A second US civil war is “going to happen” if state and federal authorities continue to prosecute Donald Trump, the former Alaska governor and Republican vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin said.
“Those who are conducting this travesty and creating this two-tier system of justice, I want to ask them what the heck, do you want us to be in civil war? Because that’s what’s going to happen,” Palin told Newsmax on Thursday night.
“We’re not going to keep putting up with this.”
Palin was speaking to the rightwing network as Trump surrendered at a jail in Fulton county, Georgia, and a historic mugshot was released.
Wearing a blue suit, white shirt and red tie, the former president scowled into the camera. Authorities have warned of potential violence from his supporters.
Trump faces 13 racketeering and conspiracy charges in Georgia, related to his attempt to overturn his defeat there by Joe Biden in 2020. Eighteen allies, including the former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, are charged with him.
In total, Trump, 77, faces 91 criminal charges under four indictments, for state and federal election subversion, retention of classified records and hush-money payments to a porn star. He faces a civil trial over defamation arising from an allegation of rape, for which he was found liable. He faces investigations of his business affairs.
The former president denies all wrongdoing, claiming political persecution. Dominating national and key-state polling for the next Republican presidential nomination, he felt able to skip the first debate in Milwaukee this week.
Academics have long warned of the potential for Trump to stoke violence worse than the attack on Congress on 6 January 2021, when supporters he told to “fight like hell” to stop certification of Biden’s victory stormed the Capitol building. Nine deaths have been linked to the riot.
Barbara F Walter, author of How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them and a CIA advisor, has written: “No one wants to believe that their beloved democracy is in decline, or headed toward war.”
But “if you were an analyst in a foreign country looking at events in America – the same way you’d look at events in Ukraine or Ivory Coast or Venezuela – you would go down a checklist, assessing each of the conditions that make civil war likely.
“And what you would find is that the United States, a democracy founded more than two centuries ago, has entered very dangerous territory.”
Palin was governor of Alaska when John McCain picked her as his running mate against Barack Obama in 2008. Many observers, including figures involved in the choice, now see her selection as the starting point for a Republican rush to extremism that shows no sign of slowing.
Palin has remained prominent, though a run for Congress failed last year.
On Thursday, addressing her host, the ex-Fox News anchor Eric Bolling, Palin said: “You suggested that we need to get angry. We do need to rise up and take our country back.
“Now I would say the RNC [Republican National Committee], that’s what’s lacking when it comes to collective anger that can be healthy and can be useful.
“Where is the RNC? They hold the purse strings to the party. They hold the funds that can help out in this situation. They have the platform and yet they’re too timid, bunch of frickin’ Rinos [Republicans in Name Only] running the thing. So the RNC, they better get their stuff together or we have to ask them too: What do they want as an outcome of this. Civil war?”
