Former President Donald Trump has made more than 100 public threats “to investigate, prosecute, imprison or otherwise punish his perceived opponents,” NPR reported Tuesday.
Earlier this month, Trump ominously told Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo that members of the “radical left” represent “an enemy within” America that he said should be met by force.
But he’s been making such threats for a while, even telling a crowd at the Conservative Political Action Conference in March 2023 that “I am your retribution.”
Among the people Trump wants to see prosecuted if he returns to the White House are his former Democratic opponent Joe Biden, his current Democratic opponent Kamala Harris, and former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), who has become a prominent Republican Trump critic.
Many of Trump’s threats are connected with his ongoing lie that he won the 2020 election.
Legal experts told NPR that if Trump is reelected, there isn’t much that would prevent him from following through on his plans to prosecute opponents.
Just Security laid out a chronology of Trump’s efforts to pressure the Department of Justice to investigate his political adversaries during his time as president.
NPR reported that some people who are possible targets in a second Trump presidency are “considering whether to leave the country if Trump wins the election.”
Ian Bassin, the executive director of the nonprofit group Protect Democracy, which advocates for protections against authoritarianism, told NPR that Trump’s threats are in line with “how autocrats cement their permanent grip on power.”
As a supplement to the article, author and NPR correspondent Tom Dreisbach documented Trump’s many publicly available threats in a roundup on X, formerly Twitter.
The Trump campaign did not immediately respond to HuffPost’s request for comment.
However, Republican National Committee spokesperson Anna Kelly told HuffPost, “Kamala Harris is the threat to democracy. She and Joe Biden weaponized our justice system in order to sway an election,” an apparent reference to the federal criminal charges that Trump is currently facing.
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