Trump: “Does Anyone Believe This Election Was Fair?” ... Election Denial Claims Resurface

[Financial News]  

U.S. President Donald Trump challenged the results of the midterm elections on the 9th (local time), unable to accept the Democrats’ “blue wave.”
According to CNBC, Trump revived election-fraud claims that day, writing on his social media platform Truth Social, “Is there anyone who really believes this ‘election’ was fair?” The reaction came six days after his party suffered a historic midterm defeat, including losing Texas and South Carolina—Republican strongholds—to the Democrats.
Trump claimed, “How could the polls have been so wrong??? Some of the early-vote ‘dumping’ was so massive that winning was impossible. It didn’t matter how many people went to vote,” adding, “This is all about the machines (vote-counting machines), which are far more important than the voters.”
These claims were at odds with his initial reaction, when he acknowledged the Democrats’ landslide victory.
On election night, Trump told The New York Times (NYT) that he would “definitely accept” the midterm results and said he was willing to work with the Democrats. The following day, he also said, “I’ll get along with the Democrats as long as they aren’t destructive.”
Signs of a shift emerged on the 6th. Susie Wiles was replaced as White House chief of staff by hard-liner Stephen Miller, her deputy. Miller was the architect of the Trump administration’s extremely hard-line policy of deporting immigrants, and had long been a target of strong criticism from the Democrats.
As the Democrats press for investigations into his family and close associates, Trump appears to be trying to rally his base again with election-fraud claims and escape an unfavorable political situation. Installing Miller as chief of staff may also be a move made with a confrontation with the Democrats in mind.
The Democrats called Trump’s election-fraud claims “pathetic.”
In a post on social media platform X, Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York, who will become Senate majority leader next January, criticized Trump’s “pathetic return to denying the election results” as “as predictable as day follows night.”
Schumer said, “Trump can whine all he wants,” but added, “Nothing can stop this inescapable truth: During the final two years of his presidency, Trump will face a Democratic Party holding its largest majority in decades, and all of this stems from the extraordinary failures he has committed.”
Trump’s denial of election results is a familiar refrain. After losing the 2020 presidential election to former President Joe Biden, he claimed without any evidence that he was the victim of widespread vote-counting fraud.
Those claims led to the Capitol riot. On January 6, the year after the presidential election, Trump spoke at a protest outside the White House, after which his supporters occupied the Capitol. They failed, but their aim was to prevent Congress from certifying Biden’s presidential victory.
Critics of Trump’s election-fraud claims have pointed out that he lost the 2020 presidential election when he was president, but won the 2024 election when Biden was president.
They also emphasize that the areas where the Democrats scored landslide victories in Texas, Kansas, South Carolina and Iowa—states where almost no analysts had expected such victories just a year earlier—were controlled by Republican state governments.
[email protected] Song Kyung-jae Reporter