By James Oliphant
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Donald Trump said he may not accept the 2024 election results in Wisconsin, a key battleground state in his matchup with President Joe Biden, leaving open the possibility of post-election turmoil.
In an interview with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel on Wednesday, Trump said that if he does not believe the result in November’s election was legitimate, “you have to fight for the right of the country.”
Trump added, “If everything’s honest, I will absolutely accept the results.”
The Republican presidential candidate’s comments came on the heels of an interview this week with Time magazine in which Trump did not rule out the possibility of political violence around the election, saying “it depends on the fairness” of the process.
On his way to an event on Thursday in Charlotte, North Carolina, Biden was asked whether he is worried Trump won’t accept the election results.
“Listen to what he says,” Biden said.
In the Journal Sentinel interview, Trump reiterated his baseless claims that he won Wisconsin — a Midwestern state he lost to Biden, a Democrat, by about 21,000 votes in 2020 — and that the election was tainted by fraud. Trump’s campaign unsuccessfully sought to disqualify almost 240,000 ballots cast for Biden.
Trump won Wisconsin over Democrat Hillary Clinton in 2016, and his rematch this year with Biden is expected to be tight. He held campaign rallies on Wednesday in Wisconsin and Michigan, another battleground state.
Trump said in the newspaper interview that he will not hesitate to raise doubts about the election if he is convinced something is amiss with the results.
“I’d be doing a disservice to the country if I said otherwise,” Trump said. “But no, I expect an honest election and we expect to win maybe very big.”
(Reporting by James Oliphant in Washington and Jeff Mason in North Carolina; Editing by Colleen Jenkins, Jonathan Oatis and Daniel Wallis)
