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Trump Kicked Off the RNC Falsely Claiming Democrats Are 'Stealing Votes'

Yet another diatribe against mail in voting.
Cameron Joseph
Washington, US
U.S. President Donald Trump speaks on the first day of the Republican National Convention at the Charlotte Convention Center on August 24, 2020 in Charlotte, North Carolina.

President Trump didn’t even wait until primetime to start lying about the election.

Trump made his first of many speeches scheduled for Republican National Convention Monday afternoon by falsely accusing Democrats of “trying to steal the election,” issuing a fact-free diatribe against mail voting while threatening to reject the results if they don’t come out in his favor.

“What they're doing is using COVID to steal an election. They're using COVID to defraud the American people, all of our people, of a fair and free election,” Trump claimed.

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He returned to that false claim time and again in a nearly hourlong speech, claiming the only way he can lose is if the election is stolen from him while tirading against Democrats and the media for raising concerns that he might be intentionally gutting the U.S. Post Office to undercut mail voting and boost his own reelection efforts.

“This is stealing millions of votes,” Trump claimed about mail voting, before touting his campaign’s many lawsuits seeking to make it harder to vote. “We're in courts all over the country, and hopefully we have judges that are going to give it a fair call, because if they give it a fair call, we're gonna win this election. The only way they can take this election away from us is if this is a rigged election.”

The comments mark Trump’s latest diatribe against mail voting, a practice that’s been widely used for years and has become more popular this year as people look to vote safely during the coronavirus pandemic. 

There have been almost no examples of widespread election fraud using mail voting — but Trump made a point to praise the man whose election was tossed out because of it.

Trump called Mark Harris as “a fine man, a pastor,” even though Harris’s 2018 House win was tossed out after serious allegations of widespread election fraud came to light against Harris’s campaign. And Trump argued that Democrats want to do what a Harris adviser faces charges for: Take scores of mail ballots from voters and fraudulently filling them out for their preferred candidate.

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And he concluded his speech with a paranoid warning.

“Be very, very careful,” he said. “This is the most important election in the history of our country. Don’t let them take it away from you.”

The attacks on democratic institutions weren’t Trump’s only blatant falsehoods in a nearly hour-long speech in Charlotte, N.C. to a cheering crowd of hundreds of GOP convention delegates. 

Trump claimed that ”There’s never been a person that needed a ventilator that didn’t get a ventilator” during the coronavirus crisis. He falsely accused the Obama administration of spying on his 2016 campaign. He said that “We very strongly protected your preexisting conditions,” even though the Trump administration is currently in court seeking to overturn Obamacare, which would eliminate the law’s mandate that insurers cover people with preexisting conditions. He made up a fake quote he claimed Hillary Clinton had said. And he claimed that the bevy of high-quality polls that show him trailing former Vice President Joe Biden by a wide margin were fake.

When he wasn’t lying about the election, Trump leaned hard into claims that the economy was roaring back amidst the coronavirus. “It’s now looking like a super-V,” he said.

“Think of your life just prior to the plague coming in, it was the best it's ever been,” he said.

As meandering and conflicting as Trump’s speech was, it was clearer than ever that the GOP is a party that now exists solely to support its leader.

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The GOP didn’t even bother debating and refining a party platform this year, instead passing a resolution that said “the Republican Party has and will continue to enthusiastically support the President’s America-first agenda” while preemptively accusing “the media” of planning to misrepresent what that cop-out meant.

And shortly before Trump spoke, Vice President Mike Pence made clear that the message for the convention was to look past COVID and get ready for another four years of economic growth.

“We’re going to make American great again — again,” he said.

Cover: U.S. President Donald Trump speaks on the first day of the Republican National Convention at the Charlotte Convention Center on August 24, 2020 in Charlotte, North Carolina. (Photo by Chris Carlson-Pool/Getty Images)