Trump doesn't 'like the way the votes are being tallied' when GOP loses

Trump is still mad about the midterms. So much so that he’s now returning to a familiar lie: that the GOP only lost the House because the Democrats cheated.

Speaking at a National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) dinner, Trump urged his GOP audience to be “a little bit more paranoid than you are.” He went on:

We have to be a little bit careful, because I don’t like the way the votes are being tallied. I don’t like it and you don’t like it either. You just don’t want to say it because you’re afraid of the press.

Trump also used the NRCC dinner to push his belief that the noise from windmills causes cancer and decreases property values by 75 percent. But that’s a different conspiracy theory.

Trump’s conspiracy theory about the 2018 midterms involves believing that the massive blue wave — a 40-seat victory — that swept the nation was the result of a carefully orchestrated voter fraud operation carried out across dozens of states. That’s easier for him to swallow than the fact that his party was soundly rejected at the polls.

He even suggested that the GOP lost because people “go to their car, put on a different hat, put on a different shirt, come in and vote again.”

This isn’t even close to the first time Trump has floated a theory that the only way the GOP loses is if Democrats commit voter fraud. Immediately after the 2016 election, he insisted there were 3 to 5 million illegal votes, literally all of which were for Hillary Clinton. He just can’t accept that Hillary Clinton’s popular vote victory over him was massive, and has insisted that he really won the popular vote if all the “illegal” votes were removed.

Because of this inability to accept reality, Trump launched a voter fraud commission that was so unsuccessful at finding voter fraud that it was forced to shut down after less than a year in operation. And in the runup to the 2018 midterms, Trump tried to use his Twitter account to sow doubt in the results, just in case they didn’t go his way.

When the GOP was found to have actually engaged in voter fraud in North Carolina in 2018, Trump responded with an incoherent rant about voter fraud in Texas and California.

Trump’s disdain for the electoral process is a dangerous thing, and it’s only going to get worse as we get closer to the 2020 elections.

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.