After he won the New Hampshire Republican primary Tuesday night, former President Donald Trump complained about his main GOP rival, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, about immigration, inflation, and his likely opponent in November, President Joe Biden.
One thing he didn’t complain about: Voter fraud in the election he had just won.
That continues a pattern for Trump as he steamrolls through the GOP presidential primary and toward an increasingly likely November rematch with Biden. While Trump generally refrains from claiming voter fraud in elections he wins, he spends plenty of time laying the groundwork to cry fraud should he lose an upcoming vote. He’s already been doing that with an eye toward November’s general election.
“They used COVID to cheat. And they did a lot of other things, too. We’re not going to let that happen,” Trump said of Democrats in his Tuesday night speech to supporters in New Hampshire. “You can never forget history, because if you forget, you never, you never recover from it. And you repeat.”
This is the best summary I could come up with:
NEW YORK (AP) — After he won the New Hampshire Republican primary Tuesday night, former President Donald Trump complained about his main GOP rival, former South Carolina Gov.
Trump lost dozens of court challenges, his own attorney general found no evidence of widespread fraud, and reviews, audits and recounts in the battleground states where he contested his loss all affirmed Biden’s victory.
Rachel Orey of the Bipartisan Policy Center said Trump’s preemptive allegations of fraud have become built into the nation’s political culture.
Trump held back from echoing Vance’s allegations Tuesday, though he did briefly reiterate the unfounded claim that Democrats voted for Haley before focusing on his victory.
He’s previously described Biden as the real threat to democracy because the Justice Department is prosecuting Trump for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election and for illegally keeping classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida.
Steven Levitsky, a professor at Harvard and coauthor of “How Democracies Die,” said Trump’s refusal to admit defeat in elections combined with demonizing the other side is a textbook authoritarian tactic.
The original article contains 973 words, the summary contains 177 words. Saved 82%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!