Former President Donald Trump said Wednesday that his strategy for the fall is less aimed at mobilizing his supporters and more at ensuring Democrats “don’t cheat” in the general election. “Our main goal is not to get the vote, but to make sure they don’t cheat,” Trump said at a campaign event in Asheboro, North Carolina, a state Vice President Kamala Harris sees as competitive for this campaign. year.
“We have all the votes we need,” Trump added, pointing to the symptoms of the road as proof of his popularity. As an excerpt of his video remarks makes clear, the former president is not joking.
I’ve been reading campaigns for some time, and I honestly can’t think of any other example where a candidate, less than a month before the electorate voted in a competitive race, said out loud, “Our primary goal is not get the vote out.
If the message sounds familiar, it’s not your imagination. As we discussed about a month ago, the Republican candidate spread the same word on Fox News last July. “My instructions: We don’t want votes, I have so many,” Trump said.
It is not a mistake. The day after the June presidential debate, for example, the former president held a rally in Virginia and told attendees, “We don’t want votes. “A week earlier, the Republican spoke at a far-right convention and said more or less the same thing. “I tell my fellow members that I don’t want votes,” Trump said, adding, “We don’t want votes. “
This follows the Republican nominee who pushed the same line in an appearance in Detroit. “Look, we don’t want votes,” Trump said. We have to stop, concentrate, not worry about votes. “
In fact, as my colleague Jachan Jones pointed out on MSNBC, the former president has championed this line since last fall, his party’s number one process. “You don’t have to vote,” Trump told an audience in New Hampshire in October. Let’s not worry about voting: they gave us a lot of votes.
As far as I know, Trump is not literally telling Americans not to vote. Rather, he suggests that he is so popular that it will be easy to win him over from the electorate as Election Day approaches.
The real challenge, the former president invariably adds, is dealing with the cheating and voter fraud that exist in his imagination, despite Trump’s inability to back up his conspiracy theories with evidence.
In other words, the Republican downplays the desire to vote, but necessarily emphasizes the desire to use voter intimidation tactics and voting restrictions. Given the volume and repetition of his anti-election rhetoric, Trump asked earlier this week, “Why do we have an election?” – And after his years of antipathy towards democracy, it is difficult not to find those comments worrying.
This article updates our previous similar coverage.
Steve Benen is a producer on “The Rachel Maddow Show,” editor of MaddowBlog, and political contributor to MSNBC. He is also the best-selling author of “Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans’ War on the Recent Past. “”.
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