Trump gives his strongman’s ambitions free rein on a day off from court

Donald Trump used his day off from a criminal trial related to a past election to cast a dark, familiar shadow over the next one.

The presumptive GOP nominee declined to say if he’d accept the result of his White House race with President Joe Biden in November, warning in an interview with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel on Wednesday that if the election was not “honest,” then “you have to fight for the right of the country.”

“I’d be doing a disservice to the country if I said otherwise,” Trump told the paper. “But no, I expect an honest election and we expect to win maybe very big.”

As he often does, the ex-president left an impression that an election can only be fair if he is the winner. “But if everything’s honest, which we anticipate it will be — a lot of changes have been made over the last few years — but if everything’s honest, I will absolutely accept the results,” he said. Trump refused to accept that the 2020 election was fair, even though there was no evidence of widespread fraud.