‘We Want the Answer Tonight’: Trump, Once Again, Lays Groundwork to Deny Election
It's an echo of his 2020 demand to stop counting votes that might cost him victory
Donald Trump clearly wants to try it again.
Trump, who falsely claimed victory Election Night four years ago while simultaneously —and baselessly — demanded that all vote-counting stop across the country, is setting up the same play this year.
The former president, who is running to return to the White House, made that plain at his final rally of the 2024 campaign.
On Election Night 2020, Trump stood in the East Room of White House and called for a halt to vote-counting, claiming victory over Democrat Joe Biden.
Ultimately, of course, the count did continue and after several days, Biden was declared the winner.
Fast-forward four years.
Speaking in the wee hours of Tuesday morning, Trump demanded to know the winner of the election on the same day: Election Day.
With early voting — and vote-by-mail — coming in at record levels in a number of key states, it may well be days before anyone is prepared to declare a new president-elect.
But that’s not good enough for Trump, who fomented a violent insurrection on January 6, 2021, in an attempt to illegally hold onto the presidency.
“We want the answer tonight!” Trump declared, in his final rally of the campaign season, in the battleground of Grand Rapids, Mich.
Trump also — again, falsely and without evidence — tried to claim that voting by electronic machines is less trustworthy and accurate than relying solely on paper ballots.
He seems to be making these baseless claims as a predicate that he is setting up to eventually deny the results of the 2024 election should he not be declared the lawful winner.
“But if you use paper, it’s 8 percent the cost of the other, it’s more accurate, and you don’t have 12-day waits,” Trump said, falsely. “And then what the hell is happening in the inside of those machines? We want the answer tomorrow — tonight.
“We want the answer tonight!”
The truth is that Trump and his allies attacked the integrity of voting machines four years ago.
The right-wing Fox News parroted those false claims against voting machines and ultimately Fox News had to agree to pay Dominion Voting Systems nearly $800 million to avert a trial in the voting machine company’s lawsuit that would have exposed how the network promoted lies about the 2020 presidential election.
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