Trump made the comments during an interview with the Spanish-language television network Univision. The host Enrique Acevedo asked him about his flood of legal problems saying: “You say they’ve weaponized the justice department, they weaponized the FBI. Would you do the same if you’re re-elected?”
“They’ve already done it, but if they want to follow through on this, yeah, it could certainly happen in reverse,” Trump replied. “They’ve released the genie out of the box.
“When you’re president and you’ve done a good job and you’re popular, you don’t go after them so you can win an election. They’ve done indictments in order to win an election. They call it weaponization,” Trump added. “But yeah they have done something that allows the next party, I mean if somebody, if I happen to be president and I see somebody who’s doing well and beating me very badly, I say go down and indict them, mostly they would be out of business. They’d be out. They’d be out of the election.”
Prosecuting political rivals is a hallmark of authoritarian regimes and Trump’s remarks are the most candid public revelations so far of the anti-democratic power he would bring to a second term as president.
The former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, who is challenging Trump but has lagged in the polls, said the remarks were alarming. “This is outrageous,” he said on CNN on Thursday evening.
He also warned that unlike Trump’s first presidential term, there would not be lawyers and other officials around Trump to stop his most authoritarian pushes. Trump allies are already preparing an effort to install far-right attorneys in the federal government who can back up Trump’s fringe ideas.
“You had good folks like Bill Barr who were keeping him on the rails and stopping him from doing stuff like this at the justice department,” Christie said. “Nobody as good and decent and honest as Bill Barr is gonna agree to be Donald Trump’s attorney general if he ever becomes president again.”
The comments also drew rebuke from a CNN panel on Friday morning, which implored Americans not to shrug off Trump’s remarks.
Even before Trump’s Univision interview aired on Thursday, the former secretary of state Hillary Clinton said Trump was clearly telegraphing an authoritarian agenda if he returns to the White House and compared him to Adolf Hitler.
“Trump is telling us what he intends to do. Take him at his word,” she said on ABC’s The View.
“Those aren’t flippant ‘ha-ha funny’ remarks,” Phil Mattingly, CNN’s chief White House correspondent said on air on Friday. “That’s insane.” Elie Honig, the network’s chief legal analyst, agreed and said Americans should “take him at his word”. “If he says he’s gonna do this, I believe him.”
Trump is the overwhelming frontrunner in the Republican race for the 2024 nomination and no rival has yet emerged to seriously challenge him. In recent national polls against Joe Biden, Trump has also frequently been shown to be ahead – unnerving many Democrats.
He faces a suite of lawsuits in key swing states, including Colorado, Minnesota and Michigan, seeking to bar him from running because of his responsibility for the January 6 attack on the Capitol. The suits argue that section 3 of the 14th amendment bars anyone who previously took an oath to the United States from holding office if they have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the US constitution.
The Minnesota supreme court ruled this week that the state could not block him from appearing on the primary ballot, but left the door open to future challenges.
Part of the reason the challengers are bringing these cases is because of the threat a second Trump presidency poses to the US constitution.
“The dangers are not merely theoretical. We saw what happened on January 6 2021 and if he’s allowed back into power that might be child’s play compared to what he’ll do in the future,” Ron Fein, the legal director for Free Speech for People, a left-leaning group behind several of the challenges, told the Guardian last week.
The Washington Post reported earlier this month that Trump and his allies were already discussing how to use the justice department to prosecute and exact revenge against people who have spoken out against Trump, including former attorney general Bill Barr and his former chief of staff John Kelly.
He is also reportedly considering invoking the Insurrection Act on his first day in office, should he win, which would allow him to deploy the military against domestic protesters.
Trump faces four separate criminal cases, including two different federal ones dealing with his handling of classified documents and his efforts to overturn the election. Both of those cases were brought by Jack Smith, a justice department special counsel appointed by the attorney general, Merrick Garland, to insulate the cases from political pressure.
If Trump wins the election, he would almost certainly fire Smith if the investigation is still ongoing, or pardon himself if he has been convicted.
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