Sit for a minute with these comments the GOP frontrunner for president has made on national television in recent days. “They’ve released the genie out of the box,” Donald Trump said in a Univision interview aired Thursday, referring to the four indictments he faces that he insists are attempts to interfere with his 2024 campaign. “If I happen to be president, and I see somebody who’s doing well and beating me very badly, I say, ‘Go down and indict them.’”

“Now that he indicted me,” Trump said at a rally a day earlier of Joe Biden, who did not indict him, “we’re allowed to look at him…He did real bad things. We will restore law and order to our communities. And I will direct a completely overhauled [Department of Justice] to investigate every Marxist prosecutor in America for their illegal, racist-in-reverse enforcement of the law.”

It is easy to overlook these kinds of pronouncements from the former president, given the frequency with which he makes them. But it’s also important to really take them in—to listen to his threats with fresh ears, as if you haven’t heard him say some version of them a thousand times before. Here is the frontrunner for the Republican nod—and possibly the presidency—vowing to use the government to go after political opponents. A second Trump term “would be the end of our country as we know it,” Hillary Clinton warned in an appearance on the View Thursday, “and I don’t say that lightly.”

Clinton, of course, has long been the subject of Trump’s threats of political prosecution. “Lock her up!” was something of an unofficial slogan of his 2016 campaign—a rally refrain as ubiquitous as “Build the wall!” and “Drain the swamp!” and “Make America Great Again!” But it was never just about his 2016 opponent; “lock her up,” like other Trump catchphrases, was really more of a mnemonic—one he has repurposed in attacks on Biden, Anthony Fauci, and others who have been cast as villains in the MAGAverse. These authoritarian threats are not tit-for-tat responses to his own indictments, as he suggested this week. They’ve always been a central tenet of his movement.

Though this bluster is nothing new, it has taken on an even more menacing overtone recently: Trump, who is leading Biden in some recent polls, is running for a second term on an explicitly authoritarian platform—and allies like Stephen Miller are already plotting to clear the way for him to make good on his threats, to remove the roadblocks that kept his autocratic fantasies from being fully realized in his first term.

It’s possible to forget just how close he did come that first time around and to get desensitized to his repeated threats, praise for dictators, and other outrages. Which is why it’s so important to remain clear-eyed about the danger he represents. As Clinton warned, “Trump is telling us what he intends to do. Take him at his word.”