If God was the vote counter, Donald Trump says he’d win in a landslide.
The Republican nominee suggested on Thursday that divine intervention in next week’s election would reveal him as the rightful winner of even Democratic bastions like California.
On one level, Trump’s comment shows how his false election fraud claims have entered the outer realms of absurdity.
But this goes beyond hyperbole. Trump who altered reality for tens of millions of Americans by claiming he was cheated out of power four years ago is creating a sinister threat to the 2024 election and spinning a legacy of fractured trust that could taint presidential votes long after he’s left the stage.
The election fraud claims that Trump most notably supercharged in 2020 to salve his humiliation at losing to Joe Biden are already at high intensity this year.
After laying out the darkest closing argument in modern American history, Trump is now increasingly turning to poisoning public confidence in the election. In New Mexico on Thursday, he falsely claimed the state was actually in his column in 2016 and 2020. “I believe we won it twice,” he said. “If we could bring God down from heaven and he’d be the vote counter, we’d win this, we’d win California, we’d win a lot of states. … You have just got to keep the votes honest.”
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In reality, Trump lost New Mexico twice, by 8 and 11 points, and his claims he could win Democratic strongholds like California but for vote fraud are wildly off base. But they are part of a clear and deliberate strategy that is unfolding before the eyes of millions of voters to create an impression that Tuesday’s election will be fraudulent. This might seed ground for legal challenges if Trump loses, and it also serves to crank up fury among his supporters already primed by past false fraud claims. Trump is also working in conjunction with the conservative media machine to create an impression that his victory is a certainty and that a win for Vice President Kamala Harris and Democrats can only be the result of fraud.
The ex-president’s increasing efforts to shatter the credibility of the 2024 election, as an apparent Plan B if he loses, coincide with a widening effort by GOP officials and “Make America Great Again” activists to position to undermine any Harris victory in courts, local election jurisdictions and even in state legislatures.
Reported by CNN
