It begins: Trump cries foul play and attacks mail-in ballots as his lead slips away
We all knew it was coming.
Donald Trump has been making it clear for months that he has no intention of allowing the electoral process to play out, and given the way that this election was likely to play out with the overwhelming amount of pandemic-related early voting and mail in-ballots, it was easy to predict that at some point during the lengthy counting process that the President would begin casting doubt on the integrity of the mail-in ballots and absentee ballots as his percentage of the vote began to dwindle.
Unfortunately, we didn’t have to wait very long. On Wednesday morning, the President took to Twitter and complained that his lead was “magically” disappearing as “surprise” ballot dumps were counted.
Last night I was leading, often solidly, in many key States, in almost all instances Democrat run & controlled. Then, one by one, they started to magically disappear as surprise ballot dumps were counted. VERY STRANGE, and the “pollsters” got it completely & historically wrong!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 4, 2020
In a second tweet, the president bizarrely complained that mail-in ballot dumps were “devastating” and had a “power of destruction” as if they were bombs and not, you know, boxes of ballots.
How come every time they count Mail-In ballot dumps they are so devastating in their percentage and power of destruction?
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 4, 2020
In a third, he wondered “WHAT IS THIS ALL ABOUT,” planting even more seeds of doubt.
WHAT IS THIS ALL ABOUT? https://t.co/6487pYLZnL
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 4, 2020
For the record, there is nothing magic or surprising or untoward about any of these ballots. If Trump had wanted a bigger share of the late vote, he shouldn’t have been telling his supporters to only vote on Election Day for the past couple months — but of course, this is exactly what he wants, because it allows him to potentially set up an election steal by stopping the vote count through some bizarre Supreme Court shenanigans.
During his speech last night, the President claimed victory and made it clear he was putting all his hopes on the Supreme Court to steal the election for him. “All of a sudden, I said, what happened to the election? It’s off. You know what happened. They knew they couldn’t win, so they said, let’s go to court,” said Trump. “We’ll be going to the U.S. Supreme Court. We want all voting to stop. We don’t want them to find any ballots at 4:00 in the morning and add them to the list.”
While we knew he was going to do this, it still is horrifying to see the President of the United States implying that the counting of votes that aren’t for him is somehow an effort to steal the election away from him when he himself is the one who is attempting to steal the election by putting a stop to the counting of votes!
All we can do right now is hope that the mail-in votes deliver a margin of victory to Biden large enough that no court would overturn it…and that the Republican Party apparatus will choose our democracy over Donald Trump’s political career.