U.S. President Donald Trump warned evangelical leaders that if Republicans lose control of Congress in the midterm elections, Democrats will institute change “quickly and violently”, The New York Times has reported.
At a meeting with those leaders at the White House on Monday, Mr. Trump said everything was at stake for his conservative agenda if his party loses in November, according to an audiotape obtained by NYT .
‘Violent people’
Democrats “will overturn everything that we’ve done and they’ll do it quickly and violently”, said Mr. Trump, according to the NYT report published on Tuesday night. “They will end everything immediately.”
“When you look at Antifa”, he added, referring to militant leftist anti-fascism groups, “and you look at some of these groups, these are violent people”.
It was not the first time Trump has warned of violence if things did not go his way. During the 2016 presidential campaign, he said his supporters would probably react violently if he did not win the Republican nomination. “I think you’d have riots,” he warned.
“I just ask you to go out and make sure all of your people vote,” Mr. Trump reportedly told the evangelical leaders.
“Because if they don’t — it’s Nov. 6 — if they don’t vote we’re going to have a miserable two years and we’re going to have, frankly, a very hard period of time because then it just gets to be one election — you’re one election away from losing everything you’ve got.”
