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Trump ignores Vance’s message and clings to the “rigged election” lie

Trump ignores Vance’s message and clings to the “rigged election” lie

Near the end of this week’s vice presidential debate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz asked Ohio Sen. JD Vance a question whose relevance continued long after the event. “Did he [Donald Trump] “Losing the 2020 election?” asked the Democratic candidate.

His Republican rival refused to respond — the senator said only that he was “focused on the future” — and the Harris campaign quickly turned Vance’s evasion into a campaign ad.

A day later, the Republican vice presidential nominee was asked the same question, which he again dodged while accusing news organizations of being “obsessed” with the election four years ago. That same evening, House Majority Leader Tom Emmer appeared on CNN and asked Kaitlan Collins, “Why are you talking about something that happened four years ago?” the Minnesota congressman addedregarding the 2020 race: “This is something you in the media want to focus on on a regular basis.”

Against this backdrop, a day later, Trump made his vice president and allies in Congress look pretty stupid. NBC News reported:

Trump said early in his speech at a rally in Saginaw, Michigan that he would not run again if he thought he would lose the 2020 presidential election.

“We won. “We won,” declared the former president, despite reality. “We won. It was a rigged election. It was a rigged election.”

It’s not exactly a secret that Republican officials have publicly and privately asked Trump to stop spreading his ridiculous conspiracy theories about his 2020 defeat – which many are calling the former president’s “big lie” – because it’s big and the whole thing is a message of loss – voters don’t want to hear that.

But Trump just can’t help it. Although Vance and other leading GOP voices occasionally tell the public that the party and its platform are “focused on the future,” Trump has a habit of focusing on the past.

In fact, it is a core message of the Republican candidate. A HuffPost report said, even before Vance dodged the 2020-related question: “Trump had already brought up the stolen election repeatedly over the past week — he brings up 2020 unprompted, virtually every time he does speaks in public even though he doesn’t. “I don’t always say explicitly that it was ‘rigged.’

However, that was the word he used at his final event in Michigan. It was also the word he used on his social media platform Wednesday night after special counsel Jack Smith’s brutal court filing was unsealed. “I didn’t rig the 2020 election, they did!” the former president wrote, pointing to a version of reality that has nothing to do with our own.

The problem isn’t just that Trump is lying. Additionally, the fact that the Republican presidential nominee and vice presidential nominee are making contradictory statements about the 2020 race is surprising, but not the most important detail.

What matters most is that Trump, who laid the groundwork for rejecting the results of his reelection long before Election Day 2020, is doing the same thing again.

As we discussed, the former president refuses to say whether he will accept the results of this year’s competition. Routinely too falsely tells the public The his enemies are deceivers and election results are suspect – unless he says otherwise.

As NBC News reported, Trump has also begun calling almost everything “election interference,” evidence be damned, as part of a multi-pronged attempt to preemptively delegitimize the 2024 race, just in case he loses.

The Republican’s efforts four years ago were a deliberate attack on democracy. As he reads from the same script, cheating hasn’t improved with age.

If the Democrats are lucky, Trump won’t change course at all, and in the final 32 days of the election cycle, the Republican nominee will peddle the same whiny lie at event after event that most Americans have been fed up with for some time.