Rachel Maddow Warns Trump ‘Doesn’t Think That Elections are Legitimate’
MSNBC’s Joy Reid had fellow network host Rachel Maddow as a guest on Wednesday’s episode of “The Reid Out” where Maddow warned that Donald Trump outright “doesn’t want an American form of government in which elections decide whether or not he’s in power.”
Reid began the segment by discussing how Donald Trump is barely campaigning, with scant appearances in swing states and generally a low number of campaign appearances period. “If you didn’t know any better, you’d think Trump isn’t even really trying to win the election,” Reid commented.
This led to a look into growing reporting on the ways Republican officials in Georgia are openly conspiring to disrupt the election in order to help Donald Trump regardless of whether he wins or not. The scheme in part involves pro-Trump officials on the State Election Board who are imposing burdensome, contradictory and legally suspect election rules changes, with the explicit goal of making it impossible to certify the results in the state.
After Maddow was introduced, she noted a Trump rally held in Georgia in August, where Trump praised those election board by name and announced that they are allied directly with him. And as Maddow noted, the state election board is supposed to be a nonpartisan institution.
“It’s the technocratic board that oversees the administration of elections in Georgia, and so him shouting them out by name, and claiming them as MAGA superheroes who were pit bulls for victory was a bad sign,” she explained.
“Republicans have been trying to refuse certification Since 2020, in all of the swing states, in a bunch of states that aren’t swing states, in more than two dozen, more than three dozen instances, they just refused to say here was the vote total in our most recent election,” Maddow added. “They’re doing this leading up to the 2024 presidential election, when it seems very clear that no matter what the results are, they’re going to say there’s no knowable result.”
Maddow then how Georgia’s Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger, is attempting to stop this. On Wednesday, he informed the state election board that their actions are illegal, in part because of how close we are to the start of voting, and ordered them to stop.
“But there’s no reason to think they’re going to follow this advice. They are really intent on sort of technocratically scuttling the process of tallying the votes,” Maddow said.
Maddow then explained at length how these schemes work, and then reminded viewers, “when Trump won the Republican primary in 2016, he said it was rigged. When he won the general election in 2016, he said it was rigged. Ran for reelection in 2020, he said it was rigged. When he lost, he said it was rigged. He’s already saying 2024 is rigged,” she continued.
“He doesn’t think that elections are a real thing. He doesn’t think that elections are legitimate, and he doesn’t want an American form of government in which elections decide whether or not he’s in power because he doesn’t believe election results should be binding,” Maddow went on.
You can watch the whole conversation between Reid and Maddow below:
