Did Donald Trump really suggest delaying the election because people couldn’t vote in person?
With Universal Mail-In Voting (not Absentee Voting, which is good), 2020 will be the most INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT Election in history. It will be a great embarrassment to the USA. Delay the Election until people can properly, securely and safely vote???
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 30, 2020
Note the question marks after the suggestion to delay the vote. The White House says Trump was just “asking a question,” but unless Trump is a total idiot, he had to know the firestorm that this would let loose.
And that’s apparently just fine with him.
A senior administration official told Fox News that “the President is simply raising a question, whereas Democrats are proposing an entirely new system (of massive mail in voting) that will result in enormous delays in the election results.”
And Trump re-election campaign national press secretary Hogan Gidley – responding to the president’s tweet – said in a statement that “the President is just raising a question about the chaos Democrats have created with their insistence on all mail-in voting.”
Focusing on reality would be helpful. The election will not be delayed. It would take an act of Congress — including the Democratic-controlled House — for a proposal to delay the election to succeed. No bookie in the world would give you decent odds on that.
The date of the presidential election — the Tuesday after the first Monday in November in every fourth year — is enshrined in federal law and would require an act of Congress to change, including agreement from the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives. The Constitution makes no provisions for a delay in the end of Trump’s term — noon on Jan. 20, 2021.
Still, the mere suggestion of the delay was extraordinary in a nation that has held itself up as a beacon to the world for its history of peaceful transfer of power, including during the Civil War, the Great Depression and World War II.
The act is getting old. Trump trolling the media may entertain Donald Trump but most of the rest of us are not amused. For an incumbent president to even ask a question about delaying the election is dangerous.
The rest of the world is responding. Markets and money are down all over the world and the stock market took a nosedive.
So if Trump knew the chaos his suggestion would cause, why make it? Because he’s losing the election, he knows he’s losing, and unless he connects with a hail mary pass to pull the game out, it’s over?
Trump’s hail Mary is chaos and distraction. Note that the media is talking about his tweet to delay the election, not his response to the coronavirus, not the death toll, not Russia, not even foreign interference in the election. Even the bad economic news has taken second place to the president’s tweet.
As always, Democrats and the media are playing into Trump’s game plan. The question is, will it still matter? We’re less than 100 days out from the election and it’s usually about this time that American voters begin to make up their minds about who they will vote for. The 15 percent of voters who are “persuadable” will drop to less than half that number in a month. Time is becoming a critical factor and with Biden still hiding from a cooperating media, the chances of a Biden gaffe changing the momentum of the election are receding.
Trump can rail all he wants to against an “inaccurate and fraudulent” election, but the bottom line is that a vote will happen in November and nobody is going to stop it.
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