Tag: Trump fake voter fraud crisis

Dear Trump, Enough Is Enough

The idea that Trump, the leader of the free world, would simply declare himself the winner of a U.S. election jarred even some of the most loyal of Republican stalwarts.

FOR NEARLY FOUR YEARS of the Trump presidency, the question to Republican lawmakers and leaders has been: Where would you draw the line when it comes to supporting President Donald Trump? The nasty tweets, the thousands of misstatements, the promotion of his business interests while in office? Maybe separating children from their parents when they came over the border illegally or threatening to withhold aid from states and governors he doesn’t like?

Turns out, the line came as Trump faced the reality that he might lose the election, as mail-in ballot counting started to take must-win states out of Trump’s reach. Even as millions of votes remained to be counted, Trump boasted of a victory early Wednesday. All week, Trump and his campaign have been insisting on social media that the president had won states like Pennsylvania and Georgia that had yet to be called.

That did it for a wide array of Republicans, and not just those who had already separated themselves from Trump. The idea that the leader of the free world would simply declare himself the winner – something Americans criticize in other countries and even punish other nations for doing – jarred the most loyal of Republican stalwarts. Continue reading.

Secretaries of State in Spotlight as Trump Ratchets Up Attacks to Sow Doubt

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While state election centers are broadcast on cable news and have drawn partisan supporters to the sites as thirst for electoral updates intensifies, election administrators have continued to diligently tabulate the votes.

PHILADELPHIA — They typically operate behind the scenes and far from the spotlight. But as the final count in the 2020 presidential election drags on and President Trump assaults the integrity of the results, otherwise obscure secretaries of state, election commissioners and clerks have found their every utterance meriting breaking news interruptions and all-caps cable chyrons.

With the occupant of the White House hinging on the results in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada, the Trump campaign has sought to ratchet up pressure on election officials, threatening legislation and trying to shape public opinion with carnival-like events. Mr. Trump himself baselessly claimed widespread fraud and that people were “trying to steal the election,” at a news conference Thursday evening. And the president’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., even tried to make support of the effort a litmus test of the 2024 Republican presidential primary.

“Everyone should be watching who is actually fighting this flagrant nonsense and who is sitting on the sidelines,” he wrote Thursday afternoon on Twitter. An hour later, he fumed, “The total lack of action from virtually all of the ‘2024 GOP hopefuls’ is pretty amazing.” Continue reading.

In Torrent of Falsehoods, Trump Claims Election Is Being Stolen

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Most television networks cut away from the statement President Trump gave Thursday night from the White House briefing room on the grounds that what he was saying was not true.

WASHINGTON — Even for President Trump, it was an imagined version of reality, one in which he was not losing but the victim of a wide-ranging conspiracy stretching across the country in multiple cities, counties and states, involving untold numbers of people all somehow collaborating to steal the election in ways he could not actually explain.

Never mind that Mr. Trump presented not a shred of evidence during his first public appearance since late on election night or that few senior Republican officeholders endorsed his false claims of far-reaching fraud. A presidency born in a lie about Barack Obama’s birthplace appeared on the edge of ending in a lie about his own faltering bid for re-election.

“If you count the legal votes, I easily win,” Mr. Trump said Thursday night in an unusually subdued, 17-minute televised statement from the lectern in the White House briefing room, complaining that Democrats, the news media, pollsters, big technology companies and nonpartisan election workers had all corruptly sought to deny him a second term. Continue reading.

Trump challenges electoral process as hopes for victory fade

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President Trump on Thursday without providing any direct evidence of fraud, challenged the electoral process and claimed that the election was being stolen from him.

Trump made the remarks as part of a lengthy written statement that he mostly stuck with as Democratic nominee Joe Biden closed in on the 270 electoral votes needed to become president-elect and end Trump’s time in the Oval Office.

Trump, who has seen his path to 270 electoral votes greatly narrow, said he believed he would ultimately win the election and promised a lengthy legal fight to challenge the results.  Continue reading.

Some in GOP break with Trump over baseless vote-fraud claims

WASHINGTON — Some Republican lawmakers on Thursday criticized President Donald Trump’s unsupported claim that Democrats are trying to “steal” the election, saying Trump’s comments undermine the U.S. political process and the bedrock notion that all Americans should have their vote counted.

Trump, who has complained for weeks about mail-in ballots, escalated his allegations late Thursday, saying at the White House that the ballot-counting process is unfair and corrupt. Trump did not back up his claims with any details or evidence, and state and federal officials have not reported any instances of widespread voter fraud.

Rep. Adam Kinzinger, a Republican from Illinois, tweeted that the president’s claims of fraud are “getting insane.” If Trump has “legit” concerns about fraud, they need to be based on evidence and taken to court, Kinzinger said, adding, “STOP Spreading debunked misinformation.” Continue reading.

‘This isn’t going to happen’: Top GOP operative throws cold water on Trump’s claims of ‘voter fraud’

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As President Donald Trump and his allies desperately try to push the narrative that the election that’s slipping away from him is actually being stolen via voter fraud, a longstanding top operative in the Republican Party threw cold water on the suggestion.

Karl Rove, the former adviser to George W. Bush, wrote a blog post on Thursday describing the state of the race. His overall analysis seemed to generally match the consensus view of election analysts at the time — votes in key swing states remain outstanding, but results look increasingly favorable for Joe Biden — though he didn’t explicitly lay out that Trump is on a track to lose. He even put a negative spin on his analysis for Biden, arguing that his campaign did nothing to lift up down-ballot Democrats.

But in one notable paragraph, he sharply broke with the president and his allies who are concocting baseless claims about voter fraud to cast doubt on the results and drum up legal challenges to the process. Continue reading.

Civil unrest fears grow as protests hit vote-counting battleground states

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Unrest across the country appears to be on the rise as protesters hold more demonstrations over ongoing vote counts in several key battleground states that will decide the outcome of a heated presidential race.

The Biden and Trump campaigns have diverged on their approach to ballot counting, with President Trump filing lawsuits to stop counting ballots and former Vice President Joe Biden emphasizing the importance of having all votes counted.

The dueling rhetoric has spilled out into the streets of various cities, where Biden supporters can be heard chanting “count the votes,” while Trump supporters call to “stop the count.” Continue reading.

Facebook bans ‘STOP THE STEAL’ group Trump allies were using to organize protests against vote counting

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The group, which had attracted more than 360,000 members, was among widespread efforts by conservative activists to spark protests challenging the legitimacy of the election

President Trump’s allies have turned to Facebook and other social media sites in an effort to spark nationwide protests against the 2020 election, thrusting some of Silicon Valley’s most powerful organizing tools into a contest over the legitimacy of American democracy.

The campaign’s leading voices have relied on a network of new and existing Facebook pages, groups and events — some of which have garnered hundreds of thousands of members — to rally people in public this week around a baseless conspiracy theory that Democratic candidate Joe Biden is attempting to “steal” the election. Some of the efforts promoted in places like Pennsylvania and Arizona specifically target vote-counting centers, threatening disruptions while ballot-tallying is still underway.

The online efforts have unfolded not on the Republican Party’s fringes but well within its mainstream. Among the most vocal leaders is Amy Kremer, a former congressional candidate in Georgia and a co-founder and co-chair of Women for Trump. She used a Facebook page called Women for America First, which boasts more than 100,000 followers, to drive users to a newly launched Facebook group called “STOP THE STEAL,” which garnered more than 360,000 members before the company removed it midday Thursday for violating the platform’s rules. Continue reading.

Leslie Jones Hilariously Compares Donald Trump To Top 40 Radio

The “Saturday Night Live” alum chopped down the president’s bogus election fraud claims on “Late Night.

Comedian Leslie Jones said Wednesday that President Donald Trump is like a Top 40-playing radio station. (Watch the clip below.)

Jones watched Trump baselessly claim that the rightful counting of legal mail-in votes in battleground states was illegal. “This is a fraud on the American public,” the president said on election night.

Trump made similar allegations even before Election Day, laying the groundwork for repudiating vote tallies in case he lost to Democratic nominee Joe Biden. With the outcome still uncertain on Thursday, Trump’s lawyers filed a blizzard of lawsuits.

The “Saturday Night Live” alum called Trump’s antics “Entertainment 101.” Continue reading.

Trump and his allies boost bogus conspiracy theories in a bid to undermine vote count

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The campaign also sent an estimated 9 million text messages between midnight and midday Wednesday, according to an anti-robocall firm, with some messages seeking money to launch voting challenges.

President Trump, his son and top members of his campaign on Wednesday advanced a set of unfounded conspiracy theories about the vote-tallying process to claim that Democrats were rigging the final count.

Eric Trump tweeted a video, first pushed out by an account associated with the far-right QAnon conspiracy theory, that purported to show someone burning ballots cast for his father. The materials turned out to be sample ballots, and Twitter quickly suspended the original account that circulated the misleading clip.

Trump’s son and others, including White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany, claimed falsely in tweets later hidden by warning labels that the president had won Pennsylvania — even though no such determination had been made. And the campaign’s spokesman, Tim Murtaugh, claimed without evidence that crowd control at a processing center in Detroit was an effort to thwart Trump’s chances of reelection. Continue reading.