But no sooner had this chatter started, then Trump dropped another bomb, by suggesting this morning on CNN that if he finishes with the most delegates, and the nomination goes to someone else, that violence could result:
Trump said Wednesday that a contested GOP convention could be a disaster if he goes to Cleveland a few delegates shy of 1,237 — and doesn’t leave as the party’s nominee.
“I think you’d have riots,” Trump said on CNN.
Noting that he’s “representing many millions of people,” he told Chris Cuomo: “If you disenfranchise those people, and you say, ‘I’m sorry, you’re 100 votes short’…I think you’d have problems like you’ve never seen before. I think bad things would happen.”
It’s hard to say whether this is intended as a threat or a prediction. But the unsettling fact of the matter is that there is no particular reason to rule out the former — that it was indeed intended as a tacit threat, as least of a certain kind. Trump has been playing a clever little game where he hints at the possibility of violence while stopping short of explicitly threatening it — yet he also doesn’t denounce such an outcome as unacceptable, so his hintseffectively function as a threat.