Former President Donald Trump said the world has “never been nastier than it is now” during an interview on Newsmax on Wednesday night as multiple criminal cases against him proceed.
Midway through an answer to a question in which he was speculating on Ron DeSantis’ odds of winning the 2028 Republican nomination for president, the former president veered into a broader philisophical take on the state of the politcal world.
“You don’t walk into anything,” Mr Trump said. “This is a tough world in politics. This is a nasty, nasty world, as we found out. Probably it’s never been nastier than it is right now. Because we have sick people. We have sick people in office, and again, they are a bigger problem than the outside world.”
Mr Trump’s comments on the percieved nastiness of the world come as he is facing charges in three separate criminal cases: one in New York, for his alleged participation in a hush money payment scheme; one in Florida for his alleged mishandling of classified documents after leaving the White House; and one in Washington, DC for allegedly inciting the January 6 Capitol riot.
If Mr Trump is convicted of any of the felony charges he is facing, he could potentially become the first ever American president to be incarcerated — raising even further the stakes of his ongoing bid to return to power in next year’s presidential election.
Later in his answer, Mr Trump ramped up his rhetoric regarding an unidentified group of people in the US government.
“You can do things with them,” Mr Trump said of the so-called outside world. “But these people that we have, these radical fascists and Marxists that we have in our government — you can’t talk to them. They’re nuts. They’re crazy.”
Despite his rapidly mounting legal issues — Mr Trump may face yet another indictment over his alleged attemps to overturn the result of the last presidential election in Georgia — the former president remains the polling leader in the race for the Republican nomination.
Mr DeSantis, once considered Mr Trump’s top rival for the nomination, has largely seen his support fall off since the spring.
“DeSantis is a failed candidate,” Mr Trump said. “If I didn’t endorse DeSantis [as governor] he wouldn’t have ever won. He was out. And I endorsed him and he went up and he was able to win. He went up massively in one night after I endorsed him. But he was a failed candidate. And you know what? He’s a failed candidate again. He’s got no personality, and he’s dropped like a rock.”
