Former President Donald Trump mocked Democrats during an exclusive interview with Breitbart News on Sirius XM for claiming he is exhausted but, in the same breath, feigning bogus fear he will weaponize the federal government if elected.
Trump’s quip came in response to a question from Breitbart News Washington Bureau Chief Matthew Boyle about the weaponization of government against him.
“First they say you’re exhausted, then they say, I’m going to weaponize government. I guess I can’t be too exhausted, can I?” Trump jested before saying Democrats have set a terrible precedent with lawfare.
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“So just so you understand, they’ve set a very bad precedent with what they’ve done. Third-world countries, banana republics, have done it,” he said. “But what they have done, what they have done with me, with the… I call it the Department of Injustice, and the FBI and the raids on Mar-a-Lago. It’s unprecedented.”
In 2023, months after Trump announced he would run for president in November 2022, state and federal agencies brought four separate cases against him in the course of five months.
The first was Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s (D) 34-count indictment alleging Trump falsified business records in April 2023, followed by two federal cases brought by Special Counsel Jack Smith – the presidential documents case in June 2023, and the case over the Trump campaign’s 2020 election challenge in July 2023.
Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis (D) then indicted Trump in August 2023. What is more, former Trump Adviser Peter Navarro served a prison sentence on a contempt of Congress charge, and White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon, the former executive chairman of Breitbart News, is currently serving a sentence for one.
Trump said the imprisonment of former White House officials like Navarro and Bannon was once inconceivable in America and emphasized he would never weaponize government against political opponents.
“So no, I won’t be doing that, but they are doing it, and you called it out better than I would have,” he told Boyle. “I appreciate that because… they’ve taken Peter Navarro, Steve Bannon and others. What they have done… nobody thought it was possible.”
“People would say long before this happened, when the idea came up, ‘Oh, but they’d never do that. You’d never do that.’ You don’t do that to an ex-president,” he added. “But they are bad people. Let me tell you, they’re bad people. They’re sick.”