Donald Trump reserves the right to warn America and encourage his supporters to fight if he loses the presidential election.
When Time magazine asked President Trump if he thought the election would end in political violence if he lost, the former president replied: It’s always about the fairness of elections. ”
“If everything is honest, I’m willing to accept the outcome,” he later told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. “If not, we must fight for our country’s rights.”
When Mr. Trump says, “It depends,” there’s a problem here. He has never participated in an election that he recognized as fair.
Even when she won the 2016 presidential election, millions of non-citizens voted in California, claiming that Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party rigged the tally to deny her landslide victory in the popular vote. He claimed this without any evidence. An official investigation he ordered found no significant wrongdoing.
When he lost to President Biden in 2020 by 7 million votes, President Trump not only claimed that the result was unfair; He worked for months to overturn it, demanding state officials “find” thousands of new votes in his favor. After court challenges failed, he called his supporters to Washington and encouraged them to march on the Capitol.
“If we don’t fight like hell, we won’t have a country anymore,” he told them. The mob responded by breaking into the building.
He returned to that apocalyptic theme last week when he told supporters in Wisconsin that if Biden wins a second term, “we won’t have a country left.”
“Joe Biden is destroying our country,” President Trump said at the rally. “The enemy from within is more dangerous than China or Russia. …The fact is, I don’t think our country will survive.”
It was as if he was calling on his supporters to take extreme measures if he did not win.
And it was part of a long pattern. He warned in January that if four criminal charges were to prevent him from winning, the outcome would be a “domestic catastrophe”.
“This is opening Pandora’s box,” he warned.
In March, Biden posted a video on his social media accounts showing an image of him being hogtied like a prisoner.
And for months, he praised defendants convicted of violent crimes in the Jan. 6, 2021, riot as “hostages” and promised to pardon many or all of them if re-elected.
“He’s telling us his intentions just as he did before January 6,” Juliette Kayyem, a terrorism expert at Harvard University, recently told PBS. “Language is the language of incitement. … Even if he loses, we know from President Trump’s statements, and from what the FBI has said, that there are large groups and organizations prepared to continue the fight. I know for sure.”
Given the current state of the presidential campaign, there is a good chance that Trump will win, so a crisis like the one in 2020 may not happen again.
The average poll released by Fivethirtyeight.com shows a tight race for the national popular vote, but Trump won all six of the most important battleground states: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. It shows that
Trump used a break from his criminal trial in New York on Wednesday to campaign in Michigan and Wisconsin, reiterating his warnings about an unfair election process.
“The radical left of the Democratic Party rigged the 2020 presidential election,” he falsely claimed once again. “We will not allow them to cheat in the 2024 presidential election. We have no country left… 2024 is our last fight.”
For months, Mr. Biden has sought to remind voters that Mr. Trump, if re-elected, would violently violate the norms of American government and politics.
“Democracy is on the ballot,” the president often says.
By reminding voters that he has not accepted an obligation to recognize the results of the election he lost, Trump paradoxically strengthens Biden’s case.
For some voters, this election may force them to choose between preserving democracy and hoping for a return to the low inflation of the Trump era. It may not be an easy choice for them.
A survey conducted last year by the Public Religion Research Institute found that 38% of Americans believe the country needs “leaders who are willing to break the rules if necessary to make things right.” It turned out that there was. That substantial minority included 48% of Republicans.
When a Time reporter asked President Trump whether his rhetoric about ignoring the Constitution and ruling as a “dictator for a day” might alienate voters, the former president disagreed.
“I think a lot of people like it,” he said.
Unfortunately, he’s right.
