On Sunday, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) told George Stephanopoulos on ABC’s This Week that Donald Trump is “hurting his chances” at getting reelected in 2024 by focusing so much on 2020.
“It’s his nomination for the taking,” Graham said, but suggested Trump would have a harder time getting elected if he “looks backward.”
“Donald Trump is the most consequential Republican in the Republican Party today. He has a great chance of being president again in 2024, if he’ll start comparing what he did as president versus what’s going on now, and how to fix the mess we’re in,” Graham said. “If he looks backward, I think he’s hurting his chances.”
That’s not to say Graham dismisses reports of fraud or irregularities. “I am not contesting the 2020 election. I’d like to reform the system. The problems we found in 2020 need to be addressed. But the 2020 election is over for me,” he said.
Sen. Graham tells @GStephanopoulos that former Pres. Trump “has a great chance" of being elected again in 2024, but warns that “if he continues to talk about the 2020 election, I think it hurts his cause and, quite frankly, it hurts the Republican Party.” https://t.co/5jIwAMZYbo pic.twitter.com/C7eKpcXsCV
— This Week (@ThisWeekABC) February 13, 2022
To an extent, Graham is correct.
On Monday, Trump released a statement declaring, “I was proven right about the spying, and I will be proven right about 2020!” And that’s just one of several statements he’s made recently that have referenced the 2020 election. For example, on Friday, he released a statement about voter fraud that had been discovered in Wisconsin.
As someone who feels cheated by the results of the 2020 election as much as any other Trump supporter, it’s still hard for me to ignore that much of Trump’s rhetoric isn’t helpful. For example, his attacks on Mike Pence will not help the GOP in 2024. Trump insists that Pence could have stopped the 2020 election from being certified. This is simply not true. Were there irregularities in the 2020 election? Absolutely. Even Mike Pence knows that.
“On January 6th, I said that I believe there were irregularities about which I was concerned, and I wanted them to have a fair hearing before the Congress,” Pence said last December. “But from the founding of this nation forward, it’s been well established that elections are to be governed at the state level and that the only role that Congress has is to open and count the electoral votes that are submitted by states across the country. No more, no less than that.”
He’s right; by the time it was Pence’s job to certify the results, there was nothing he could do. The vice president’s role is ceremonial.
And Lindsey Graham is right. Trump needs to focus on the future and let others resolve the problems with the 2020 election. Similarly, Trump needs to end his feud with Mike Pence and other Republicans he’ll need to work with if he runs again. Nothing that happens now can reverse the outcome of the 2020 election, so the focus needs to be on making future elections more secure and fixing the damage caused by Joe Biden and the Democrats.
Related: WATCH: Kamala’s Disastrous Response to a Question About 2024
Last week, Democrat strategist James Carville argued that the January 6 Committee won’t matter to voters in November because “People want an election about their lives.” On top of that, the voters won’t want to be debating the 2020 election in 2024. One year of Biden has been brutal enough on the American people, and in 2024, they’re going to be hungry for solutions to get us back on track. That needs to be Trump’s message going forward.
