A political scientist and author is warning that former President Donald Trump is already laying the groundwork for what could be another violent insurrection if he loses the November election.
In a Friday night interview with CNN, Barbara F. Walter — who wrote the book How Civil Wars Start — said Trump has so far been repeating the same rhetoric from his 2020 campaign. She observed that unlike most conventional presidential candidates, Trump is literally running for office to remain a free man. According to Walter, this means doing whatever it takes to win, including fomenting political violence.
"He wants to stay out of jail and he wants to get in the White House," Walter told CNN host Pamela Brown. "And this is sort of classic, mob-style bullying tactics. He's trying to intimidate jurors, intimidate judges, intimidate anybody who might have an influence on what the repercussions of this past trial are going to be."
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She noted that by attempting to convince his base that a win is inevitable, Trump is also communicating that a loss implies a stolen election.
"This will be the second consecutive election he will have lost, and he's priming them. He's priming them to be angry, to feel like a great injustice has been done to him, and for some of them, he's priming them to come out and fight to prevent him from losing yet again."
At that point, Brown asked Walter, "what do you mean, specifically? What exactly?"
"I think we'll see something similar to what we saw after the November 2020 election," Walter said. "He started talking about, 'we need to take our country back.' 'Come on January 6, it's going to be wild.' ... He's setting the doubt that there's no way could possibly lose, so that if he does lose people will feel that the election was illegitimate, that there was fraud, that his supporters need to fight back to correct what they will truly believe was an injustice."
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On the campaign trail, Trump has maintained the Big Lie by insisting that he was the true winner of the 2020 election and that President Joe Biden and the Democrats supposedly engaged in voter fraud to "steal" the election from him. Of course, Trump's former attorney general, William Barr, has said that there was no widespread fraud like the kind Trump described.
However, in private, Trump has been more willing to admit the truth. Author Ramin Setoodeh, who has interviewed Trump half a dozen times for his forthcoming book about the ex-president's old reality TV show, The Apprentice, said Trump uttered the phrase, "when I lost the election," to him before quickly retracting it.
Watch Walter's comments on CNN below, or by clicking this link.
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