Donald
Trump has denied he is pushing to delay the US election in November, repeating
his claim voting by mail from home would cause extensive problems determining
the result. 'Do I want to see a date change? No. But I don’t want to see a
crooked election. This election will be the most rigged election in history, if
that happens,' he said
Trump
suggests delaying presidential election as dire economic data released
Rattled
Trump suggests poll delay – There has been a furious response from both sides
of US politics after Donald Trump suggested the November elections should be
delayed because he doesn’t trust postal voting. The president was seen as
trying to sow doubt about the legitimacy of the outcome, as he trails
significantly behind Joe Biden in the polls.
Senator
Marco Rubio, a Trump loyalist on most issues, said: “I wish he hadn’t said
that, but it’s not going to change. We are going to have an election in
November.” That was one of the more muted critiques. Election experts in the US
say that all forms of voter fraud are rare – in 2017 the Brennan Center for
Justice ranked the risk of ballot fraud at 0.00004% to 0.0009%.
2020
ELECTIONS
Republicans flat-out reject Trump’s suggestion to
delay election
The president’s tweet stems from his long-running
allegations, without evidence, that mail-in voting is unreliable and riddled
with fraud.
Voting
stations are set up in the South Wing of the Kentucky Exposition Center for
voters to cast their ballot in the Kentucky primary in Louisville, Ky. on June
23.
Voting
stations are set up in the South Wing of the Kentucky Exposition Center for
voters to cast their ballot in the Kentucky primary in Louisville, Ky. on June
23. | Timothy D. Easley/AP Photo
By ANDREW
DESIDERIO
07/30/2020
12:31 PM EDT
Updated:
07/30/2020 04:51 PM EDT
President
Donald Trump on Thursday faced resounding, near-universal opposition from
Republicans to his suggestion that the November election should be delayed due
to unsubstantiated claims of mail-in voter fraud.
Trump does
not have the power to unilaterally push back the date of the Nov. 3 election;
only Congress holds that authority under the Constitution. Lawmakers from both
parties on Thursday said they oppose delaying the election, and many
Republicans in particular have touted the merits of voting by mail during the
coronavirus pandemic.
“He can
suggest whatever he wants. The law is what it is. We’re going to have an
election that’s legitimate, it’s going to be credible, it’s going to be the
same as we’ve always done it,” Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), the chairman of the
Senate Intelligence Committee, told reporters.
In
bipartisan public reports, the Senate Intelligence Committee has emphasized
that American officials, including the president, should not seek to undermine
faith in U.S. elections, arguing that such statements aid malign efforts by
foreign countries to meddle in campaigns.
“I wish he
hadn’t said that. But it’s not going to change,” Rubio added. “We’re going to
have an election in November. And people should have confidence in it.”
Sen. Chuck
Grassley (R-Iowa), who is in the line of succession for the presidency as the
president pro tempore of the Senate, dismissed Trump’s tweet as just the
opinion of one person, noting that it would take an act of Congress to change
the date of a federal election.
“It doesn’t
matter what one individual in this country says,” Grassley said. “We still are
a country based on the rule of law. And we must follow the law until either the
Constitution is changed or until the law is changed.”
House
Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) similarly said he opposes pushing
back the date of the election. “No way should we ever not hold an election on
the day that we have it,” McCarthy told reporters.
The
president’s tweet stems from his long-running allegations, without evidence,
that mail-in voting is unreliable and riddled with fraud. It also comes as he
is trailing significantly in the polls to presumptive Democratic presidential
nominee Joe Biden, who predicted in April that Trump would seek to push back
the date of the election.
“With
Universal Mail-In Voting (not Absentee Voting, which is good), 2020 will be the
most INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT Election in history. It will be a great
embarrassment to the USA,” Trump wrote on Twitter. “Delay the Election until
people can properly, securely and safely vote???”
Later on
Thursday, Trump softened his suggestion, tweeting that Americans “Must know
Election results on the night of the Election, not days, months, or even years
later!”
Several
House Republicans responded to Trump’s suggestion unprompted.
“Moving
Election Day would seriously jeopardize the legitimacy of the election,” Rep.
Dusty Johnson, a conservative House Republican from South Dakota, wrote on
Twitter. “Federal, state and local officials need to continue to work hard to
ensure that Americans can vote safely, whether by voting early or on November
3.”
Rep. Adam
Kinzinger (R-Ill.), an occasional Trump critic, wrote: “Reminder: Election
dates are set by Congress. And I will oppose any attempts to delay the
#2020Election.”
Senate
Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) declined to respond to reporters’
questions about Trump’s tweet, but he reportedly told WNKY in Kentucky that the
election is set in stone.
Democrats
said the president’s suggestion represented further evidence of his desire to
undermine trust in U.S. institutions, and they panned it as a distraction from
Trump’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic.
“He’s
always trying to divert attention from his overwhelming failure on Covid,”
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said in a brief interview. “And
it’s not going to happen.”
Melanie
Zanona and Max Cohen contributed to this story.
TRUMPOLOGY
‘He’s Willing to Put Democracy on the Block’
Trump’s tweet about delaying the election shocked
Washington into speaking out. But it didn’t surprise those who have tangled
with him over the years.
By MICHAEL
KRUSE
07/30/2020
08:01 PM EDT
Michael
Kruse is a senior staff writer at POLITICO and POLITICO Magazine.
With three
question marks, two words in all caps and one incendiary tweet, Donald Trump on
Thursday morning unleashed one of his most hostile sallies on democracy yet.
The corrosive missive, smearing the November election as “INACCURATE &
FRAUDULENT” before the first vote has been cast and floating the notion of
delaying the date, was probably shocking not so much because of its content as
by the reaction it swiftly elicited. People who habitually do not respond to
the president’s tweets responded to this one—a point-blank and bipartisan
repudiation that included a roster of important Republicans.
The tweet
even alarmed a cadre of longtime Trump observers—the biographers and former staffers
and executives who long ago became accustomed to his provocations. But they
also weren’t that surprised.
From
Trump’s financial failures of the early to mid-1990s, after all, to his
failures then and later as a casino owner in Atlantic City, New Jersey, to the
similar tactics he deployed in the stretch run of the election in 2016, the
people who know Trump best have seen versions of this before. And always the
motivation is the same—to save face by muddying the runway headed toward a
looming loss by calling into question if not outright attacking the validity of
the system itself.
The sole
difference, they say, and it’s a big one, they grant, is the gravity of his
role—he’s the president not of the Trump Organization but of the United States
of America—and what’s at stake: the health and sustenance of the country’s
democracy.
“The only
thing that has changed is that he’s doing it on the world stage, and it is
enhanced by the powers and the platform that the presidency offers,” biographer
Tim O’Brien told me. “We don’t need to believe now that there’s anything Donald
Trump won’t do to preserve his own sense of himself. And for the history books
alone, certain incidents are worth cataloging, and this is one of them. He’s
willing to put democracy on the block.”
But Trump
never has altered his fundamental M.O. to match the scale of the moment. He’s
always placed his own interests first, say those who know him, whether it’s a
business deal or a matter of state.
“This is
all very consistent with the man I worked with 30 years ago,” Bruce Nobles, the
former president of the Trump Shuttle, told me. “He’s very competitive and
wants to always win, and if he thinks he can’t win, then by definition there
must be something wrong with the system, because otherwise, of course, he would
win,” Nobles said. “He believes that, if for some reason he doesn’t get what he
wants, it’s not his fault—it’s some other corrupt system that’s keeping that
from happening.”
Back in
1990, when he owed his bank lenders billions of dollars, Trump blamed the
overall economic downturn instead of acknowledging the litany of his own
reckless decisions, “saying, ‘OK, well, you run the building, you run the debt,
you run the airline, you run the Plaza,’” former Trump publicist Alan Marcus
told me. And he made sure that his plight was every bit their plight, in a
sense faulting the system, then distorting the system—then (ab)using the system
to survive. “He’d say, ‘Hey, if I fail, everybody fails,’” said Marcus.
“When he
was deeply indebted with bank loans he couldn’t repay,” added O’Brien, the
biographer, “he basically said that he would just blow up the banks and leave
them hanging and walk away from his debts—when they needed him to play ball, so
they could rationally dispose of the properties he used to control. And once he
realized that they needed his involvement, he began playing with fire—like all
7-year-olds do.”
Steven
Perskie, the chairman of New Jersey’s Casino Control Commission from 1990 to
1994, on Thursday recalled the instance in December 1990 in which Trump’s
father spent more than $3 million on casino chips he didn’t use—an illegal loan
that helped his beleaguered son make a debt payment that was due.
“It doesn’t
have remotely the profile and political impact of the tweet this morning, which
is a direct attack on our system of government,” Perskie told me. But still, he
said: “The connection, or the tie, if you will, is simply his instinctive
ability to reinvent reality.”
Reinventing
reality in that case meant an assault on the state’s regulatory
infrastructure—and in this case means sowing doubt about the trustworthiness of
the nation’s voting system.
“Every
failure he’s ever had,” O’Brien told me, “he has blamed it on outside forces.”
Only now,
of course, Trump is one of the most powerful people on the planet, and one of
the most consequential presidents ever, and what he’s assailing is not the
banks or Atlantic City.
“It’s
democracy,” O’Brien said.
“You have
to have empathy to be bothered by collateral damage. And he is devoid of
empathy. He never thinks about collateral damage. He just thinks about how cool
the mushroom clouds will look.”
At least on
Thursday, though, the response on Capitol Hill and around the political world
seemed to suggest that Election Day—which the Constitution empowers Congress to
set and therefore can be changed only by Congress—is one pillar of democracy
this norm-eviscerating president won’t be able to gut. He’d been “edging”
toward the idea of postponing or poisoning this fall’s election, biographer
Gwenda Blair told me, “but now he’s going full speed ahead.” Republicans, from
Mitch McConnell on down, however, said in essence stop right there.
But the
people who’ve known and watched Trump—not for five years but parts of five
decades—say one thing is for sure. He will not. As predictable as Tuesday’s
tweet might have been given his patterns of behavior in the past, it also could
and should be seen, they said, as a preview of what’s to come these next 96
days and for who knows how long after that.
“He’s going
to keep the rhetoric up,” former Trump casino executive Jack O’Donnell told me.
“He’s going to do it for the next three months, and he’s going to talk about
this ‘rigged’ election and this ‘fraudulent’ election. Because he can’t lose in
his mind. And this is how he’s going to cover in case he does.”
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