Former President Donald Trump said Wednesday that his strategy for the fall focused less on mobilizing his supporters and more on ensuring Democrats “don’t cheat” in the general election. don’t cheat,” Trump said at a meeting in Asheboro, North Carolina, a state Vice President Kamala Harris sees as competitive this year.
“We have all the votes we need,” Trump added, pointing to street symptoms as proof of his popularity. As a video of his comments makes clear, the former president was not joking.
I’ve been reading campaigns for some time and honestly can’t think of any other example where a candidate, less than a month before the electorate voted in a competitive race, would say out loud, “Our main goal is not to get the vote done.
If the message sounds familiar, it’s not your imagination. As we discussed about a month ago, the Republican nominee spread the same word on Fox News in late July. “My instructions: We don’t want the votes, I have a lot of them,” Trump said.
It was not a mistake. The day after the June presidential debate, for example, the former president held a rally in Virginia and told attendees, “We don’t want votes. “A week earlier, the Republican spoke at a far-right convention and said much the same thing. “I tell my fellow members that I don’t want votes,” Trump said, adding, “We don’t want votes. “
This follows the Republican nominee who pushed the same line in an appearance in Detroit. “Look, we don’t want votes,” Trump said. We have to stop, concentrate, not worry about votes. “
In fact, as my colleague Jachan Jones pointed out on MSNBC, the former president has defended this line since last fall, his party’s number one process. “You don’t have to vote,” Trump told an audience in New Hampshire in October. Let’s not worry about voting: they gave us a lot of votes.
As far as I know, Trump is not literally telling Americans not to vote. Rather, he suggests that he is so popular that it will be easy to win over the electorate as Election Day approaches.
The real challenge, the former president invariably adds, is dealing with the cheating and voter fraud that exist in his imagination, despite Trump’s inability to back up his conspiracy theories with evidence.
In other words, the Republican downplays the desire to vote, but necessarily emphasizes the desire to use voter intimidation tactics and voting restrictions. Given the volume and repetition of his anti-election rhetoric, Trump asked earlier this week, “Why do we have elections?”– And after his years of antipathy towards democracy, it is difficult not to find those worrying comments.
This article updates our previous similar coverage.
Steve Benen is a producer of “The Rachel Maddow Show”, editor of MaddowBlog, and political contributor for MSNBC. He is also the best-selling author of “Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans’ War on the Recent Past. ” “.
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