Donald Trump’s wild week as he provides chilling preview of how he’ll undermine midterm elections
It’s easy to laugh this off as Trump returning to his usual schtick. But this is exactly what he’s going to do in November when Republicans get a pummelling in the midterms. Here’s more on that and the other key moments of the week in Trumpworld
Donald Trump has been giving a preview of how he’ll undermine November’s midterm elections in his “questions” about California’s Primary.
It takes California a long time to count votes. It just does. It’s not remotely unusual for a Primary election, like the one that took place on Monday night, to take a week to count.
Some of this is down to the fact that postal ballots are accepted right up to the end of polling day – and this year, with a massively split ticket, many Democrats waited until the last minute to decide which candidate to vote for.
Of course, the other thing about elections in America is that Republicans vote early, and in person – and in-person votes are counted first. So while the initial results suggested Trump-backed Republican Steve Hilton – yes, David Cameron’s former ‘blue-sky thinking’ guru – was in the lead, as more postal ballots are counted that is likely to change quite dramatically.
It’s also somewhat inevitable that Donald Trump would use this as an excuse to claim there is some kind of irregularity happening in the count, which there is absolutely no evidence of.
Lo and behold, in the Oval Office, Trump – who had just got done branding the American media “corrupt” – said he hoped journalists would “look at” the California Primary count.
“They think it’ll take 7 or 8 days to count the votes, can you believe this?” he said. “The numbers are looking strange because without any vote counting the numbers dropped very precipitously for the two Republicans that are doing well, or had been doing well. I hope you’re all watching it because I’m watching it very closely.”
See, it’s easy to laugh this off as Trump returning to his usual schtick. But this is exactly what he’s going to do in November when Republicans get a pummelling in the midterms – and I don’t think he’s going to let it go.
Meanwhile this week
- Donald Trump has been losing the fight against wokeness again
- His 80th birthday bash is not going at all as he had hoped
- He’s comparing himself to Martin Luther King
Here’s what you need to know
Donald Trump has been losing the fight against wokeness again
Marco Rubio got a grilling from congress this week – much of which involved him repeatedly denying having ever seen Donald Trump fall asleep in meetings, only to be shown several videos of the President apparently snoozing away right next to him at various events. The Secretary of State stuck to the line, Trump not only doesn’t fall asleep in meetings, he said, he NEVER sleeps.
It was all the more embarrassing for Rubio a couple of days later when Trump, appearing before cameras for the first time after one of his occasional week-long absences…appeared to drop off in the Oval Office. Being honest, who among us has never nodded off in a boring meeting, and Trump is 80 years old. But then, I’m not usually invited to meetings that might result in troops being deployed.
Speaking of Trump turning 80…
His 80th Birthday isn’t going quite as he hoped it would
As we mentioned earlier, a giant spider has landed on the White House South Lawn. Sadly it’s not here to put us all out of our misery. No, it’s the lighting rig for the UFC match that’s being held outside the White House to mark Donald Trump’s 80th birthday. I mean, officially it’s happening to mark the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States, but it’s not. It’s for Trump’s birthday. Trump has mercifully backed down from his threat to make this godforsaken edifice towering over the people’s house a permanent fixture. But there will be three days of “festivities” in and around the White House to mark the occasion with brutal physical violence. Just as the founders intended.
Another thing that was supposed to be happening to mark the 250th was a five-day festival on the National Mall, featuring artists such as Vanilla Ice, Milli Vanilli, The Commodores, Young MC, Martina McBride, Bret Michaels and Flo Rida. You know, all the greats. Unfortunately, it seems most of the artists didn’t know they were being booked for a Trump adjacent event, and swiftly pulled out when that became clear. Except for Vanilla Ice and Flo Rida. They were apparently fine with it. Anyway, Trump threw his toys out of the pram, cancelled the whole thing. Instead, Trump has now announced he’ll be holding “the Rally to end all rallies”. Which given the last time he held a rally near National Mall was January 6th 2021, is a high bar. Speaking of which…
Trump compared himself to Martin Luther King – and January 6th to the ‘I have a dream’ speech
“I had the same amount of people. They said he had a million people and I had 25,000 people. I had more people”.
Donald Trump is comparing his crowd sizes again – this time to the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom at the Lincoln Memorial, during which Martin Luther King gave his “I Have A Dream” speech.
Trump has only spoken at the Lincoln Memorial twice – one the night before his first inauguration, the other at a July 4th celebration in 2019. Neither event drew anything like the kind of crowd Dr King spoke to in August 1963. The July 4th one was by far the more well attended of the two…but it was the Fourth of July, there were fireworks and flypasts. Point is, he wasn’t the main draw for the event.
Troublingly, he later started talking about his crowd size at the speech he gave on January 6th 2021 at the Ellipse, near the White House, just before his supporters stormed the capitol.
It’s entirely possible that that’s what he meant. Donald Trump was comparing a speech that inspired a violent attempted coup to a speech that inspired the biggest improvements in civil rights in American history.
