Once again on Friday, Donald Trump decided he’d attack the idea of voting by mail. But this time he directly contradicted himself in back-to-back tweets.
Specifically, Trump praised absentee ballots, deeming them to be “fine,” but then claimed that mail-in voting is “dishonest” and cannot be trusted:
Mail-In Ballot fraud found in many elections. People are just now seeing how bad, dishonest and slow it is. Election results could be delayed for months. No more big election night answers? 1% not even counted in 2016. Ridiculous! Just a formula for RIGGING an Election….
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 10, 2020
….Absentee Ballots are fine because you have to go through a precise process to get your voting privilege. Not so with Mail-Ins. Rigged Election!!! 20% fraudulent ballots?
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 10, 2020
Once again, Donald Trump reaffirms what many of us have known for quite some time: There’s embarrassingly stupid and then there’s Trump stupid.
As CNN noted in a fact-check they did after the president sent out the two tweets, there’s not a shred of truth in what Trump is claiming:
“Trump is inventing a distinction where none exists, and also peddling baseless claims of rigged elections and fraudulent ballots. Different states use different terms, but ‘absentee ballots’ are ‘mail-in ballots,’ and vice versa. Regardless, there are strict measures in place across the country to verify the authenticity of all ballots cast in the mail. These measures are very successful — more than 99.9% of votes in US elections are legitimate.”
Fortunately, it appears that karma is starting to catch up with Trump and his attacks on voting by mail, with key battleground states such as Florida and Pennsylvania reporting that requests for absentee ballots among Democrats are up, but requests by Republicans are down significantly. That’s not exactly the “Trump effect” the GOP was hoping for.
Remember way back when Trump called himself a “stable genius”? Mr. Ed was a stable genius. Donald Trump, however, is as dense as a chunk of granite.