As odd as it is to see Trump tell the public that the GOP presidential ticket doesn’t “need the votes,” it’s the message behind the message that makes the rhetoric so much worse.

You don’t need to be an expert in electoral politics to understand Rule One of any campaign: Candidates should pursue as many votes as possible. In a democracy, it’s common sense: The more votes a campaign has, the greater the chance of success.

With this in mind, Donald Trump appears to have a counterintuitive rhetorical habit. The New Republic noted:

On Fox News Thursday morning, Donald Trump had a weird instruction for his supporters: they don’t have to vote. “My instruction: We don’t need the votes, I have so many votes,” Trump said on Fox & Friends before going on a rant about how much support he has in Florida.

As a clip from the show makes clear, the former president didn’t appear to be kidding: https://x.com/atrupar/status/1816482779581775943

If the phrasing sounded at all familiar, it’s not your imagination. The day after last month’s presidential debate, for example, Trump held a rally in Virginia and told attendees, “We don’t need votes.”

  • @[email protected]
    10•4 months ago

    Because he’s counting on not having, or needing, the votes to win. His plan is to call the Election rigged, get Mike Johnson to refuse to certify the results, throw the election. Being “So confident” that he has more than enough votes to win, and then showing election results that have him way behind Harris, will just feed his narrative of a rigged election. He’ll go on about how a disparity like that isn’t possible, Johnson will parrot the same shit, opening a process that is much more unclear to certify a different result.

    Trump is laying the groundwork for an election loss, sewing seeds of doubt that he could lose my any margin, much less a big one. When the results come in, the bigger the landslide against him, the louder his screeching that it was obviously rigged.