The Trump team is out of control. At a Wednesday press conference, White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany suggested that President Donald Trump might not accept the election results in November if he doesn’t like what he sees. To be abundantly clear: it’s not like there’s some kind of looming legitimate reason on which Trump could base a rejection of the election results. Recently, however, Trump has made baseless claims about the supposed high potential for fraud when mail-in voting is used. The nonsense mirrors utterly nonsensical claims that he made around the 2016 election, when he said that millions of illegal votes were cast, which there was never any evidence for or even any hint of evidence for.
This Wednesday, a reporter posed the question to McEnany:
‘Kayleigh, the president said this week “the only way we lose the election is if the election is rigged” — it begs the question, does the president believe there is any circumstance under which he could lose the election fairly?’
It is utterly outrageous that Trump’s behavior has meant that this question is worth asking at all. Nevertheless — McEnany did not directly answer the question. She said:
‘The president believes he has done a great job for the American people, and he believes that will show in November. He believes that voter fraud is real, in line with what we see all across the country, particularly with mail-in ballots, which are prone to fraud.’
Significant numbers of Americans already use mail-in ballots, which are not “prone to fraud.”
Another reporter followed up:
‘Is the President saying if he doesn’t win this election that he will not accept the results unless he wins?’
McEnany replied:
‘The President has always said he’ll see what happens and make a determination in the aftermath. It’s the same thing he said last November — he wants a free election, a fair election, and he wants confidence in the results of the election, particularly when you have states like Nevada doing mass mail-out voting to their voting rolls, and when they tried this in the primary, it was a massive failure: ballots were piled up in trash cans. Ballots were pinned to apartment dart boards, and with that being the system, the president wants to take a hard look at this and make sure these are fair election results and not subject to fraud.’
Does she think it’s profound to note that not all of the ballots were used and some were, well, thrown out? What’s her point exactly? That some of those thrown out ballots magically floated into election headquarters? Watch below:
Reporter: "Is the President saying if he doesn't win this election that he will not accept the results unless he wins?"
Kayleigh McEnany: "The President has always said he'll see what happens and make a determination in the aftermath." pic.twitter.com/iH606u3V38
— The Hill (@thehill) August 19, 2020
There is not a single reasonably foreseeable determination that the president could make — not a single one — that would make it acceptable for him to decide not to accept the election results.
He’s already proven that he has a tough time hanging onto reality in the first place; it’s difficult to think of a claim more reality-disconnected than the idea that millions of illegal votes were cast in 2016, but Trump has made that exact claim before.
It is nonsense, just like all of this is nonsense — the president and his allies simply sound like they’re panicking about the possibility of losing this November.
