Former President Donald Trump on Friday urged his supporters to cease “bags of crap” arriving at polling locations to vote within the presidential election later this yr.
During a rally in Mason City, Iowa, Trump echoed his false claims that the 2020 election had been stolen from him, and mentioned that “we’re not going to let it happen again.”
He added: “You should all stay in those voting booths. You should stay there and watch it. If you see bags of crap coming into the voting areas, you’ve got to stop it. You can’t let it happen, because these guys are crooked as hell. They know how to cheat.”
Trump, the present front-runner for the GOP presidential nomination, went on to declare that he and his backers wouldn’t enable Democrats to “rig” the 2024 election.
“We will fight for America like no one has ever fought before,” Trump mentioned on the rally, held upfront of this month’s Iowa caucuses. “2024 is our final battle.”
His feedback arrive after he instructed supporters at a earlier Iowa rally to “guard the vote” in the course of the election.
“You should go into Detroit and you should go into Philadelphia and you should go into some of these places, Atlanta, and you should go into some of these places and we’ve got to watch those votes when they come in,” the previous president mentioned final month.
Susan Benesch, who runs a analysis group known as the Dangerous Speech Project, instructed The Associated Press on the time that Trump’s remarks advised that the election’s end result is “foregone.”
“Is it actually guarding the election against fraud, or is it guarding the election against a result in which Trump is not declared the winner?” she requested.
Trump made comparable calls previous to the 2020 election when, throughout a presidential debate that yr, he urged supporters to observe polling locations and warned of “bad things” taking place in Philadelphia.
Critics on X (previously Twitter) reacted to Trump’s newest rally remarks, alleging that the previous president was “intimidating voters” 10 months out from Election Day.
