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As many of the remaining Republican presidential candidates participated in a primary debate in Miami, Donald Trump held a rally nearby. Those expecting the former president to comment on his party’s poor showing in the 2023 election cycle came away disappointed: He ignored the subject.
But as it turns out, Trump remarked on the results earlier in the day.
If his social-media efforts were any indication, the race the former president cared about most was the gubernatorial contest in Kentucky, where Trump invested time and effort into supporting the state’s Republican attorney general, Daniel Cameron. As recently as Saturday, Trump published an item taking credit for Cameron’s possible success, explaining that the GOP nominee was “not really ‘a McConnell guy,” in reference to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.
The morning after Cameron lost, Trump returned to his platform and wrote, “Daniel Cameron lost because he couldn’t alleviate the stench of Mitch McConnell. I told him early that’s a big burden to overcome. McConnell and Romney are Kryptonite for Republican Candidates. I moved him up 25 Points, but the McConnell relationship was ‘too much to bear.’”
First, McConnell won re-election in Kentucky a few years ago by nearly 20 points. Second, Cameron based much of his candidacy on his affiliation to Trump but lost anyway. And third, the contradiction between what he wrote on Saturday and his follow-up message four days later seemed pretty obvious.
But Trump took matters in an even uglier direction soon after. NBC News reported:
One day after the election losses, Trump also quickly turned to unfounded conclusions that there were “irregularities” that caused Republicans to lose Tuesday night. “We have very, very third world elections. You see that up in Connecticut this weekend, the last few days,” Trump said Wednesday on “The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show.” “They found a lot of improprieties, to use a nice word.”
Democrats racked up a series of impressive wins in the 2023 elections, and Trump’s next-day response was decidedly Trumpian: People should chalk up GOP defeats, not to the will of voters, but to election “irregularities.”
Or put another way, the Republican leader did what he always does: Trump responded to election results he didn’t like by encouraging the public not to trust the integrity of the nation’s democracy.
In the same interview, the former president went on to falsely claim that he defeated President Joe Biden “by a tremendous amount,” adding, “We have proof of it. We’re releasing the proof. And you’ll see that proof, it’ll come up a lot in the next few months.”
Oh. So we’re now supposed to believe that Trump and his team have “proof” that he won the election that he lost, and rather than release it now, the evidence will be unveiled relatively soon.
I can hardly wait.