Former US President Donald Trump warned in an interview that his supporters could see a prison sentence against him as a “breaking point.” “I'm OK with that,” Trump said in an interview broadcast on Fox News on Sunday. But he was not sure whether the public could tolerate it.
“I think it would be difficult for the public to bear. At a certain point there is a breaking point,” said the 77-year-old, who is expected to run for the Republicans against Democratic incumbent Joe Biden in the November 5 presidential election.
There are concerns in the US that politically motivated violence could occur around the presidential election on November 5. Trump, who has been a convicted felon since May 30, has already made it clear several times that he will not accept defeat.
To this day, he claims that his 2020 election defeat to Biden was due to fraud. In the heated atmosphere in the months following the election, radical Trump supporters stormed the Capitol in Washington on January 6, 2021. Five people were killed.
Democratic House Representative Adam Schiff said Trump's strategy was clear. “At its core, this is his threat that if he is sentenced to prison, he will encourage his supporters to insurrection,” Schiff, who was a member of the committee investigating the storming of the Capitol, told CNN. “We saw the deadly consequences of that on January 6.”
Trump continued in the interview with Fox News that the criminal trial had been “very hard” for his wife Melania. “She's fine, but I think it's very hard for her. She has to read all this crap.”
On Thursday, Trump became the first former president in US history to be found guilty in a criminal trial in New York. The jury found the 77-year-old guilty on all 34 counts of concealing a $130,000 hush money payment to former porn actress Stormy Daniels before the 2016 election by falsifying business documents.
The payment was used to force Stormy Daniels to conceal an alleged sex affair that she claims to have had with Trump and which he denies. The sentence is to be announced on July 11.
A prison sentence is possible, but legal experts are more likely to expect a suspended sentence and a fine or even a sentence of community service.
Trump had denounced the trial as “very unfair.” Shortly after the guilty verdict, his campaign published a fundraising appeal titled “I am a political prisoner!”