Former President Donald Trump has been using strikingly similar rhetoric casting doubt on the integrity of the upcoming presidential election to what he used in the run-up to the 2020 vote.

That has some lawmakers, judges and scholars fearing that if Trump loses to Vice President Kamala Harris next month and disputes the election results, violence could again follow, just as it did on Jan. 6, 2021, when a mob of his supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol as Congress met to certify Joe Biden’s win over Trump.

“I fear that, because of the heated rhetoric, the disinformation, the exaggeration, the cynical effort to actively promote distrust in the election and suspicion of wrongdoing when there’s no evidence of it, that we’re headed for very serious trouble,” said Larry Diamond, a senior fellow at the public policy think tank the Hoover Institution.

Then and now

Four years ago, Trump spent the months before the election railing against mail-in voting and predicting the only way he would lose was if the vote was rigged. He and his allies then spent the two months after the election pushing false claims of election fraud. They lost more than 60 court cases challenging the results, and election and law-enforcement officials, including in Trump’s own administration, said there was no evidence to support the allegations.

The former president seems to be working from the same playbook this time around. He continues to attack mail-in voting, despite his campaign promoting it, while also making baseless claims that undocumented immigrants will vote, which is illegal in federal elections. 

“If I lose — I’ll tell you what, it’s possible, because they [Democrats] cheat,” Trump, who continues to push falsehoods about 2020, said at a Michigan campaign rally in September.  

Trump, meanwhile, has been threatening to prosecute anyone “involved in unscrupulous behavior” related to the election, including lawyers, political operatives, donors, illegal voters and election officials.

Last week he called for the National Guard or U.S. military to be deployed on Election Day to handle “the enemy from within,” which he described as “radical left lunatics.” Meanwhile, Trump has repeatedly refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power should he lose.

Some supporters of the former president with large megaphones are also using inflammatory language when discussing the election. For instance, Tesla, SpaceX and X owner Elon Musk has regularly promoted baseless claims to his 200 million followers on X, formerly Twitter, that could sow distrust in the vote outcome, including posting in July, “The goal all along has been to import as many illegal voters as possible.”

Earlier this month, Greg Gutfeld, one of the co-hosts of the popular Fox News show “The Five,” told his viewers that "elections don't work" and suggested there is a “need to make war to bring peace" because Democrats will never admit "their beliefs have been corrupt all the time."

And Kevin Roberts, president of the influential right-wing think tank the Heritage Foundation, told former Trump adviser Stephen Bannon’s podcast in July the country was “in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”

Jan. 6 reverberates

On Jan. 6, 2021, swarms of Trump supporters clashed with police officers outside the Capitol before forcing their way into the building. More than 100 police officers were injured, and lawmakers were rushed to secure locations, halting their session for several hours. Nine people who were at the Capitol on Jan. 6 died that day or in the days or weeks that followed, although it’s a point of debate whether the riot was directly responsible for the vast majority of those deaths.

The riot followed a Trump rally held near the White House, where the then president repeated false election fraud allegations and told the crowd, “If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore” and: “You’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength.”

More than 1,500 people have been charged with crimes in connection with Jan. 6. Over 1,000 have been convicted. 

More than 200 criminal defendants say they were answering Trump’s call on Jan. 6, according to the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.

For example, Dustin Thompson, of Columbus, Ohio, testified at trial in April 2022 that he fell down a “rabbit hole” of conspiracy theories, adding, “If the president’s giving you almost an order to do something, I felt obligated to do that.” Thompson was sentenced to three years in prison for charges that included obstruction of an official proceeding and theft of government property.

Deborah Sandoval, of Ankeny, Iowa, wrote on Facebook two weeks before the riot: “Hey we’re going back to Washington January 6 — Trump has called all patriots. If the electors don’t elect, we will be forced into civil war.” She was sentenced to five months in prison for entering and remaining in a restricted building or grounds.

Trump was impeached by the House but acquitted by the Senate of inciting an insurrection. He faces criminal charges in Washington and Georgia in connection with his efforts to overturn the election. He has pleaded not guilty.

The Republican presidential nominee has vowed to pardon his supporters, whom he has called “patriots” and “hostages,” if he’s reelected. Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., who was a member of the now-disbanded House committee that investigated the Jan. 6 attack, told Spectrum News she believes the offer is “meant to encourage people to engage in violence.”

“I think a number of people that we interviewed who were rioters believed what he told them,” she said. “They thought that he had sent them to the Capitol to save the country, and then they ended up — their lives were ruined. I mean, they lost their jobs, they were convicted of crimes, and that’s a real deterrent to doing it again. But if you believe that you’ve got a get-out-of-jail-free card and Trump is calling you to save the country again, then maybe you go ahead and do it.”

Lofgren said Trump is “pretty much saying the same thing” today that he did in the run-up to the Capitol attack.

In a reminder of the weight Trump's words carry with some, after the former president pushed misinformation about Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, and the federal response to Hurricane Helene in North Carolina, threats were made in those areas that forced schools and buildings to be closed, people to be evacuated and the Federal Emergency Management Agency to temporarily pull out of some hurricane-affected areas.

Fears of a repeat

Some judges who have overseen cases involving Jan. 6 defendants have also expressed concerns about the possibility of more election-related violence this year. 

“That sore loser is saying the same things he said before,” U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton, a nominee of President George W. Bush, said recently before sentencing a rioter in Washington, D.C., The Associated Press reported. “He’s riling up the troops again, so if he doesn’t get what he wants, it’s not inconceivable that we will experience that same situation again. And who knows? It could be worse.”

During a sentencing hearing for four defendants last month, also in Washington, Judge Jia Cobb, a Biden nominee, said, according to the AP, “It scares me to think about what will happen if anyone on either side is not happy with the results of the election.”

Of course, future election-related violence might not resemble Jan. 6 at all. Diamond said he’s concerned about the possibility that state and local election workers could be targeted next, particularly during the counting of ballots.

“We know that there’s been a rising tide of threats against secretaries of state, county election administrators, poll workers,” he said. “The kind of drama and criminal mobilization that we saw [on Jan. 6], if we aren’t careful and we’re not prepared, we might see it in some states and localities that particularly represent ground zero for determining who won the presidential election.”

Efforts to protect the vote

Last month, the Justice Department launched the Election Threats Task Force to respond to what Attorney General Merrick Garland called “an unprecedented spike in threats against the public servants who do administer our elections.”

“If you threaten to harm or kill an election worker or official or volunteer, the Justice Department will find you,” Garland said at the Sept. 4 announcement. “And we will hold you accountable.

"In a democracy, people vote and argue and debate — often loudly — in order to achieve the policy outcomes they desire, and the Justice Department will continue to relentlessly protect the rights of all Americans to peacefully express their opinions, beliefs and ideas," the attorney general said. "But the promise of our democracy is that people will not employ violence to achieve their preferred outcomes.”

A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson told Spectrum News in a statement that the U.S. “remains in a heightened, dynamic threat environment and we continue to share information with our law enforcement partners about the threats posed by domestic violent extremists in the context of the 2024 election. Violence has no place in our politics, and DHS continues to work with our partners to evaluate and mitigate emerging threats that may arise from domestic or foreign actors.”

The DHS added it is helping election officials and election infrastructure partners fortify their cyber, physical and operational security. It said it is also advising federal, state and local partners to remain vigilant to threats and encouraging members of the public to report suspicious activity to local authorities. 

Meanwhile, U.S. Capitol Police told Spectrum News they have hired several hundred new people since 2021 and now have more than 2,100 officers, ahead of attrition. USCP has created a Protective Intelligence Operations Center to track reports about threats to members of Congress and has dramatically expanded the number of intelligence analysts it employs. In addition, its police chief can now request National Guard support without preapproval by the Capitol Police Board, which was a roadblock on Jan. 6. 

GOP blames Democrats

In a statement to Spectrum News, the Republican National Committee accused Democrats of being the ones who use incendiary rhetoric, echoing earlier complaints by Trump and some Republicans.

“It is the Democrats and Kamala Harris whose dangerous rhetoric has led to two assassination attempts on President Trump’s life and has divided our country,” RNC spokesperson Taylor Rogers said. “Dangerously liberal Kamala Harris and Democrats are fearmongering because they have NOTHING else to offer the American people.”

It’s not clear whether either assassination attempt was inspired by Democratic rhetoric. The FBI has not established a motive in the July 13 shooting at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, and has said the gunman, Thomas Matthew Crooks, researched campaign events for both Trump and Biden. The suspect in the second attempt, Ryan Routh, had expressed support for a wide range of politicians, including Trump and Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., one of the most liberal members of the Senate.

Republicans often cite Democratic attacks calling Trump a threat to democracy or comparing him to Adolf Hitler as examples about rhetoric that goes too far.

Robert Pape, a political science professor at the University of Chicago who studies political violence, wrote in a New York Times essay this month that his research found “disturbingly high levels of support for political violence,” which was bipartisan. Nearly 6% of those surveyed agreed or strongly agreed that the “use of force is justified to restore Donald Trump to the presidency,” while 8% said force was justified to keep Trump out of the White House.

Pape called for the governors of the seven election battleground states to make a joint video statement condemning all political violence and to take additional steps to ensure elections sites are safe.

Diamond, however, argued that the threat of violence remains stronger from Trump supporters.

“I don’t know of an organized Democratic or Democrat-supporting extremist group that represents a threat of trying to overturn the election or commit large-scale political violence,” he said. “I have seen no evidence of there being such a group.”

But Diamond acknowledged there’s always a chance a lone wolf could act out, just as what authorities say happened in the two assassination attempts on Trump.

Lofgren, meanwhile, said she thinks congressional Republicans would share some of the blame if Trump’s supporters resort to violence again.

“When he [Trump] said repeatedly that the Jan. 6 felons were patriots and that he would pardon them all and they were hostages, my Republican House colleagues know that’s not the case,” she said. “They were there on the floor of the House. They were evacuated, along with me. I mean, people died, more than a hundred officers were severely injured, but they don’t call him on it. 

“People who vote are Republicans, and they trust their Republican leaders. They’re being lied to, and it’s not just Trump. It’s a whole ecosystem.”