Donald Trump appeared to disclose what he’ll do if President Joe Biden beats him a second straight time in November ― and it’s troubling to say the least.
In an interview Wednesday with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Trump said of the upcoming presidential showdown, “If everything’s honest, I’ll gladly accept the results. I don’t change on that. If it’s not, you have to fight for the right of the country.”
In other words, it sounds like he’ll dispute any outcome in which he is not the winner.
It’s the same kind of rhetoric on which he built his lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him. That prompted a violent coup attempt to stop certification of the results and charges against him for allegedly scheming to overturn the outcome.
In an interview with Time magazine published this week, Trump suggested there would be no political violence if he wins the November election — but “if we don’t win, you know, it depends.”
Trump spent an off-day from his trial in the hush-money case campaigning in Wisconsin, where he baselessly claimed victory in that state the last time around.
“If you go back and look at all of the things that had been found out, it showed that I won the election in Wisconsin,” Trump told the Journal Sentinel. “It also showed I won the election in other locations.”
After Trump beat Hillary Clinton in Wisconsin in the 2016 election en route to the presidency, he lost the state to Joe Biden by more than 20,000 votes in 2020. It’s a defeat he has refused to accept.
A bipartisan audit in 2021 determined there was no widespread fraud in the state’s election after Biden’s victory weathered recounts and court rulings.
In 2022, Trump suggested that a court-ordered reduction in drop boxes for absentee ballots in Wisconsin meant that the votes counted from those boxes in 2020 were somehow bogus.
“This means I won the very closely contested (not actually) Wisconsin Presidential race because they used these corrupt and scandal-ridden Scam Boxes,” he falsely wrote on Truth Social at the time.
