On Tuesday, former President Donald Trump won Republicans’ presidential primary in New Hampshire, surpassing the votes received by Nikki Haley, his only remaining rival with extensive name recognition. Trump somehow managed to still not take it well.
He was complaining close to midnight on his personal account on his social media site Truth Social about commentary on Fox News by Kayleigh McEnany, a former official on his presidential team-turned-presence on the network. (McEnany had been encouraging the ex-president to work on expanding the coalition of voters actually supporting his campaign, with an eye towards Trump’s expected rematch later this year with Joe Biden.) And Trump characteristically filled his victory speech with a litany of complaints, which fell apart under scrutiny including a fact-check from the news network CNN.
Besides the usual, like claiming he’d actually been victorious in the 2020 presidential election, Trump also misrepresented Democrats’ approach to taxation and even the way that primaries in New Hampshire are conducted.
“They must hate our country. Because there’s no other reason that they can be doing the things they do. Take a look – the taxes, they want to raise your taxes times four,” Trump claimed. There’s no actual indication of some mythical tax plan from Democrats to force upwards what people are paying by anywhere close to that level. “But if he’s suggesting that Biden would ‘double, triple’ federal income taxes, he’s just making up numbers,” Howard Gleckman of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center previously told the network after similar claims.
And on the handling of elections in the state, Trump claimed Democrats were allowed to vote in the Republican primary, which misrepresents the facts. Voters who used to be Democrats can vote in the GOP primary, sure — but they’d have to at least be an independent before actually doing so, and like with so much else around elections, there are strict deadlines for making such a change in affiliation. Having the opportunity to change your partisan affiliation is obviously also pretty routine. Trump is trying to make some point based on ex-Democrats assumedly voting in Republicans’ primary when there’s nothing there. (Check it all out here.)
Trump also claimed a record of success in general elections in New Hampshire that doesn’t exist. He’s lost the state twice, including to Hillary Clinton, who reminded Trump of this with posted images of election results from 2016 and 2020 on Wednesday.
