OF
COURSE TRUMP THINKS IT’S A “FRAUD ON THE NATION” TO COUNT ALL THE BALLOTS
“We’ll be going to the U.S. Supreme Court. We
want all voting to stop.”
BY BESS LEVIN
NOVEMBER
4, 2020
Donald Trump spent the last several months on the
campaign trail falsely declaring mail-in ballots were rife with fraud,
complaining that it would be soooo unfair to actually count all the votes
before calling a winner, and vowing to send his
goon lawyers in to punt the election to the Supreme Court. He also insisted on Tuesday
that he wouldn’t declare victory until a winner was actually decided but:
Surprise! He decided to dispense with the democratic process and just claim he
won the whole thing and that any attempts to actually count all the ballots is
actually cheating.
“Millions and millions of people voted for us
tonight, and a very sad group of people is trying to disenfranchise that group
of people and we won’t stand for it, we will not stand for it,” Trump said
during a speech from the White House in the early hours of the morning, making
it clear that he has no idea what disenfranchisement means. “We were getting
ready for a big celebration, we were winning everything and all of a sudden it
was just called off. The results tonight have been phenomenal…I mean literally
we were just all set to get outside and just celebrate something that was so
beautiful, so good, such a vote such a success. The citizens of this country
have come out in record numbers, this a record, there’s never been anything
like it to support our incredible movement…. Most importantly, we’re winning
Pennsylvania by a tremendous amount of votes. We’re up 690,000 votes. These
aren’t even close, this is not like, Oh, it’s close. With 64% of the vote in,
it’s going to be almost impossible and we’re coming into good Pennsylvania
areas where they happen to like your president. We’re winning Michigan…I said
‘Wow, that’s a lot’…and we’re winning Wisconsin…so when you take those three
states in particular and you take all of the others…and all of a sudden it’s
not like we’re up 12 votes and we have 60% left, we won states and all of a
sudden, I said, ‘What happened to the election? It’s off.’ And we have all
these announcers saying, ‘What’s happened’ and then they said, ‘Ohhh.’
Because you know what happened, they knew they
couldn’t win, so they said, ‘Let’s go to court’ and did I predict this? Did I
say this? I’ve been saying this from the day I heard they were going to send
out tens of millions of ballots. Because they were either going to win or they
were going to take us to court…. This is a fraud on the American public. This
is an embarrassment to our country. We were getting ready to win this election,
frankly we did win this election. So our goal now is to ensure the integrity
for the good of this nation…this is a major fraud on our nation. We want the
law to be used in a proper manner, so 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 o’clock
in the morning and add them to the list…. We will win this and as far as I’m
concerned we already have won it.”
Of course, out here in the real world, Trump
hasn’t won anything and he may have been “getting ready for a big celebration”
but here in America, we decide who won the election by counting all the votes,
not by who busted out the streamers and party hats first. As experts have said
for weeks now, Trump would probably fare okay at the start of Tuesday night but
late-arriving—though properly postmarked!—ballots for Joe Biden would
cut into the president’s early lead. That probably had something to do with the
fact that Trump spent months fearmongering about voting by mail, while Biden
supporters understood it was a perfectly acceptable way to vote, particularly
in the midst of a pandemic. Also, laws in places like Pennsylvania dictated
that ballots couldn’t be scanned or even opened and and flattened in
preparation for processing before Tuesday—hence, a scenario in which it would
be impossible to call the state on the night of the election, or what our
not-very-smart president thinks is a “fraud on the nation.”
In contrast, Joe Biden told supporters at a
drive-in rally in Delaware, “We’re going to have to be patient until the hard
work of tallying votes is finished. And it ain’t over till every vote is
counted.” Or as Biden’s campaign manager put it at 3:55 a.m.: “We repeated what
the Vice President said tonight: Donald Trump does not decide the outcome of
this election. Joe Biden does not decide the outcome of this election. The
American people decide the outcome of this election. And the democratic process
must and will continue until its conclusion…. If the president makes good on
his threat to go to court to prevent the proper tabulation of votes, we have
legal teams standing by ready to deploy to resist that effort. And they will
prevail.”