As he refused to answer questions about whether he will accept the results of the 2024 election and avoided acknowledging where he stands on the thorny issue of a peaceful transfer of power, Donald Trump on Thursday painted a rather rigid picture of how exactly it might prove. to undermine the results of the election if he loses.
His impromptu press conference, apparently designed to get back into the news cycle and counter press coverage of the Democratic ticket, was vintage Trump: off-the-rails, complete with talk of how he could have shut down Hillary Clinton when he did. he was president and hit on his crowd sizes. But rather than diving too deep into the old stories about how the 2020 election was stolen from him through COVID mitigation measures and other assorted conspiracy theories, he dug into a new logic that he and his allies seem to ready to use in November if you lose. .
The Republican Party resurrected old myths about noncitizen voting this spring and summer, a baseless concern that, as my colleague Khaya Himmelman pointed out, the party seems to have rhetorical value . Trump and his allies, such as House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), have conflated the much-hyped border crisis with unfounded fears of undocumented immigrants heading to the polls en masse to vote. for the Democrats; House Republicans have pushed legislation that would prevent non-citizens from voting in federal elections – the fact that this is already illegal and, well, just about damned.
In his Thursday tirade, Trump all but confirmed that this form of electoral denialism will be in heavy rotation within months if Harris beats him, suggesting that some amorphous “they” are trying to flood America with migrants.
For my colleague John Light:
Then he moved to the territory adjacent to the Great Replacement, he wondered why “the other side”, in his statement, “allows” the immigrants to enter, and landed on the conclusion that “they are trying to sign for the vote”.
“And they have to stop,” he added. “They can’t let illegal immigrants vote in this next election.”
Because this did not actually happen and has never happened, it has been unclear, until this point, how exactly Republicans and MAGA activists would argue that their loss was actually due to an illegal, non-citizen vote in a massive scale. But that hasn’t stopped them in 2020. And Trump’s allies in the right-wing media are also helping him create data points to make a gesture. This morning, the RNC issued a press release highlighting a Breitbart story a singular one undocumented immigrants receiving (but apparently not even voting with) a mail-in ballot. The RNC:
As previously reported in Breitbartthe RNC and MN GOP discovered that a non-citizen, legally resident in the United States, received a primary vote in Minnesota. This is an alarming failure in Minnesota’s election system, potentially not an isolated incident, and a predictable result of poor vetting systems. The RNC and MN GOP are demanding answers, verification of citizenship before registering to vote, and an immediate review of voter rolls.
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