On his day off from a criminal trial involving an earlier election, Donald Trump once again cast a familiar, ominous shadow over the next one.
“You have to fight for the right of the country” if the election was not “honest,” the presumed GOP nominee warned in a Wednesday interview with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, but he avoided answering the question of whether he would accept the outcome of his November contest for president against John Biden.
“If I were to say otherwise, it would be detrimental to the country,” Trump informed the newspaper. “No, I anticipate a fair election, and we anticipate a victory, perhaps a significant one.”
For some reason, the former president seems to think that he is the only candidate who can win an election fairly. “However, I will wholeheartedly embrace the outcomes if all is transparent, which we expect to be the case given the number of changes that have taken place in recent years,” he declared. Even though there was no proof of massive fraud in the 2020 election, Trump still refused to acknowledge that it was fair.
While in Wisconsin and Michigan, the former president was campaigning. However, on Thursday, his first criminal trial, where he faces charges of attempting to conceal a hush money payment to an adult film star by falsifying company records, was set to resume in Manhattan.
In light of his denial of defeat in 2020 because to his baseless accusations of voter fraud, his comments regarding the 2024 contest were particularly concerning. They also remembered his threat to his followers that they would lose their nation unless they “fought like hell” in the days leading up to the riot on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021.
Extreme rhetoric, of which Trump’s warning was the most recent example this week, shows that his dangers to American democracy remain undimmed.
He summoned a strongman’s nightmare picture of America’s future on a Michigan airport on Wednesday, as his unusually long red tie seemed to float on the wind, making the nation’s founders quake in their boots.
Trump transformed into an entirely different person from the gloomy former president who screams angrily outside Judge Juan Merchan’s court every day regarding his hush money prosecution. In what seemed like a direct challenge to the prosecutors attempting to hold him accountable in various instances, Trump utilized Wednesday’s rally, which was his most spirited in months, to demonstrate that a second term would put the law to the test even more so than his first.
“When I return to the White House, we will stop the plunder, rape, slaughter, and destruction of the American suburbs, cities and towns,” Trump promised, while simultaneously taking aim at the Democratic Party’s “communists and criminals,” the bureaucracy, and mass deportations of undocumented migrants. The nation is under siege from “radical extremists and far-left agitators who are terrorizing college campuses,” he said earlier in Wisconsin, updating his picture of a “American carnage” national hellscape.
Trump made the allegation that “New York was under siege last night” and lauded police for dispersing a rally at Columbia University in an apparent effort to cash in on the nationwide wave of university protests. Watching New York’s finest perform was a breathtaking experience. The fact that they’re using ladders to smash windows and get in is “very dangerous,” he said.
He has avoided large-scale rallies and fundraisers since the hush money trial began last month. (A storm forced the cancellation of an event in North Carolina.) For the first time ever, though, on Wednesday, a sitting president and prospective successor took advantage of a midweek recess in his own criminal prosecution to quickly traverse swing states that might propel him back to the Oval Office. A big audience in Michigan gave him a boisterous welcome, proving that his supporters still haven’t been swayed by days of potentially damning testimony.
Recent surveys show that Trump’s chances of becoming president are about even, and his assertive return to a position of power—rather than Judge Merchan—has further demonstrated his political threat to Vice President Joe Biden’s prospects of serving a second term. When it comes to specific problems, such as the economy, immigration, and the Israel-Hamas conflict, polls reveal that Trump is ahead of Biden. While visiting Florida on Wednesday, Vice President Kamala Harris hammered Trump 21 times over the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade and the state’s new six-week ban on abortion, bringing up one of Biden’s few strong points: abortion rights.
Former Obama administration senior strategist and current HEADLINESFOREVER political commentator David Axelrod gave Trump some honest feedback on Wednesday, following days of trial coverage that would have probably disqualified Trump in a different political era. I don’t see any indication at the moment that this is impacting the campaign in any way, so the real issue is, “What effect is this whole thing having on the campaign?” he stated.
“In many peoples’ estimation, this is a non-event. ” Axelrod told HEADLINESFOREVER’s Erin Burnett, although he did allow that the verdict might tip the needle.