With early voting looming, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s rhetoric has become even more threatening. He has promised to prosecute anyone who “cheats” in the election in the same way he said he did in 2020, when he falsely claimed He won and attacked those who insisted on voting correctly.

Last Friday, he also told a gathering of police officers to “watch out for electoral fraud,” an obvious attempt to mobilize law enforcement in a legally questionable manner.

Trump claimed, without providing evidence, that he lost the 2020 election only because of fraud by Democrats, election officials and other unspecified forces. On Saturday Trump promised that this year those who cheat “will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law” if he wins in November. He said he was referring to everyone from election officials to lawyers, political staff and donors.

“Those who act unscrupulously will be tracked down, caught and prosecuted on a scale unfortunately never seen before in our country,” Trump wrote in a post on his social network Truth Social, which he later also published on X, the site once known as Twitter.

The former president’s warning – which he prefaced with the words “LISTEN AND DESIST” – is the latest increase in rhetoric similar to that of authoritarian leaders.

To be clear: Trump lost the 2020 election President Joe Biden in both the Electoral College and the popular vote, where Biden received 7 million more votes. Trump’s own Attorney General said there was no evidence of widespread fraud, Trump lost dozens of Complaints to question the results and Associated Press investigation showed that there was no fraud that could have influenced the election. In addition, Reviews, told And Examinations in the Swing States – contested states where Trump denied his defeat all confirmed Biden’s victory.

Trump, the warm-hearted about authoritarian and recently mused that “sometimes a strong man is needed”, has already promised prosecute his political opponents when he returns to power. His allies have drawn up plans to Federal Prosecutors better able to target the president’s opponents.

In a possible conservative blueprint for a new Trump administration, known as Project 2025A former Justice Department official under Trump writes that Pennsylvania’s top election official should have been prosecuted over a political dispute – namely, his decision to give voters there a chance to correct signature errors on their mail-in ballots.

Although Trump has distanced himself from Project 2025, his rhetoric is consistent with that example, says Justin Levitt, a former Justice Department official and Biden White House staffer who now teaches law at Loyola Marymount in Los Angeles.

“He’s increasingly showing us the kind of president he wants to be, and that includes using the Justice Department to punish people he disagrees with – whether or not they’ve committed crimes,” Levitt said.

Levitt expressed skepticism about the possibility of a Trump Justice Department simply bringing charges against people who contradicted his election lies. Still, he and others thought the proposal was dangerous.

“Threatening people with punishment for fraud is deeply troubling when ‘fraud’ simply means you don’t like the election results,” Steve Simon, a Democrat who is Minnesota’s secretary of state and chairman of the National Association of Secretaries of State, said in a post on X.

Trump’s campaign team said the former president had only spoken about the importance of clean elections.

“President Trump believes that anyone who violates the law should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, including criminals who commit voter fraud. There can be no country without free and fair elections,” campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said in a statement.

Trump has previously issued threats against individuals who did not engage in obvious illegal activities during the 2020 election. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan Zuckerberg donated more than $400 million to local election offices in 2020 to help them deal with the pandemic. In a book published earlier this month, Trump threatened that Zuckerberg would ” spend the rest of his life in prison “ if he makes further contributions.

Jocelyn Benson, Michigan’s Democratic secretary of state, said in an interview Monday that Trump’s comments had prompted election officials, already suffering years of threats stemming from Trump’s false claims of corruption in 2020, to increase their vigilance and security planning.

“This is a level of vitriol and threats that we have never seen before, and it is very alarming and concerning,” Benson said. “We fear that individuals will understand this rhetoric and take it upon themselves to exact the revenge that their candidate has called for before the election – or immediately afterward if their candidate does not win.”

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said on Monday that Trump’s rhetoric was dangerous: “This is not who we are as a country. This is a democracy.”

Stephen Richer, the Republican recorder of Maricopa County, Arizona, who has been repeatedly attacked by Trump and his supporters for his insistence on the accuracy of the county’s 2020 vote count, reached out to X to point out an election official who was impeached for her actions that year – Tina PetersThe former Mesa County official in Colorado was convicted in August of helping activists gain access to her county’s voting machines to prove Trump’s lies.

“She was on your side on this,” Richer wrote in his post to Trump. Earlier this summer, Richer lost the Republican primary in his fight for re-election.

Trump’s call for police to monitor polling stations in case of election fraud in November came on Friday when he addressed a gathering of Fraternal Order of Policean organization that supports him.

“I hope you can watch and you’re everywhere. Watch for voter fraud. Because we’re winning. Without voter fraud, we win so easily,” he told the officers. “You can keep it under control by just watching. Because believe it or not, they’re afraid of that badge. They’re afraid of you.”

What he proposes could have several federal And Condition Laws against voter intimidation – some of them expressly prohibit uniformed officers According to Jonathan Diaz, director of election advocacy and partnerships at the Campaign Legal Center, voters are not allowed to participate in the polls unless they are responding to an emergency or casting their own ballot.

Diaz said these laws are the result of the country’s troubled history of police officers abusing their power to prevent black people from voting.

“We have to remember this history when we think about the presence of police forces at polling places,” he said. “Even the police officers with the best intentions, who are really just there to protect people, with no bad intentions, could be perceived by voters differently than they intended.”

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Riccardi reported from Denver. Associated Press writers Christina A. Cassidy in Detroit and Ali Swenson in New York contributed to this report.