Donald Trump, facing the threat of a prison sentence after jurors convicted him on 34 felony charges, is now denying that he ever used "Lock her up" as a rallying cry against his 2016 rival, Hillary Clinton. He made this claim during an interview with Fox & Friends on Sunday, after co-host Will Cain tried to portray the former president as merciful.
"You famously said, regarding Hillary Clinton, ‘Lock her up.’" said Cain. "You declined to do that as president."
“I beat her,” Trump responded. “It’s easier when you win. They always said, ‘Lock her up.’ And I could have done it, but I felt it would have been a terrible thing. And then this happened to me, so I may feel differently about it."
Trump proceeded to blame his supporters for invoking the chant. "Hillary Clinton — I didn’t say, ‘Lock her up,’ but the people would all say, ‘Lock her up, lock her up.’ OK. Then we won, and I said pretty openly, I’d say, ‘Alright, come on, just relax. Let’s go. We gotta make our country great.’"
But Trump's many statements on the campaign trail and after his election easily prove his claim false. He repeatedly promised to imprison Clinton, including to her face, and threatened to appoint a special prosecutor to probe her and her campaign over her use of a private email server during her tenure as Barack Obama's secretary of state. When his supporters began the chant at rallies, Trump would often enthusiastically state his agreement. "For what she's done, they should lock her up," he once said.
In the 2020 election, Trump revived the chant again, this time including the Bidens in his prison lineup ("Lock up the Bidens," he said). Now, he is accusing Biden of masterminding a political persecution of him, even though the charges of Trump falsifying business records to cover up a sex scandal were brought by an independently elected prosecutor.
