By Brett Samuels - 09/10/24

Former President Trump is escalating his rhetoric around claims of fraud in the upcoming election and vowing to go after opponents if he wins, alarming critics who fear a repeat of the chaos that followed the 2020 election.

Trump over the weekend threatened to prosecute donors, lawyers and elections officials who he claimed “cheated” in the 2020 election or who engaged in behavior he deemed “unscrupulous” in November. And he elevated a dubious claim about fraud involving mail ballots in Pennsylvania, echoing rhetoric he used to cast doubt on the 2020 results.

Republicans have long argued Trump’s fixation on the 2020 election and his claims of widespread fraud are unhelpful politically, but critics viewed Trump’s most recent posts as a blaring warning sign about how Trump may react to November’s results, win or lose.

“As we head into the debate, an extreme and unhinged Donald Trump is further ratcheting up his dangerous threats of revenge and retribution,” Harris campaign spokesperson Ammar Moussa said in a statement.

“Trump is openly laying out how he will try to rule as a dictator on day one to go after his political enemies. Another thing is clear: For Donald Trump, it’s all about himself,” Moussa added.

The former president has spent the years since his 2020 election defeat continuing to claim there was widespread fraud and that the election was improper. Numerous court challenges in 2020 were thrown out for lack of evidence or standing, and Trump was indicted in Georgia and in Washington, D.C., over his attempts to overturn the election results and remain in power.

Trump warned Saturday that anyone deemed to have “cheated” in the 2020 election or in the 2024 election would face prosecution.

“WHEN I WIN, those people that CHEATED will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the Law, which will include long term prison sentences so that this Depravity of Justice does not happen again,” Trump posted Saturday on Truth Social.

He indicated that lawyers, political operatives, donors, voters and election officials could all be targeted with prosecution.

Trump on Sunday promoted an April interview ex-Fox News host Tucker Carlson conducted with an individual from a right-wing think tank who claimed at least 20 percent of mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania were fraudulent, a claim that would amount to major fraud by voters in both parties that went undetected by authorities.

Trump has for years cast doubt on the reliability of mail-in and absentee ballots, calling for single-day voting even as his campaign and the Republican Party have tried to encourage supporters to take advantage of early voting options. Experts have repeatedly debunked his claims about fraud and mail-in ballots.

Former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), who last week said she would vote for Vice President Harris in November, has been a target of Trump’s threats. She said in an interview Sunday that she is particularly concerned “when I listen to, you know, fellow Republicans in the past say things to me like, well, it’s fine, there are guardrails. You know, he can’t do that much damage. It’s just simply not true.”

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre on Monday called Trump’s rhetoric “dangerous,” tying it directly to the violence that engulfed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

The Harris campaign has signaled it will seek to remind voters of Trump’s conduct and rhetoric in the closing weeks of a neck and neck campaign.

“The former president, Donald Trump, makes very, very clear, not through his own previous actions — we all saw what happened on Jan. 6 — but through the rhetoric he espouses and the plans that he has in place, the danger that he poses,” Harris campaign communications director Michael Tyler said Sunday on MSNBC. “And so I think that’ll be very clear for the remainder of this campaign.”

Trump’s campaign has waved away attacks from Democrats and criticisms that the former president poses a threat to democratic foundations. Instead, they have pivoted to redirect those attacks back at Democrats.

North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum dodged a question about whether Trump’s social media post threatening election workers and donors was appropriate, instead calling for states to clean up their voter rolls.

Trump has claimed Democrats engaged in a “coup” to remove President Biden from atop the ticket after he won the party’s primary, a characterization Biden and others have rejected. And the former president and his allies have described his numerous legal cases as a form of “election interference” from Democrats intent on tearing down his chances in November.

“President Trump believes anyone who breaks the law should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law,” Trump campaign press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement.

“The real threats to democracy are the Democrats and Kamala Harris who support open borders, allow lawlessness in our cities, and are actively engaging in election interference with their unconstitutional attempts to remove President Trump and RFK Jr. from the ballot,” she added.

Democratic-aligned groups had previously challenged some of independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s efforts to get on the ballot in states across the country, worrying he would pull votes from President Biden. Kennedy has since scrambled to remove his name from the ballot in numerous states after he endorsed Trump.

But Trump’s rhetoric about the election and threatening his opponents has been the foundation for several prominent conservatives to come out in support of Harris. The likes of former Vice President Dick Cheney have not cited policy differences with Trump, but concerns about the threat he poses to democracy in endorsing Harris.

The Harris campaign plans to run an ad on Fox News during Tuesday night’s debate highlighting criticism of Trump from his own former administration officials who have deemed him unfit for office.

“In 2016 Donald Trump said he would choose only the best people to work in his White House,” a narrator says in the ad. “Now those people have a warning for America: Trump is not fit to be president again.”