Fresh off last week’s historic conviction, former President Donald Trump had a warning for his political opponents on Tuesday.
In an interview with the conservative newspaper 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 leading us down, and it’s very possible that it’s going to happen to them,” Trump said as he discussed his guilty verdict.
“Does this mean the next president will do this to them? That’s really the question,” he added.
Talk of going after his political enemies has been a consistent talking point during his campaign, resurfacing since the verdict.
Early in his re-election campaign, Trump regularly brought up the president’s prosecution Joe Biden.
“I will appoint a real special prosecutor to go after the most corrupt president in the history of America, Joe Biden, and the Biden crime family,” Trump said in June at his residence in Bedminster, New Jersey, just hours after he was killed. indicted at a federal courthouse in Miami on charges of handling classified documents after leaving the White House.
Trump also discussed his 2016 opponent, Democrat Hillary Clinton, and how he avoided jailing her. “Lock her up” was a common chant at Trump campaign rallies — often fueled by Trump himself — during that election cycle.
But Trump gave himself credit for not going after Clinton, compared to what is being done to him now.
“Some people said I should have done it, but you know, it could have been done, 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 it is, you’re going to have to look at it very differently. This is a bad, bad road that they are leading us as a country.”
A spokesperson for Clinton did not immediately return 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 extremely difficult when you see what they’ve done. These people are so bad,” Trump said.
He also suggested there would be a “breaking point” for the public if he ultimately ends up in jail or under house arrest after being found guilty in his hush money trial.
On Thursday, a New York jury found Trump guilty of all 34 crimes in his hush-money case related to covering up payments to an adult film star to help the 2016 campaign.
In the Newsmax interview, Trump complained about the jury in his trial, saying he “never saw a glimmer of a smile from them” and adding that he did not receive a fair trial.
Judge Juan Merchan, who oversaw the hush-money case, placed a gag order on Trump, preventing him from talking about jurors, potential witnesses and individual accusers that he has not lifted since the end of the trial. During the trial, Merchan fined Trump $10,000 for violating the gag order.
Trump also lashed out at writer E. Jean Carroll, who said Trump raped her in a department store in the 1990s.
“I’ve never met this woman,” he said of Carroll. ‘I don’t know this woman. And I have to pay a ridiculous amount of money for a fictional story.
Last May, a jury in New York found Trump liable for sexually assaulting and defaming Carroll and ordered him to pay her $5 million. In January, after continuing to deny Carroll’s claims and publicly attacking her, he was ordered to pay her another $83 million for defamation.
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
