By The New York Times (U.S.) | Created at 2024-10-26 21:23:30 | Updated at 2024-10-26 23:30:09
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Top military leaders and high-ranking former officials from his administration have issued warning after warning that Donald J. Trump would rule as a dictator if given the chance.
Oct. 26, 2024, 5:05 p.m. ET
A campaign marked by Donald J. Trump’s apocalyptic extremes has turned even darker in its final days.
With voting already underway in battleground states, the former president on Friday escalated his threats to prosecute and imprison a wide range of people involved in elections and politics. Hours later, on the hugely popular “The Joe Rogan Experience” podcast, he said that the “enemy within,” a phrase he has used to describe political opponents, poses a bigger threat to the nation than North Korea.
For eight years, Democrats have warned that Mr. Trump’s political ambitions have fueled some of the nation’s deepest divides. But in his third presidential bid, those worries have metastasized into fear that another term for Mr. Trump would threaten the founding principles of the Republic. As the campaign comes to a close, a series of people who know him well, including top military leaders and high-ranking former officials from his administration, have warned that Mr. Trump, who has sought to project his victory as all but assured, would rule as a dictator if given the chance.
Republicans say such concerns are overblown. But Vice President Kamala Harris has intensified her own alarms about Mr. Trump, switching the joyful tenor of the early days of her campaign to stark warnings that he would govern as an authoritarian and curtail what she casts as core American freedoms — like a woman’s right to terminate a life-threatening pregnancy. There are also hints that Mr. Trump’s dark promises are affecting the political choices of business leaders and media outlets owned by them.
For Mr. Trump, the personal stakes go beyond the outcome of what polls indicate is a dead heat. The former president is running not only for the White House but also to remain a free man. Should he lose, he may very well face jail time.
It has left voters facing a bleak choice over the country’s democracy — one that has never before been litigated in an American presidential election.
In a post on his social media site on Friday, Mr. Trump wrote that those who “cheated” in the election would face “long-term prison sentences” and would “be sought out, caught, and prosecuted at levels, unfortunately, never seen before in our Country.” The phrasing was almost exactly the same as a post from September. But less than two weeks before Election Day, his words carry new resonance.
