Fresh from last week historic guilty verdictFormer President Donald Trump issued a warning to his political opponents on Tuesday.
In an interview with the conservative channel Newsmax, Trump appeared to suggest the possibility of jailing his political opponents if he becomes president again.
“So, you know, it’s a terrible, terrible path that they’re taking us down, and it’s very possible that this has to happen to them,” Trump said when discussing his guilty verdict.
“Does that mean the next president will do this to them? That’s really the question,” he added.
Talking about going after your political enemies has been a consistent topic of discussion during your campaign, which has started to resurface since the verdict.
At the beginning of his re-election campaign, Trump frequently raised suing the president Joe Biden.
“I will appoint a real special prosecutor to go after the most corrupt president in the history of America, Joe Biden, and go after the Biden crime family,” Trump said in June at his home in Bedminster, New Jersey, just hours after being arraigned in a federal court in Miami on charges related to his handling of classified documents after leaving the White House.
Trump also discussed his 2016 opponent, Democrat Hillary Clinton, and how he didn’t arrest her. “Lock her up” was a frequent chant at Trump campaign rallies — often fueled by Trump himself — during that election cycle.
But Trump blamed himself for not going after Clinton, compared to what is now being done to him.
“Some people said I should have done it, but, you know, I could have, it would have been very easy to do it, but I thought it would be a terrible precedent for our country,” Trump said. “And now, whoever you are, you’re going to have to look at things very differently. This is a very bad path they are taking us as a country.”
A Clinton spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In a Sunday interview with Fox News, Trump said his revenge would be his “success.”
“And I mean that, but it’s really hard when you see what they did. These people are so evil,” Trump said.
He also suggested that there would be a “breaking point“to the public if he ends up serving prison time or under house arrest after being found guilty in his silent trial.
On Thursday, a New York jury found Trump guilty on all 34 criminal charges in his hush-hush case, relating to the cover-up of payments to an adult film star to help with the 2016 campaign.
In the Newsmax interview, Trump complained about the jury at his trial, saying he “never saw a smile” from them and added that he did not get a fair trial.
Judge Juan Merchan, who oversaw the hush money case, placed a gagIt isR about Trump blocking him from talking about jurors, potential witnesses and individual prosecutors he has not denounced since the trial ended. During the trial, Merchan fined Trump $10,000 for violating the gag order.
Trump also attacked writer E. Jean Carroll, who said Trump raped her in a department store in the 1990s.
“I never met this woman,” he said of Carroll. “I don’t know this woman. And I should pay a ridiculous amount of money for a fictional story.”
Last May, a New York jury held Trump responsible for sexually abusing and defaming Carroll and ordered him to pay him $5 million. In January, after continuing to deny Carroll’s allegations and publicly attack her, he was ordered to pay her an additional $83 million for defamation.
This article was originally published in NBCNews. with
