Ron Reagan worries about Trump’s base if he refuses to accept defeat in 2020: ‘Who knows what they will do’

Ron Reagan worried about how President Donald Trump's language would impact his base if he lost the 2020 presidential campaign.

MSNBC anchor Chris Matthews played clips of Trump speaking at the National Rifle Association convention.

"They tried for a coup, didn't work out so well," Trump told the NRA. "And I didn't need a gun for that one, did I?"

"You have been looking at things you wouldn't have believed possible in our country," Trump said in his NRA speech. "Corruption at the highest level. A disgrace. Spying, surveillance, trying for an overthrow. And we caught them, we caught them."

The remarks echoed Trump's Thursday night comments to Fox News personality Sean Hannity.

"This was a coup. This was an attempted overthrow of the United States government," Trump said on Fox News. "Trying to infiltrate the administration to -- really it's a coup, it's spying, it's everything you can imagine."

Matthews corrected the president, listing several examples of actual coup d'états.

"A coup, however, is a violent overthrow of a government by force, usually carried out by the military in third-world countries," Matthews said. "A coup is not what happened in our country over the last two years and in making such frightening claims, Trump is using the language of a third-world dictator."

Matthews asked Reagan about Trump's language.

"No surprise that there were no facts and no evidence presented because of course, it's an absurd claim," Reagan noted. "It's easy for us to mock his buffoonery, talking about a coup, but this is dangerous talk."

"You notice the people at the NRA convention that he was speaking at there, they were not booing and they weren't laughing, they were cheering that. They were eating that kind of stuff up," he noted.

"And I see it as a prelude of what might happen in the 2020 election if Donald Trump doesn't win," he worried.

"He talked like this during the last election and he is setting it up now, if he is somehow turned out of office, that it won't be legitimate and his base, who knows what they would do if they thought an actual coup had taken place, let's say in the guise of an election," Reagan explained.

"This is dangerous talk," he repeated.

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