With early voting fast approaching, rhetoric from Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has grown more ominous with a promise to prosecute anyone who “cheats” the election in the same way he believes they did in 2020, when he falsely claimed he won and attacked those who stood by their correct vote numbers.

He also told a gathering of police officers Friday that they should “watch out for voter fraud,” an apparent attempt to enlist law enforcement that would be legally questionable.

Trump has claimed, without providing evidence, that he lost the 2020 election only because of cheating by Democrats, election officials and other, unspecified forces. On Saturday, Trump promised that this year those who cheat “will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law” should he win in November. He said he was referring to everyone from election officials to lawyers, political staff and donors.

“Those involved in unscrupulous behavior will be sought out, caught and prosecuted at levels unfortunately never seen before in our country,” Trump wrote in the post on his social media network Truth Social which he later also posted on X, the site once known like Twitter.

The former president’s warning — he prefaced it with the words “DISTANCE & DESIST” — is the latest surge in rhetoric that mimics that used by authoritarian leaders.

To be clear, Trump lost the 2020 election to President Joe Biden in both the Electoral College and the popular vote, where Biden received 7 million more votes. Trump’s own Attorney General said there was no evidence of widespread fraud, Trump lost dozens trials challenge the results and a Associated Press investigation showed that there was no degree of fraud that could have tipped the election. In addition, several reviews, tells and revisions in battleground states where Trump contested his loss all confirmed Biden’s win.

Trump, who has spoke warmly of authoritarian and recently mused that “sometimes you need a strong man”, already promised it prosecute their political opponents if he returns to power. His allies have drawn up plans to do federal prosecutors more able to target the president’s opponents.

In a possible conservative outline for a new Trump administration known as Project 2025writes a former Trump Justice Department official that Pennsylvania’s top election official should have been charged with a political dispute — when they decided voters there have a chance to fix signature errors on their mail-in ballots.

Trump has dismissed Project 2025, but his rhetoric matches that example, said Justin Levitt, a former Justice Department official and Biden White House staffer who now teaches law at Loyola Marymount in Los Angeles.

“He’s increasingly showing us the kind of president he hopes to be, and that means using the Justice Department to punish people he disagrees with — whether they committed crimes or not,” Levitt said.

Levitt said he was skeptical that a Trump Justice Department could simply bring charges against people who contradicted his campaign lies, but he and others said the proposal was still dangerous.

“Threatening people with penalties for cheating is deeply troubling if ‘cheating’ simply means you don’t like the outcome of the election,” Steve Simon, a Democrat who is Minnesota’s secretary of state and president of the National Association of Secretaries of State, said in a post on X.

Trump’s campaign said the former president was simply talking about the importance of clean elections.

“President Trump believes that anyone who breaks the law should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, including criminals who engage in voter fraud. Without free and fair elections, you cannot have a country,” campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said in a statement.

Trump has already issued threats against people who engaged in no apparent illegal activity during the 2020 election. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan Zuckerberg, donated more than $400 million to local election offices in 2020 to help them deal with the pandemic . In a book released earlier this month, Trump threatened that Zuckerberg will ” spend the rest of his life in prison ” if he makes any more contributions.

Jocelyn Benson, Michigan’s Democratic secretary of state, said in an interview Monday that Trump’s comments have prompted election officials, already reeling from years of threats over Trump’s false claims of corruption in 2020, to increase their vigilance and security planning.

“It’s a level of vitriol and threats that we haven’t seen before, and it’s very alarming and concerning,” Benson said. “We are concerned that individuals will read that rhetoric and take it upon themselves to exact revenge before the election — or immediately after, if their candidate doesn’t win — that their candidate has called for.”

White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Monday that Trump’s rhetoric was dangerous: “This is not who we are as a country. This is a democracy.”

Stephen Richer, the Republican registrar in Maricopa County, Arizona, who has been repeatedly attacked by Trump and his supporters for vouching for the accuracy of the county’s 2020 vote count, took to X to point to an election official who has been indicted for his actions in — Tina Peters. The former Mesa County clerk in Colorado was convicted in August of helping activists access her county’s voting machines to try to prove Trump’s lies.

“She was on your side of this,” Richer wrote to Trump in his post. Earlier this summer, Richer was defeated in the Republican primary in his re-election bid.

Trump’s call for police officers to watch polling places in case of fraud in November came Friday when he addressed a gathering of Fraternal police orderan organization that has supported him.

“I hope you can watch and you’re everywhere. Watch out for voter fraud. Because we’re winning. Without voter fraud, we win so easily,” he told the officials. “You can keep it down just by watching. Because believe it or not, they are afraid of that brand. They are afraid of you.”

What he proposes may offend several federal and state laws against voter intimidation — some of which specifically ban uniformed officers from being at the polls unless they are responding to an emergency or voting themselves, according to Jonathan Diaz, director of voter advocacy and partnerships at the Campaign Legal Center.

Diaz said these laws arose out of the country’s fraught history of law enforcement officials abusing their power to stop black people from voting.

“We have to remember that history when we think about the presence of law enforcement at the polls,” he said. “Even the best-meaning officials who are there just to protect people without malice, their presence can be perceived by voters in a different way than they intended.”

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Riccardi reported from Denver. Associated Press writers Christina A. Cassidy in Detroit and Ali Swenson in New York contributed to this report.