(1/5)Former U.S. President and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump gathers with supporters during a “caucus pledge” event at a Whiskey bar in Ankeny, Iowa, U.S. December 2, 2023. REUTERS/ Carlos Barria Acquire license rights
CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa, Dec 2 (Reuters) – Donald Trump, frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination, asked his supporters on Saturday to “go” to Philadelphia and two other Democratic-led cities to “keep the vote” in 2024, repeating its unfounded claims of widespread voter fraud in 2020 to justify the call to action.
Speaking at two events in Iowa, Trump also sought to counter growing concerns among Democrats and some Republicans that his potential return to the White House posed a threat to democracy.
Even though he faces criminal charges for his efforts to overturn his 2020 defeat, Trump has attempted to flip the script and portray the winner, President Joe Biden, as a dangerous autocrat, calling him a communist, a fascist and a tyrant.
A spokesperson for Biden’s re-election campaign said Trump’s comments describing Biden as a threat to democracy were an attempt to distract the public from his own problems.
Looking ahead to next year’s general election, Trump said it was important to carefully examine voting in battleground states that could determine the outcome. He chose the largest cities in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Georgia — all Democratic strongholds at the center of the storm of false election fraud claims made by Trump and his allies three years ago.
“So the most important part of what’s coming is monitoring the vote. And you should go to Detroit and you should go to Philadelphia and you should go to some of these places, Atlanta,” Trump told Ankeny, a suburb of Des Moines.
Trump’s comments foreshadow what is likely to be a contentious election in November 2024. Despite the failure of dozens of lawsuits filed by Trump and his allies challenging the 2020 results, Trump continues to assert, without evidence, that he lost to President Joe Biden due to fraud.
Trump did not specify who he was asking to “enter” cities in battleground states. When asked for clarification, a campaign aide said he was referring to poll watchers and volunteers whose goal would be to ensure election security.
That would fit with plans outlined by the Republican National Committee, which aims to recruit and train tens of thousands of poll workers and observers in hotly contested states because their voting preferences could lean toward Republicans or Democrats. .
“VOLATILE PERIOD” FOR DEMOCRACY
The comments by Trump, president from 2017 to 2021, come amid growing scrutiny of his recent rhetoric on the campaign trail, which included calling his political enemies “vermin,” a word that some historians say echoed in the language of Nazi Germany.
Timothy Naftali, a senior fellow at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, said Trump’s comments calling for scrutiny of elections in major Democratic-controlled cities were concerning because he was making them while seeking to undermine confidence in American elections.
“We are going through a very unstable period in our democracy,” Naftali said. “If he’s looking to increase trust in our system, he should be more explicit. But what he said today was in the context of his distrust of our system.”
In recent weeks, Biden’s re-election campaign has seen more aggressively went after Trump, highlighting his growing legal problems and likely policies that he said would hurt the economy and undermine the foundations of democracy. Trump, for example, has vowed to use his power to imprison his political enemies.
“Donald Trump’s America in 2025 is one where government is his personal weapon to lock up his political enemies,” campaign spokesman Ammar Moussa said in response to Trump’s remarks in Iowa.
“After spending a week defending his plan to take away health care from millions of Americans, this is his latest desperate attempt at diversion: the American people see through it and it won’t work.”
Trump faces four criminal trials, including two accusing him of seeking to overturn the 2020 election, aided by a mob of his supporters who ransacked the Capitol on January 6, 2021.
At an event in Cedar Rapids, Trump’s campaign handed out signs reading “BIDEN ATTACKS DEMOCRACY.” During his speech, Trump reiterated his unsubstantiated claim that Biden was using the Justice Department to prosecute him, among other alleged transgressions making Biden a threat to democracy.
“Joe Biden wants to make this race about which candidate will defend our democracy and protect our freedoms,” Trump said. “This campaign is a righteous crusade to free our republic from Biden and criminals.”
Also on Saturday, Trump reiterated comments he made days earlier indicating he wanted to make significant changes to the Affordable Care Act, known as Obamacare, calling the health insurance program used by millions Americans of “disaster”. He did not provide details.
Reporting by Nathan Layne in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and Gram Slattery in Washington; Editing by Matthew Lewis and William Mallard
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