Two allies and former political advisers of President Donald Trump are hinting at the prospect of election-related violence, injecting a new level of turbulence in a stormy political climate.
Trump’s long-time friend and adviser Roger Stone, calling into the conspiracy website Infowars on Sept. 10, said Trump should use “martial law” to stay in office or invoke the Insurrection Act if he doesn’t win. Stone, whose sentence for seven felony crimes was commuted by the President in July, also said Republicans should physically block ballots from being counted.
Michael Caputo, who worked on Trump’s 2016 campaign and is now a public affairs adviser for the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), said in a Facebook Live video on Sunday that violence was coming. He predicted without evidence that Trump’s opponent, Democratic nominee Joe Biden, would refuse to concede if Trump wins. Violence, he said, would follow.
“When Donald Trump refuses to stand down at the inauguration, the shooting will begin,” Caputo said. “If you carry guns, buy ammunition, ladies and gentlemen, because it’s going to be hard to get.”
(. . .) on the 244th anniversary of American independence, he stood on a stage built on the White House’s south lawn for an official event at taxpayer expense, to declare war against a growing majority of Americans who oppose him, dismissing them as “the radical left, the Marxists, the anarchists, the agitators, the looters, and people who, in many instances, have absolutely no clue what they are doing”. He claimed that “the process of defeating” those people is akin to the Greatest Generation’s battle against fascism during the Second World War.
