At the end of his speech at the Believers Summit in West Palm Beach, Florida, Trump said: “Christians, go out and vote, but this time. You don’t have to anymore. (…) You have to go out and vote. In four years, you don’t have to vote anymore. We will have solved the problem so that you don’t have to vote anymore.”
Democrats and others interpreted the comments as a signal of how a second Trump presidency would be conducted, a reminder that he had previously said he would not be a dictator upon his return to power “except on day one.”
Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), a Senate candidate, shared the excerpt from Trump’s speech on X, writing, “This year, democracy is on the agenda, and if we want to save it, we must vote against authoritarianism. Trump is a helpful reminder that the alternative is never getting a chance to vote again.” Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Washington) called Trump’s comments “terrifying.” And Rep. Dan Goldman (D-Y.) said, “The only way you’re not going to have to vote is if Donald Trump becomes a dictator.”
Trump’s campaign, however, has said that the remarks at the event hosted by the conservative group Turning Point Action were aimed at unifying the country. Asked what Trump meant by that, campaign spokesman Steven Cheung said in a statement Saturday that the former president “was talking about unifying this country and bringing prosperity to all Americans, as opposed to the divisive political environment that has sown so much division and even resulted in an assassination attempt.”
Trump, who has continued to claim without evidence that the 2020 election was rigged against him, prefaced his comments about not having to vote again by telling the audience that Democrats “don’t want to approve voter ID — it’s because they want to cheat. But between now and then, the Republicans have to win. … We want a landslide that’s too big to rig.”
Harris’ campaign team called Trump’s remarks a “vow to end democracy.”
“When Vice President Harris says this election is about freedom, she means it,” Harris campaign spokesman James Singer said in a press release Saturday. “Our democracy is under attack by the criminal Donald Trump: After the last election that Trump lost, he sent a mob to overturn the results. This campaign, he has promised violence if he loses, the end of our elections if he wins, and the termination of the Constitution so he can be a dictator to implement his dangerous Project 2025 agenda on America.” (Project 2025 is a think piece outlining the policy priorities of the next Republican president. Many Trump allies and former administration officials helped draft the document, but his campaign has sought to distance the former president from the document.)
Trump’s comments also sparked some concern among the Christian right.
David Lane, an organizer of conservative Christian pastors, said Trump “may have crossed the line a little bit” with his remarks because it could discourage conservative Christians from shaping the outcome of future elections.
“In 2028, 2032 and 2036, evangelicals will have to raise their level of civic-mindedness to a new level if America is to return to the Judeo-Christian heritage and biblical-based culture that the founders established,” said Lane, founder of the American Renewal Project, whose mission is to help elect more Christians. He added that “one’s values will reign supreme in the public square,” and if Christians don’t vote, their values won’t be reflected in their elected officials.
In front of another Christian audience last month, Trump made a similar suggestion that Christians would not need to vote after this year’s election.
At an event hosted by the Faith and Freedom Coalition in Washington, the former president said Christians “don’t vote as much as they should.”
“Do you know what power you would have if you voted? … You have to go out and vote, just this one time. I don’t care – in four years, you won’t have to vote, okay? In four years, don’t vote,” he said. “I don’t care by then, but we’ll have this all worked out, so it’ll be very different.”
But if Democrats came to power, he said at the time, “they would ruin everything (and) we would have to start all over again.”
Erica De Bruin, a professor of government at Hamilton College whose research focuses on civil-military relations, civil war and policing, said: “Trump frequently makes these kinds of deliberately ambiguous statements that can be interpreted in multiple ways.”
But she added that “to understand what another Trump presidency would entail, I think it’s more helpful to look at his past behavior than to try to parse out what the ‘real meaning’ of every set of remarks he makes might be.” She noted that the last time he was in office, “he tried to subvert the outcome of an election and stay in power longer than the American public voted for him to stay.”
Steven Levitsky, a professor of government at Harvard University and co-author of “Tyranny of the Minority: Why American Democracy Reached the Breaking Point,” also said that while he didn’t think Trump’s recent comment was “a sign of an organized conspiracy to end the U.S. election,” it was another sign that “the guy has authoritarian reflexes.”
“Over the last 10 or 15 years,” Levitsky added, a growing number of Republicans “have convinced themselves that they’re not going to be able to win elections in this new multiracial America. I’m not sure that’s true, but they were deeply concerned that they would. And so I think Trump, more than anything else, feels …where they are going and what they are feeling.
Christian conservatives – and particularly white evangelicals – make up a significant portion of the voter base that Trump has courted since his 2016 campaign.
In both 2016 and 2020, one-third of Trump’s votes came from white evangelical Protestants. That means one in three votes Trump received came from white evangelical Protestants, a group that the Religion Research Institute estimates makes up 14 percent of the population.
Daniel Ziblatt, a co-author of Levitsky’s book and a Harvard political science professor, clarified the significance of Trump’s comment. “I can’t think of a major candidate running for office in a democracy on Earth since at least World War II who speaks in such an overtly authoritarian manner,” Ziblatt said. “Not Victor Orban in Hungary, not Recep Erdogan in Turkey. Nowhere.”
Jennifer Mercieca, a professor of communications at Texas A&M University and author of “Demagogue for President: The Rhetorical Genius of Donald Trump,” said she interpreted Trump’s comment as an attempt to address the “double whammy” facing supposedly “strongman” leaders.
“They tell of a world in chaos and promise that they are strong enough to fix it in order to win elections, but they often fail. In fact “Christians are going to be able to solve the problems that they said they could easily solve if they had the power,” said Mercieca, whose research focuses on the relationship between democracy and American communication practices. “I think Trump is promising Christians that he’s actually going to solve the problems he promised them he would solve (a total abortion ban … and various ‘culture war’ problems) and that once all the problems are solved, they won’t feel like the world is so chaotic that they have to vote to save the nation.”
“It’s a big promise,” she added, “and he doesn’t give specific details here.”
washingtonpost
