Trump Threatens to Trap Opponents in Escalating Rhetoric

MOSINEE, Wis. — Days before his first and likely only debate with Vice President Kamala Harris, former President Donald Trump posted a warning on social media, threatening to imprison those “engaged in fraudulent behavior” in an election he said would be heavily scrutinized.

“IF I WIN, those who CHEATED will be held accountable to the fullest extent of the law, including long prison sentences, so that this miscarriage of justice does not happen again,” Trump tweeted late Saturday night, renewing doubts about the integrity of the election, even though fraud is extremely rare.

“Please note,” he continued, “that this legal exposure includes lawyers, political activists, donors, illegal voters and corrupt election officials. Those involved in fraudulent conduct will be tracked down, caught and prosecuted at a level, unfortunately, never before seen in our country.”

Trump’s message is his latest threat to use the presidency to exact punishment if he wins a second term. There is no evidence of the fraud he claims marred the 2020 election; in fact, dozens of courts, Republican state officials and his own administration have found he lost fairly.

Just a few days ago, Trump himself admitted in a podcast interview that he had indeed “lost by a whisker.”

Although Trump’s advisers and allies had urged him to focus on Harris and treat the election as a referendum on issues like inflation and border security, Trump has veered significantly off course in recent days.

On Friday, he made a shocking statement to news cameras in which he recounted a series of previous sexual harassment allegations, describing several of them in graphic detail even as he denied his accusers’ allegations. Earlier, he voluntarily appeared in court for an appeal hearing of a decision that found him liable for sexual harassment, focusing on his legal woes in the final phase of the campaign.

Earlier Saturday, Trump, campaigning in one of the most Republican areas in the key swing state of Wisconsin, invoked familiar grievances over everything from his impeachment records to Russia’s interference in the 2016 election.

“The Harris-Biden Justice Department is trying to put me in jail — they want me in jail — for the crime of exposing their corruption,” Trump said at a rally at a Central Wisconsin airport, where he spoke behind a wall of bulletproof glass because of new security protocols put in place after his July assassination attempt.

There is no evidence that President Joe Biden or Harris had any influence on the decisions of the Justice Department or state prosecutors to indict the former president.

Trump has forgone traditional debate preparations, opting instead to hold rallies and events, while Harris has been staying at a historic hotel in downtown Pittsburgh since Thursday, working with her aides.

Harris has agreed to one debate for now, which will be hosted by ABC.

At the rally, Trump outlined his plans to “drain the swamp” — a nod to his winning message from the 2016 campaign, when he ran as an outsider challenging the status quo. Although Trump has spent four years in the Oval Office, he has again vowed to “throw out the corrupt political class” if he wins again and “cut the fat from our government for the first time in a significant way in 60 years.”

As part of that effort, he reiterated his plan announced Thursday to create a new “Commission on Government Efficiency” led by Elon Musk that would be tasked with conducting a “comprehensive financial and efficiency audit of the entire federal government” to eliminate waste.

After further denigration of the congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the nation’s capital by his supporters after he lost the 2020 election, Trump told a crowd of thousands that he would “quickly review the cases of all political prisoners wrongly persecuted by the Harris regime” and sign their pardons on his first day back in office.

Trump has repeatedly defended people sentenced to prison for crimes, including violent attacks on law enforcement officers.

He added that he would “completely rebuild” what he called “Kamala’s corrupt Injustice Department.”

“Instead of persecuting Republicans, they will focus on dealing with bloody cartels, international gangs and radical Islamic terrorists,” he said.

Harris campaign spokeswoman Sarafina Chitika responded to his comments with a statement warning that if Trump is re-elected, he “will use his unfettered power to pursue his enemies and pardon the insurrectionists who brutally attacked our Capitol on January 6.”

Both Harris and Trump have made frequent visits to Wisconsin this year, a state where four of the last six presidential elections have been decided by less than a percentage point. Several polls of Wisconsin voters conducted since Biden withdrew have shown Harris and Trump in a close race.

Democrats consider Wisconsin a must-win “blue wall” state. Biden, who was in Wisconsin on Thursday, won the state in 2020 by just under 21,000 votes. Trump won in 2016 by a slightly larger margin of nearly 23,000 votes.

While Trump was campaigning, Harris took a quick break from debate preparations to visit Penzeys Spices in Pittsburgh’s Strip District, where she bought some spice blends. One customer saw the Democratic candidate and began to openly cry when Harris hugged her and told her, “It’s going to be OK. We’re all in this together.”

Harris said she was honored to have the endorsement of two leading Republicans: former Vice President Dick Cheney and his daughter, Liz Cheney, a former congresswoman from Wyoming.

“People are exhausted by the divisions and the attempts to divide us as Americans,” she said, adding that her main message during the debate will be that the country wants to be unified.

“It’s time to close the chapter on division,” she said. “It’s time to unite our country, to forge a new path forward.”

Trump held his rally in the central Wisconsin town of Mosinee, population about 4,500. It is located in Wisconsin’s mostly rural 7th Congressional District, a reliably Republican area in a purple state.

During his speech, he slammed Harris in dark and ominous terms, claiming that if the woman he calls “Comrade Kamala Harris” gets four more years, she will live in a full-fledged “Banana Republic” ruled by “anarchy” and “tyranny.”

Trump also sharply criticized the administration’s border policies, calling the Democrats’ approach “suicidal” and accusing them of “importing murderers, pedophiles and serial rapists from all over the planet.”

Multiple studies have found that immigrants, including those in the country illegally, commit fewer violent crimes than native-born citizens. Violent crime in the U.S. fell again last year, continuing a downward trend after a pandemic-era surge.

He has ignored warnings from U.S. officials about Russia’s ongoing attempts to spread disinformation ahead of the November election, including an indictment released last week alleging that a media company linked to six conservative influencers was secretly funded by employees of Russian state media.

“The Justice Department said Russia could be involved in our election again,” Trump told the crowd. “And you know, this time the whole world laughed at it.”

Among the crowd was Dale Osuldsen, who celebrated his 68th birthday Saturday at his first Trump rally. He hopes a second Trump administration will combat “cancel culture” and return the country to its “basic past.”

“We’ve had previous administrations that have said they want to fundamentally change America,” Osulden said. “Fundamentally changing America is a bad thing.”

Many supporters traveled hours from across Wisconsin to hear Trump speak, and some came from even further afield.

Sean Moon, a Tennessee musician who releases MAGA-style rap music under the stage name “King Bullethead,” played his songs from a truck in the parking lot of the event. As a musician, he said Trump’s rallies are akin to the experience of a raucous concert.

“Trump is a rock star,” Moon said. “He’s amazing. People see him as representing them and the deep state that’s trying to kill him and eliminate him. But he stands strong and represents normal people.”

Democrats have been relying on huge turnout in the state’s two largest cities, Milwaukee and Madison, to counter Republican strength in rural areas like Mosinee and the Milwaukee suburbs. Trump needs to win votes in places like Mosinee to have any chance of narrowing the Democrats’ advantage in urban areas.

Republicans held their national convention in Milwaukee in July, and Trump has visited the state four times, most recently last week in the western Wisconsin city of La Crosse.

Harris and her vice presidential candidate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, packed the same Milwaukee arena last month where Republicans held their national convention, a rally that coincided with the Democratic National Convention just 90 miles away in Chicago. Walz returned to Milwaukee on Monday, where he spoke at a union-sponsored Labor Day rally.