Former President Trump has escalated his rhetoric over his claims of fraud in the upcoming election and vowed to go after his opponents if he wins, alarming critics who fear a repeat of the post-2020 election unrest.
Trump threatened over the weekend to prosecute donors, lawyers and election officials he claims “rigged” the 2020 election or engaged in conduct he deemed “immoral” in November, and he also brought up dubious claims about fraud involving mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania, repeating the rhetoric he used to cast doubt on the results of the 2020 election.
Republicans have long argued that Trump's obsession with the 2020 election and claims of widespread fraud are politically futile, but critics saw his latest posts as clear warning signs about how he will react to the results of November's election, whether he wins or loses.
“As the debate approaches, the extreme and outrageous Donald Trump has doubled down on his dangerous threats of revenge and retaliation,” Harris campaign spokesman Amaal Moosa said in a statement.
“From day one in office, Trump has openly stated that he intends to rule as a dictator and hunt down his political opponents. Another thing that is clear is that for Donald Trump, it's all about him,” Musa added.
The former president has continued to claim since his loss in the 2020 election that there was widespread fraud and the election was illegitimate. Many lawsuits in 2020 were dismissed for lack of evidence or standing, and Trump was indicted in Georgia and Washington, D.C., for trying to overturn the election results and remain in power.
President Trump warned Saturday that anyone deemed to have “fraudulent” activities in the 2020 or 2024 elections will be prosecuted.
“If I win, those who cheated will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, including long prison sentences, to ensure this kind of perversion of justice never happens again,” Trump posted on Truth Social on Saturday.
He suggested that lawyers, political activists, donors, voters and election officials could all be subject to prosecution.
President Trump on Sunday touted an April interview with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson from a right-wing think tank in which Carlson claimed at least 20% of mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania were fraudulent, a claim that amounted to significant fraud by voters of both parties that went undetected by authorities.
Trump has long cast doubt on the reliability of mail-in and absentee voting and has called for one-day voting even as his campaign and the Republican Party urge their supporters to take advantage of early voting options. Experts repeatedly His Fraud claims And mail-in voting.
Former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), who said last week she would vote for Vice President Harris in the November election, has been a target of Trump's threats. “It's particularly troubling when I hear Republican colleagues in the past say to me, 'OK, we're going to be OK, there are guardrails.' He can't do that much damage. That's just not true,” she said in an interview on Sunday.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre on Monday called Trump's comments “dangerous” and directly linked them to the violence that stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Harris' campaign has said it plans to try to remind voters of Trump's actions and rhetoric in the final weeks of the close race.
“Former President Donald Trump has made it very clear the danger he poses, not just through his own past actions, but through the rhetoric that he's promoting and the agenda that he's putting in place — and we all know what happened on January 6th –,” Michael Tyler, communications director for the Harris campaign, said on MSNBC on Sunday. “So I think that's going to be very clear for the remainder of this campaign.”
The Trump campaign has ignored the attacks from Democrats and criticism that the former president poses a threat to the foundations of democracy, instead redirecting the attacks on Democrats.
North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum (Republican) avoided questions about whether President Trump's social media posts threatening election workers and donors were appropriate, instead calling on states to clean up their voter rolls.
Trump has alleged that he staged a “coup” to remove President Biden from his top position after winning the Democratic primary, a charge Biden and others deny, and he and his allies have portrayed his lawsuits as a form of “election interference” by Democrats trying to destroy Trump's chances of winning the November election.
“President Trump believes that anyone who breaks the law should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law,” Trump campaign spokeswoman Caroline Leavitt said in a statement.
“The real threat to our democracy is the Democrats and Kamala Harris, who support open borders, allow lawlessness in our cities and actively engage in election interference in an unconstitutional attempt to remove President Trump and President Kennedy Jr. from the ballot,” she added.
Democratic groups previously objected to efforts by independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to appear on the ballot in states across the country, fearing he would steal votes for President Biden. Kennedy has since pushed to remove his name from the ballot in many states after endorsing Trump.
But Trump's rhetoric about the election and his threats to his opponents have given many prominent conservatives reason to endorse Harris, with former Vice President Dick Cheney arguing they are concerned not about policy differences with Trump but the threat that her support poses to democracy.
The Harris campaign plans to run an ad on Fox News during Tuesday night's debate highlighting criticism of Trump from former administration officials who have deemed him unfit for the presidency.
“In 2016, Donald Trump said he would only choose the best people to work in the White House,” the ad's narrator says. “Now those same people are sounding a warning to America: Trump is unfit to serve as president again.”
