks’ website. “That is what our customers are able to do” with Salesforce’s AI tools, he said, unlike those from one of his chief competitors. “Microsoft doesn’t have these examples, actually.”

In the weeks after Agentforce’s debut, Salesforce’s stock surged by more than 50%, peaking at an all-time high last December.

But a year later, shares are slumping as competitors’ stocks keep climbing higher. Some Salesforce investors, analysts, clients, and even employees say Benioff may have placed too many chips on a bet that is yet to pay off.

Salesforce’s public disclosures show that fewer than half of the company’s 12,500 Agentforce customers are paying. Of its total customers, less than 2% were having more than 50 Agentforce conversations per week as of this summer, according to people with knowledge of internal reports. A Salesforce spokesperson said those numbers are just one cut of data that doesn’t represent actual adoption or how the tool is being used.

Sophie is also not live as it debuted as. Today, when a customer calls Saks’ hotline, a robotic voice answers, and responds to basic commands before transferring customers to a human representative — an experience virtually indistinguishable from the technology that banks and airlines have been using since the 1980s. In August, Saks announced it’s partnering with Amazon and AI company NLX on a “new AI-powered virtual voice assistant named ‘Sophie.’“

Adam Evans, an executive vice president at Salesforce who heads Agentforce, tells Business Insider he can’t “comment on exactly what’s happening with Saks,” but that “actual tangible return on investment value is being created across thousands of our customers.” A company spokesperson adds that Salesforce customers have used Agentforce in more than 3 billion instances to date and that customers from Williams Sonoma to Singapore Airlines to the South American retailer Falabella “are seeing value as they ramp up use cases.” PepsiCo transformation officer Athina Kanioura tells Business Insider that the company is using Agentforce to help 1.5 million retail stores manage their orders of its products and is targeting 5 million stores by the end of 2026.

The struggles with agents and generative AI in general aren’t unique to Salesforce. An MIT report in July found that despite $30 billion to $40 billion in enterprise spending on generative AI, 95% of organizations report no return on investment. The management consultancy Gartner recently predicted more than 40% of agentic AI projects will be canceled by the end of 2027 due to “escalating costs, unclear business value, or inadequate risk controls.”

It’s not that Salesforce is necessarily behind competitors when it comes to agents, says Gil Luria, head of technology research at D.A. Davidson. It’s that the company “bet the farm” on an early and unproven technology and neglected their core business. “Salesforce became so focused on their AI product while the rest of their business … was decelerating very sharply,” he says. “They were paying too much attention to this new thing and not enough to what got them there.” A Salesforce spokesperson said Agentforce is part of its core business and “enhances every Salesforce application by making it agentic.”

“Salesforce is uniquely vulnerable because we don’t have a cloud business to fall back on,” one senior employee says. “Microsoft has plenty to fall back on, Amazon has plenty to fall back on.”

If you are a normal business with normal admins, you do not have the expertise to set this up.Kristi Valente, a Salesforce administrator since 2008

Agentforce is Salesforce’s No. 1 priority, according to a draft of the company’s annual strategic plan for its upcoming fiscal year. The annual plan is typically finalized by February. “Win the enterprise agent wars” is listed as the first method of success for Salesforce, dubbed “the agentic enterprise” in the internal document.

The company’s stock is down more than 20% year to date, while peers like Oracle and Microsoft are up around 55% and 24%, respectively. Salesforce’s revenue growth rate earlier this year slowed to single digits for the first time in its history as a public company. Another pressure point: An activist investor that pushed Salesforce into significant cost-cutting in 2022 (before selling many of its shares) increased its stake by nearly 50% this summer.

The stakes are high for every Big Tech company in the agent wars. For Salesforce, losing may be catastrophic.

Inside the company, some current and former employees say there’s been constant struggle for the teams scrambling to deliver on Benioff’s public promises of what their AI products can do.

Demos of software to customers or at Dreamforce, Salesforce’s annual blowout conference, often showcase concepts that are months or years away, and the company sometimes shifts direction before these products are built.

“It’s very, very difficult — even for people working on the products — to know the difference between what we say in a demo, what’s on a road map, and what’s actually in production,” one senior employee said. “It’s a full-time job just figuring that out.”

Some insiders say the current version of Agentforce, requires significant technical skill from Salesforce’s clients. Kristi Valente, a director of sales operation for a large appliance and electronics distributor, has been a Salesforce administrator helping companies use its software since 2008. She says the Agentforce demo her company received made it look like the technology was a lot easier to set up and less expensive to use. Her company purchased it in April and has yet to set it up.

“If you are a normal business with normal admins, you do not have the expertise to set this up,” she said. “We hired a consultant and even the consultant is confused. It’s too new for anyone to be an expert.”

In a statement, a Salesforce spokesperson said that since launching Agentforce, “we’ve learned a lot about the complexities of building agents,” adding, “We are committed to partnering with our customers as they embark on their technical journeys to becoming agentic enterprises.”

“We’re learning not every agent or use case is the same,” says Evans, the head of Agentforce. “A lot of the agents haven’t gone to scale because prompts alone are not enough. You need more.” For example, Salesforce has learned clients may not want an agent to be as creative as a chatbot when it comes to answering direct questions from customers, like how to process a return for an online order. For this reason, Salesforce has updated Agentforce with a “reasoning engine” to make sure the agent’s answers and behaviors are more predictable and reliable.

Some of Salesforce’s own salespeople said they struggled to grasp how the AI product they’re selling works or what it can do.

Salesforce required Agentforce training for salespeople, asking them to build, for example, a concierge agent at a fictitious hotel chain that could help a patron with things like booking a restaurant or renting beach chairs. Agentforce in one of those trainings required a “tremendous amount of work” even to set up basic functions like dinner reservations, an employee who participated in the training said. “Anyone who took that training knows Agentforce isn’t ready for primetime.”

“We invest in comprehensive, hands-on Agentforce training for all 75,000+ of our employees because we recognize the significant shift that large language models represent,” the Salesforce spokesperson said in response to the complaint. “This new software environment is fundamentally different from traditional design, which is why change management and knowledge transfer have never been more important.”

Kash Rangan, Goldman Sachs’ top software analyst, said at a briefing following the investment bank’s technology conference in September that analysts in general are giving “zero credibility” to the optimistic comments from software companies like Salesforce and executives like Benioff when it comes to AI. “They have a long way to go,” Rangan said of Agentforce. “It needs to scale.”

Rangan added that Benioff, prone to grandiose predictions and bullish forecasts, was more measured and not “extremely optimistic” at Goldman’s conference. “They are in the fight, and he’s being realistic about where they are right now,” Rangan said.

Despite that note of sobriety, and despite Agentforce’s struggles, Benioff has leaned into his signature quality: Extravagance.

During that same Goldman talk, Benioff discussed an ambitious target for Salesforce: $100 billion in annual revenue, nearly three times the revenue for its most recent fiscal year.

The grandiosity continued a month later at Dreamforce — the greatest, and most surreal show in SaaS — a three-day jamboree sprawling across downtown San Francisco that’s part Davos, part Disney World, part Radisson banquet hall, part Burning Man, and entirely Benioff.

The conference, which 50,000 people attended and which one executive once told BI costs Salesforce around $100 million per year, is studded with happy hours, concerts, celebrities, and even mascots. Signs heralded Gen Z-coded slogans like “You have an agentic aura,” and “Dreamforce, it’s a vibe.” Movie star Matthew McConnaughey, whom Salesforce pays a reported $10 million a year to be a “creative director,” held a session where he read poetry with journalist Maria Shriver. A “special guest” turned out to be Trump’s AI czar David Sacks, who posted a photo with Benioff kissing him on the cheek. There was a gift shop where people lined up to buy plushies of one of Salesforce’s mascots, “Codey the Bear,” and copies of Benioff’s 2019 biography “Trailblazer.” There was a Metallica concert. There was a Hawaiian conch-blowing ceremony. Gold sequined sweatshirts were handed out to at least one attendee in an annual tradition for achievements in the community of people who use Salesforce. “I hate that I’m in a cult,” one Salesforce customer said while describing this “Golden Hoodie” award.

“Dreamforce is a marketing event, it is a sales event, not an engineering event,” one senior employee said. “It is to create hype and invite big customers and take them out to parties.”

At Benioff’s AI agent-focused keynote address, his salesmanship was on full display. He paused his speech several times to shake hands with celebrities like musician will.i.am and titans of business like Michael Dell. He talked about the death of his “close personal friend,” famed primatologist Jane Goodall, and quipped to a PepsiCo executive in attendance how much his friend “Matthew” (McConnaughey) loves Doritos.

He said his company has not been “perfect” in rolling out the Agentforce product. Later, at a briefing for reporters, Benioff shut down a question about the lack of adoption of Agentforce. “It’s the fastest-growing product in our history,” he said. “There’s never been a faster-growing product. That we have that much already is way beyond anything we could have expected.”

At Dreamforce, the company also hosted its first investor day in three years. Benioff took the stage with the company’s senior leadership team and cracked jokes while revealing new guidance — like a slightly more measured $60 billion revenue target by 2030, and returning to double-digit revenue growth. It won over some analysts. “We came away feeling incrementally better after the investor day,” William Blair analysts said in a note. “Despite slow agentic AI adoption, we don’t think Salesforce is a technology laggard,” Macquarie analyst Steve Koenig wrote in a note after the session.

How much time can the Benioff show continue to buy Salesforce as it seeks to compete in the agent wars against companies like Microsoft, Google, and Amazon with seemingly unlimited resources and mammoth, diversified businesses to fall back on? Several Salesforce salespeople told Business Insider that in the days after Dreamforce, it’s already getting easier to sell Agentforce. “Hype needed to build,” one said.

Ashley Stewart is a chief technology correspondent at Business Insider. She reports on enterprise technology companies including Microsoft and Amazon Web Services from Seattle.

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