Trump’s New Campaign Strategy: Declare The Election Illegitimate
President Donald Trump on Thursday ramped up his most forceful campaign message: That the coming election is illegitimate unless he wins.
“Because of the new and unprecedented massive amount of unsolicited ballots which will be sent to ‘voters’, or wherever, this year, the Nov 3rd Election result may NEVER BE ACCURATELY DETERMINED, which is what some want. Another election disaster yesterday. Stop Ballot Madness!” he said in a morning statement posted to Twitter.
“The only way [Democrats] can win is to cheat, in my opinion,” he said during a morning interview with Fox Sports Radio.
Neither assertion is new. Trump has been falsely claiming that mail voting is rife with fraud for several months, and in recent weeks has been repeatedly claiming that the only way Democrat Joe Biden could defeat him in November would be to cheat.
Daniel Goldman, a former federal prosecutor who led the House Intelligence Committee’s successful effort to impeach Trump last year, told HuffPost he has “massive” concerns about Trump declaring an election loss illegitimate.
“He may do something to suppress the mail-in vote, to prevent all the mail-in vote to be counted, and then declare victory,” Goldman said.
Trump’s staff did not respond to HuffPost queries regarding Trump’s statements.
In the past, White House officials have said he wants to avoid voter and ballot fraud, and have tried to make a distinction between mail ballots specifically requested by a voter and those that are automatically sent out to all registered voters or to all registered voters who have voted recently.
Trump, however, explained clearly why he opposed mail voting in a March 30 interview with Fox News. He said he opposed legislation that would have paid for coronavirus-related expansion of mail voting because: “They had levels of voting, that if you ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”
Despite that admission, Trump has continued to falsely claim...
