Trump: I Have the Ability to Use the Government Against Enemies as Well

Former President Donald Trump says that as his political enemies have “released the genie from the bottle” by weaponizing federal law enforcement agencies against him, he could make that “happen in reverse” if he is elected to return to the White House.

“Well, he’s unleashed something that everybody, we’ve all known about this for a hundred years,” Trump said, in a likely reference to President Joe Biden during a wide-ranging interview airing on Spanish-language network Univision on Thursday night, reports CBS News. “We’ve watched other countries do it and, in some cases, effective, and in other cases, the country’s overthrown or it’s been totally ineffective.”

Trump is facing a total of 91 combined federal and state charges, and denies wrongdoing in all the indictments, saying they were triggered for political reasons.

Such actions aren’t “unique” to other countries, but “it’s unique for the United States,” Trump told Univision. “If they do this, and they’ve already done it, but if they want to follow through on this, yeah, it could certainly happen in reverse. It could certainly happen in reverse, if I happen to be president, and I see somebody who’s doing well and beating me very badly, I say, ‘Go down and indict them.’ They’d be out of business. They’d be out of the election,” he said.

Trump, who was interviewed by journalist Enrique Acevedo, also defended the separation of migrant families at the U.S.-Mexico border under his administration, saying that the decision kept more immigrants from entering the country illegally, reports The Washington Post.

“When you hear that you’re going to be separated from your family, you don’t come,” he told Acevedo. “When you think you’re going to come into the United States with your family, you come.”

But separating families “stopped people from coming by the hundreds of thousands because when they hear family separation, they say ‘Well, we better not go.'”

Trump’s Univision interview came as polls show he has been performing well with Hispanic and Black voters when compared with Biden.

The appearance was one day after his rally in Hialeah, Florida, which has a large Cuban-American population.

But the interview was the first with Univision since 2015 when he ordered network anchor Jorge Ramos to be removed from a news conference on his campaign trail.

In 2016, Trump settled a lawsuit with Univision over the network’s decision not to air his Miss Universe and Miss USA pageants during an effort to cut ties with the Trump organization over his comments about Mexican immigrants.