As calls for a President Donald Trump impeachment grow louder, a former Trump campaign advisor who still counsels the president, Roger Stone, predicted violence and civil war should those calls be answered.
“The people who are calling for impeachment are the people who didn’t vote for him. They need to get over it. They lost,” Stone told a TMZ reporter who caught up with him a Los Angeles International Airport.
“Try to impeach him, just try it,” Stone continued. “You will have a spasm of violence in this country, an insurrection like you’ve never seen.”
When the reporter asked Stone if he really believed that, Stone said, “no question.”
“Both sides are heavily armed. This is not 1974, people will not stand for impeachment,” Stone said, referring to then-President Richard Nixon’s resignation from the presidency amid the Watergate scandal. Stone worked in the Nixon White House in the Office of Economic Opportunity.
In his seven months in office, Trump has racked up a few scandals of his own — there’s the potential collusion with Russia on the 2016 election meddling, the James Comey firing, a seemingly endless list of conflicts of interest and most recently, there was his failure to condemn violence by neo-Nazis and white supremacists at the Charlottesville protest.
Trump’s approval ratings are also at historic lows, so is it possible Stone underestimated the public? Maybe, the most recent poll numbers on a Trump impeachment show that 40 percent of Americans support removing him from office, according to a Public Religion Research Institute poll. That’s up 10 percent from February, and the poll was taken between Aug. 2 and 8, days prior to the explosion of violence in Charlottesville.
Even still, the Republican base is less likely to support a Trump impeachment and Stone had a stern warning for those who might.
“Any politician who votes for it would be endangering their own life,” he said, noting “there would be violence on both sides.”
“I’ll make this clear — I’m not advocating violence, but I’m predicting it,” Stone said.
