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In his speech Wednesday night, an increasingly desperate Donald Trump continued his attack on the democratic process by lying about widespread electoral fraud.
“If you count the legal votes, I win easily. If they count the illegal votes, they can try to steal the elections from us, ”he told the nation.
But now it is clear that some in his party are not buying it. Almost immediately, current and former Republican elected officials criticized the president for sowing discord and lying about the ballot process.
Illinois Congressman Adam Kinzinger tweeted that the president’s lies “are going crazy” and pleaded with his party to “STOP spreading discredited misinformation.”
Meanwhile, Texas Congressman Will Hurd tweeted: “Every American should have their vote counted.”
“A sitting president who undermines our political process and questions the legality of the voices of countless Americans without evidence is not only dangerous and wrong, but undermines the very foundation on which this nation was built,” he wrote.
A clear dividing line is emerging in the Republican Party, while sycophants like South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy have continued to repeat the president’s false claims, many are breaking with Trump.
That includes revered Republican strategist Karl Rove, who said Wednesday morning that the massive fraud that Trump alleges is “not going to happen” in the United States.
“There’s always some handkerchief, and there are already reports that poll watchers in Philadelphia can’t do their job,” Rove said. But stealing hundreds of thousands of votes would require a conspiracy on the scale of a James Bond movie. That’s not gonna happen. Let’s repeat that: that is not going to happen. “
While the Republican reprimands to the president are refreshing to many Democrats, it only comes when Trump’s re-election campaign seems doomed. Biden took the lead in Georgia hours after Wednesday’s speech, and the Democratic challenger is on track to switch to Pennsylvania.
At the end of his speech, the president, former representative Carlos Curbelo called on “the Republicans to defend our democracy at this hour.”
Carlos Curbelo
(@carloslcurbelo)By “illegal votes” it seems @potus Refers to votes cast by mail that disproportionately benefited your opponent in this election. Those votes are in no way illegal. It is important that all public leaders, especially Republicans, defend our democracy at this time.
Still, in Michigan, Trump supporters alleging fraud Thursday marched in front of Detroit’s TCF Center, where ballots were counted the day before. Meanwhile, Trump acolyte and Senate candidate John James refuses to budge on his apparent loss to Senator Gary Peters and demands an investigation.
But because Republicans publicly claim unsubstantiated fraud, at least one Republican official involved in the ballot counting process has said behind closed doors that voter fraud is not a problem. Stuart Foster, a senior Republican state official who trained ballot challengers in Michigan, told trainees just days before the election that he was “confident with our electoral system.”
Foster can be heard making the comments in a recording of the training session leaked to The Guardian.
“I’ll get in trouble here. I basically made the comment like, so if fraud was so prevalent, did the Democrats forget to do it in 2016? Did they just forget to do it? he said. “I mean, Trump… he barely won. And it’s not because he didn’t win. [Democrats] it just didn’t show up. Did they just forget? Fraud was so prevalent, but did they just forget to do it? “
Other Republicans in the state are now publicly breaking with the administration. Congressman Paul Mitchell insisted that all votes must be counted.
“Anything less damages the integrity of our elections and is dangerous for our democracy,” he said.
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