On Tuesday, Ivanka Trump — the outgoing president’s daughter and top adviser — participated in a food giveaway hosted by the King Jesus International Ministry in South Florida. While at the event, Ivanka put her father on speakerphone so that he could offer a message to the participants — and the outgoing president promptly began ranting about the imaginary fraud that he claims plagued the recent presidential election. To be clear: folks for whom the event provided some support have been seriously impacted throughout recent economic devastation. Although Trump seems to have been speaking to the food distributors rather than the support recipients, still: when confronted with the need for food support among some people in the South Florida area, Trump ranted about conspiracies. He’s an embarrassment.
Trump offered the following comments:
‘They dumped hundreds of thousands of ballots — it was a rigged election! We’re fighting it, and we got 75 million votes — that’s the most ever gotten by a sitting president by a lot, and… people are never going to forget, and we are fighting very, very hard.’
Check out Trump’s comments below:
Ivanka Trump puts her father Pres. Trump on speaker phone. He wishes everyone a merry Christmas and reiterates debunked claims about a rigged election. @WPLGLocal10 pic.twitter.com/pxyJQnWQ8n
— Saira Anwer (@SairaWPLG) December 22, 2020
There’s no legitimacy to Donald’s claims about the election. An agency at the Department of Homeland Security, outgoing Attorney General Bill Barr, and local election officials of both major parties from around the country have all confirmed that there’s just no legitimate evidence for the president’s claims of widespread fraud. Judges across the country, including a slew of Trump’s own appointees, have rejected the claims from the president and his team — and yet, Trump hasn’t let up with his nonsense.
The debacle at the food giveaway event in South Florida seems like an apt representation of this entire closing chapter of the Trump presidency. Donald has pretty much always seemed cultishly self-obsessed, but lately, as COVID-19 has spread across the country and Americans have suffered and died in greater numbers, Trump has seemed most concerned with his delusional fight against the election outcome. In the aftermath of Election Day, reported results changed as workers and officials tabulated ballots. This concept is neither remotely new nor complicated. Counting votes takes time — pretending like post-Election Day changes to reported tallies automatically suggest foul play — or “dumped” votes or whatever — on account of their timing is profoundly ignorant on a very basic level.
