Donald Trump, who fancies himself the victim of “lawfare” by Democrats, once again threatened on Tuesday to weaponize his government against political opponents if he wins back the White House, suggesting in a Newsmax interview that he would seek to jail the “nasty, vicious people” who have wronged him. “They’re crooked as hell,” Trump said of the Democrats he baselessly claims have unjustly engineered his historic conviction. “It’s a terrible, terrible path that they’re leading us to,” he continued. “And it’s very possible that it’s gonna have to happen to them.”
This isn’t the first time Trump has fantasized about political prosecutions; this is the same guy, you may recall, who made “lock her up!” a rallying cry for his supporters during his 2016 race against Hillary Clinton. As he himself faces the prospect of prison time, Trump now—absurdly—denies having called for her or Joe Biden to be jailed. Speaking to Newsmax Tuesday, the former president slightly amended that denial: His supporters were the ones chanting “lock her up” because “everybody got a kick out of it,” he explained to host Greg Kelly, but he thought that it would be “really bad, like, as an example” to actually follow through with such prosecution—even though it would have been “easy” for him to get his Justice Department to do so. “Wouldn’t that be a terrible thing?” he said. “But they”—apparently meaning Democrats—“want to do it.”
A couple things that should go without saying, but are worth saying anyway: Trump was not brought down by his political opponents; he was convicted of 34 felonies by a jury of his peers, after going through the same legal process as everyone else. Speaking to Newsmax, Trump complained that the jury never gave him a “glimmer of a smile”—evidence, to him, that he got an unfair trial. But he’s not receiving unfair treatment due, as he’s suggested, to his presidential bid. In fact, if anything, his status as the former and potentially future president has insulated him from full accountability: His three other trials—including his two election subversion cases, the most serious of the four prosecutions against him—are unlikely to happen before the November election, thanks in part to the legal defense funds he’s raised from campaign donations. If Trump wins, any political investigations he sets in motion won’t be because Democrats set a “terrible precedent” but, rather, because he’d use the DOJ as his own personal injury law firm.
“Do you regret not locking [Clinton] up?” Glenn Beck asked him last year. “And if you’re president again, will you lock people up?”
“The answer is you have no choice,” Trump replied, “because they’re doing it to us.”
Trump isn’t alone in talking about imprisoning MAGA foes; Steve Bannon told Axios that Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan DA who prosecuted the Trump hush-money case, “should be—and will be—jailed” if Trump wins in November. The threats of prosecution also are not limited to Democratic officials; Trump has also openly fantasized about imprisoning journalists.
This shouldn’t be dismissed as mere bluster; it speaks to his authoritarian aspirations, to the grave danger he poses to democracy. The system weathered that storm once already, but there’s no guarantee it would do so a second time—particularly as he vows “retribution” and surrounds himself with sycophants more willing, and perhaps better prepared, to help him execute his plans. “The threat Trump poses would be greater in a second term than it was in his first,” as Biden said at a campaign reception this week. “This isn’t the same Trump that got elected in 2016. He’s worse.”
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