Last updated on July 17th, 2023 at 09:36 pm
Donald Trump chimed in this afternoon with a statement on recount efforts underway as a result of Jill Stein challenging the election results in Wisconsin, with challenges also planned in Michigan and Pennsylvania. According to Trump, Stein is…well, guilty of being Donald Trump. He says the whole thing is a scam and she is just out to “fill her coffers with money.”
“The people have spoken and the election is over, and as Hillary Clinton herself said on election night, in addition to her conceding by congratulating me, ‘We must accept this result and then look to the future.’
“It is important to point out that with the help of millions of voters across the country, we won 306 electoral votes on Election Day – the most of any Republican since 1988 – and we carried nine of 13 battleground states, 30 of 50 states, and more than 2,600 counties nationwide – the most since President Ronald Reagan in 1984.
“This recount is just a way for Jill Stein, who received less than one percent of the vote overall and wasn’t even on the ballot in many states, to fill her coffers with money, most of which she will never even spend on this ridiculous recount. All three states were won by large numbers of voters, especially Pennsylvania, which was won by more than 70,000 votes.
“This is a scam by the Green Party for an election that has already been conceded, and the results of this election should be respected instead of being challenged and abused, which is exactly what Jill Stein is doing.”
Of course, conceding an election is a formality, not a legally binding event. An election counts whether the other candidate concedes or not, and Trump is hardly the one to quibble over a concession he himself said he would refuse to give unless he won.
Notice that Trump also ignores the fact that Hillary Clinton won the popular vote and that her lead is now in excess of 2 million votes. As The Atlantic’s David Frum quipped,
Trump won according to the rules, but if I were his team, I'd go ixnay on "the people have spoken" bit. Reality is just the reverse
— David Frum (@davidfrum) November 26, 2016
Obviously, a recount is more critical than ever, given that fact alone, and that leaves out concerns over Trump’s plan to violate Article 1 Section 9 Clause 8 of the United States Constitution restriction on emoluments.
Jill Stein, on the other hand, is not violating or abusing the United States Constitution let alone the election results, and as she has stated, her reason for this recount is transparency, so that they can have faith in the election process in a year in which evidence points to Russian hacking playing a significant role in the outcome.
This is pure projection by Trump, accusing somebody else of his own sins and motivations. The only surprise is that he didn’t put his accusations in cruder terms.
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