Donald Trump has long used strongman-style threats to prosecute people he vilifies as a campaign tactic, dating back to encouraging his 2016 rallygoers to chant “lock her up” about Hillary Clinton. And during his term as president, he repeatedly pressed the Justice Department to open investigations into his political adversaries.
But as November nears, the former president has escalated his vows to use the raw power of the state to impose and maintain control and to intimidate and punish anyone he perceives as working against him.
After Democrats replaced President Joe Biden with Vice President Kamala Harris as their 2024 nominee — and Trump’s lead in the polls eroded — Trump’s targets expanded.
He has been laying the groundwork to claim that there was large-scale voter fraud if he loses, a familiar tactic from his 2016 and 2020 playbooks, but this time coupled with threats of prosecution. Those who may face criminal scrutiny for purported efforts at election fraud, Trump has declared, will include election workers, a tech giant, political operatives, lawyers and donors working for his opponent.
Over the past month, he has shared a post calling for former President Barack Obama to be subject to “military tribunals” and reposted fake images of well-known Democrats clad in prison garb. He has threatened Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg with a life sentence for helping state and local governments fund elections in 2020. He stoked fears of voter intimidation by urging police officers to “watch for the voter fraud” at polling places because some voters may be “afraid of that badge,” and warned that people deemed to have “cheated” in this election “will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”
“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 wrote on his website Truth Social on Saturday.
He added: “Those involved in unscrupulous behavior will be sought out, caught, and prosecuted at levels, unfortunately, never seen before in our Country.”
(Travis Dove | The New York Times) Signs supporting former President Donald Trump during a campaign appearance at a Fraternal Order of Police conference, where he called on police to make their presence known at polling places, in Charlotte, N.C., Sept. 6, 2024. As Election Day in November nears, the former president has escalated his vows to use the raw power of the state to impose and maintain control and to intimidate and punish anyone he perceives as working against him.
In his latest book, “Save America,” Trump threatened Zuckerberg, who in 2020 donated, with his wife, more than $400 million to nonpartisan groups that helped local election agencies deal with the COVID-19 pandemic, such as by expanding access to mail-in balloting. Trump has falsely portrayed that effort as an illegal contribution to the 2020 Biden campaign.
“We are watching him closely, and if he does anything illegal this time he will spend the rest of his life in prison” Trump wrote. (Amid Trump’s threats, which he has also posted on social media and delivered in interviews and at rallies, Zuckerberg has sought to smooth things over, describing the former president’s raised-fist response to the attempted assassination as “badass” and saying he would not get involved this election cycle.)
Trump’s portrayal of people he perceives as his political opponents as election criminals is particularly striking in light of his own record.
He has been convicted of 34 felonies for altering business records to cover up a hush-money payment in the 2016 election that violated campaign finance laws, and he has been charged in both federal and state court with conspiring to fraudulently alter the outcome of the 2020 election. Whenever Trump’s own actions come under legal scrutiny, he portrays law enforcement efforts as illegitimate and politicized.
In a statement, the Trump campaign defended his recent threats without pointing to any evidence of a conspiracy underway to commit major voter fraud.
“President Trump believes anyone who breaks the law should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, including criminals who engage in election fraud,” said Karoline Leavitt, a Trump campaign spokesperson. “Without free and fair elections, you can’t have a country. Ask Venezuela.”
Trump often likes to say people should be prosecuted as a way of disparaging them, sometimes with no obvious connection to any law. Among them: people involved in enacting California laws aimed at protecting transgender students, a group of retired intelligence officials who in October 2020 signed a letter expressing their opinion that apparent Hunter Biden emails reported on by The New York Post might be from a Russian information operation, and critics of conservative judges.
While some of what Trump has called for could be discounted as his usual hyperbolic, norm-busting rhetoric, his record in office suggests that other parts of what he is saying cannot be treated as unserious or figurative.
As president, Trump repeatedly pressured the Justice Department to prosecute his political adversaries, including Clinton. At his urging, the department opened several politically tinged criminal investigations, from the scrutiny of former Secretary of State John Kerry and of former FBI Director James Comey to the attempt by a special counsel, John Durham, to find a basis to charge Obama-era national security officials or Clinton with crimes connected to the origins of the Russia investigation.
But to Trump’s fury, prosecutors did not ultimately find an evidentiary basis to bring charges against such figures.
(Jamie Kelter Davis | The New York Times) Former President Donald Trump speaks at a campaign event in Mosinee, Wis., on Sept. 7, 2024. In a social media post on Saturday, Trump wrote that “when I win, those people that cheated will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”
Since Trump left office, several allies who have stayed on good terms with him — including Jeffrey Clark, a former Justice Department official who helped Trump try to overturn the 2020 election — have developed a blueprint to make the department in a second Trump term more systematically subject to direct White House control, erasing the post-Watergate norm of Justice Department investigative independence.
And Trump has made clear he plans to direct Justice Department investigations if he gets another term, starting with a vow to direct a prosecutor to “go after” Biden and his family. He has also threatened criminal investigations of prosecutors who have brought charges against him.
Trump’s intent to unleash the coercive force of the government in a second administration is not limited to the Justice Department. He has promised to unilaterally deploy federal troops on domestic soil for several law enforcement purposes, including to suppress crime in big cities run by Democrats.
He wants to unleash prosecutors to go after a broad range of people — but also to charge with crimes some prosecutors who displease him.
Attacking the Black prosecutors who investigated him in New York and Georgia, Trump has said he would “direct a completely overhauled” Department of Justice “to investigate every radical, out-of-control prosecutor in America for their illegal, racist-in-reverse enforcement of the law.” He has repeated this threat at dozens of campaign stops.
At the same time, he has made a motif of calling for immunizing or indemnifying local police officers from legal consequences if they break the law themselves while fighting crime. (In this vein, he has encouraged police officers to summarily shoot shoplifters as they leave stores — a brazenly illegal act.)
Trump has posed for photos with police officers who are guarding his motorcade during campaign stops, including one while he was in New York City for his criminal trial; his aides have posted those images on social media, appearing to signal that those forces approve of him. Many police unions have endorsed Trump, and in a speech before the Fraternal Order of Police on Friday, he called on local law enforcement officers to send an intimidating message to voters in order to prevent supposed cheating by Democrats.
“I hope you can watch — and you’re all over the place — watch for the voter fraud. Because we win — without voter fraud, we win so easily,” Trump said. “Hopefully we’re going to win anyway. But we want to keep it down, you can keep it down just by watching. Because, believe it or not, they’re afraid of that badge. They’re afraid of you people.”
Trump at times has also seemed to invite vigilantism as another form of coercive force. In the 2016 campaign, he offered to pay the legal bills of any supporters who beat up protesters at his rallies. More recently, he has vowed to pardon supporters charged with or convicted of crimes as part of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.
When federal prosecutors last year sought a gag order barring Trump from vilifying people related to the election subversion case, they cited a series of threats and other harassment endured by election workers and others he has attacked, saying he “knows that when he publicly attacks individuals and institutions, he inspires others to perpetrate threats and harassment against his targets.”
Trump has exhibited a lifelong view of the criminal justice system and the exercise of state coercive force as an instrument of power to be used to impose order, not as a system in which innocence is presumed or restraint is the ideal.
In 1989, when five Black and Latino teenagers were accused of the brutal rape of a jogger in New York City’s Central Park, he took out newspaper ads calling for New York state to adopt the death penalty. (The teenagers were later exonerated, and officials found that police had coerced false confessions.) The following year, Trump expressed admiration for how the Chinese Communist Party had used its military and “the power of strength” to crush the pro-democracy protest in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square.
Trump has also spoken of turning both federal law enforcement power and the fear of extrajudicial violence upon members of the news media, which he has long maligned as the “enemy of the people.” He has repeatedly suggested prison rape as a means of inducing the Politico reporters who in 2022 obtained and published a leaked draft of the Supreme Court decision that would end abortion rights to reveal their source.
“You get the information very easily,” Trump said at a November 2022 rally. “You tell the reporter, ‘Who is it?’ and the reporter will either tell you or not. And if the reporter doesn’t want to tell you, it’s bye-bye. The reporter goes to jail. And when the reporter learns that he’s going to be married in two days to a certain prisoner, that’s extremely strong, tough and mean, he will say, you know — he or she — ‘You know, I think I’m going to give you the information. Here’s the leaker. Get me the hell out of here!’”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.