CNN's John Berman on Thursday accused President Donald Trump of implicitly threatening the use of violence if he loses the 2020 presidential election.

While discussing Trump's refusal to commit to a peaceful transition of power should he lose the 2020 election, Berman said that this was the kind of thing he'd expect to hear from leaders in foreign countries without long traditions of upholding democracy.

"To be clear, the refusal to commit to a peaceful transfer in and of itself is an implicit threat of violence," he said.

The author of a new piece outlining how President Donald Trump could steal the election from voters explained just how that might happen.

The Atlantic's Barton Gellman revealed the Trump campaign is exploring a strategy to pressure Republican-led state legislatures to appoint electors, instead of letting voters choose, and he told MSNBC's "Morning Joe" how that would work in practice.

"The only other time in history we had a debacle like this with possibility of the multiple competing slates of electors where two groups of people said, 'I'm the state elector for the state of Pennsylvania,' for example, it's supposed to go to Congress," Gellman said. "Congress is supposed to decide who are the legitimate electors, if any, from the state, and the problem is the electorate count act is one of the most garbled statutes ever passed by Congress, which is saying a lot."