Donald Trump warned America: if he loses the presidential election, he reserves the right to encourage his supporters to fight.
When Time magazine asked Asset Whether the election would end in political violence if he lost, the former president responded, “If we don’t win, you know, it depends.” It always depends on the fairness of an election.
“If everything is honest, I will gladly accept the results,” he later told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. “If not, you must fight for the rights of the country.”
When Trump says “it depends,” here’s the problem: He has never participated in an election that he recognized as fair.
Even when he won the 2016 presidential election, he claimed Hillary Clinton and Democrats rigged the count to deny him an overwhelming popular vote, claiming without evidence that millions of noncitizens voted in California. The official investigation he ordered found no significant irregularity.
In 2020, when he lost has President Biden by 7 million votes, Trump not only claimed the result was illegitimate; he worked for months to overturn it, demanding that state officials “find” thousands of new votes in his favor. When his legal challenges failed, he summoned his supporters to Washington and urged them to march on the Capitol.
“If you don’t fight like hell, you won’t have a country anymore,” he told them. THE the crowd responded by invading the building.
He returned to that apocalyptic theme last week, when he told his supporters in Wisconsin that if Biden wins a second term, “we won’t have any country left.”
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“Joe Biden is destroying our country,” Trump said at a rally. “The enemy within is more dangerous than China and Russia. … In fact, I think our country will not survive.”
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It was as if he was preparing his supporters for extreme measures if he did not prevail.
And it was part of a long pattern. In January, he warned that if his four criminal charges prevented him from winning, the result would be “chaos in the country.”
“It’s the opening of a Pandora’s box,” he warned.
In March, he posted a video on his social media account showing an image of Biden tied up like a prisoner.
And for months he has been praising the accused convicted of violent crimes during the January 6, 2021 insurrection as “hostages.” promising to pardon many or all if he is re-elected.
“He is telling us his intentions, as he did before January 6,” Juliette Kayyem, a terrorism expert at Harvard University, recently told PBS. “This language is incitement language. … If he loses, we certainly know from what Trump has said – and we also know from what the FBI is telling us – that he There are large groups and organizations preparing to continue the campaign.
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