Democratic lawmakers and Vice President Harris\u2019s campaign joined a chorus of online critics in calling out remarks Donald Trump aimed at a Christian audience on Friday, arguing that the former president and current Republican presidential nominee had implied he would end elections in the United States if he won a second term.<\/p>\n
At the conclusion of his speech at the Believers Summit in West Palm Beach, Fla., Trump said, \u201cChristians, get out and vote, just this time. You won\u2019t have to do it anymore. \u2026 You got to get out and vote. In four years, you don\u2019t have to vote again. We\u2019ll have it fixed so good you\u2019re not going to have to vote.\u201d<\/p>\n
Democrats and others interpreted the comments as signaling how a second Trump presidency would be run, a reminder that he previously said he would not be a dictator upon returning to office \u201cexcept for Day One.\u201d<\/p>\n
Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), who is running for Senate, shared the clip of Trump\u2019s speech on X, writing, \u201cThis year democracy is on the ballot, and if we are to save it, we must vote against authoritarianism. Here Trump helpfully reminds us that the alternative is never having the chance to vote again.\u201d Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) called Trump\u2019s comments \u201cterrifying.\u201d And Rep. Dan Goldman (D-N.Y.) said, \u201cThe only way \u2018you won\u2019t have to vote anymore\u2019 is if Donald Trump becomes a dictator.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Trump campaign, however, says the comments, made at the event hosted by the conservative group Turning Point Action, were about how Trump would unite the country. Asked to clarify what Trump meant, Steven Cheung, a spokesperson for the campaign, said in a statement on Saturday that the former president \u201cwas talking about uniting this country and bringing prosperity to every American, as opposed to the divisive political environment that has sowed so much division and even resulted in an assassination attempt.\u201d<\/p>\n
Trump, who has continued to assert without evidence that the 2020 election was rigged against him, preceded his comments about not having to vote again by telling the audience that Democrats \u201cdon\u2019t want to approve voter ID \u2014 that\u2019s because they want to cheat. But until then, Republicans must win. \u2026 We want a landslide that\u2019s too big to rig.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Harris campaign is calling Trump\u2019s remarks \u201ca vow to end democracy.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen Vice President Harris says this election is about freedom she means it,\u201d Harris campaign spokesperson James Singer said in a news release on Saturday. \u201cOur democracy is under assault by criminal Donald Trump: After the last election Trump lost, he sent a mob to overturn the results. This campaign, he has promised violence if he loses, the end of our elections if he wins, and the termination of the Constitution to empower him to be a dictator to enact his dangerous Project 2025 agenda on America.\u201d (Project 2025 is a think tank document outlining policy priorities for the next Republican president. Many Trump allies and former administration officials were involved in drafting the document, but his campaign has sought to distance the former president from it.)<\/p>\n
Trump\u2019s comments also drew some concern among those on the Christian right.<\/p>\n
David Lane, an organizer of conservative Christian pastors, said in a text message that Trump \u201cmay have gotten a little over his skis\u201d with what he said because it could discourage conservative Christians from shaping the outcomes of future elections.<\/p>\n
\u201cEvangelicals in 2028, 2032, and 2036 must raise their civics game to a new level if America is to return to the Judeo-Christian heritage and Biblical-based culture laid out by the founders,\u201d said Lane, the founder of the American Renewal Project, whose mission is to help elect more Christians to office. He added that \u201csomebody\u2019s values will reign supreme in the public square,\u201d and if Christians don\u2019t vote, their values will not be reflected in their elected officials.<\/p>\n
In front of a different Christian audience last month, Trump made a similar suggestion about Christians not needing to vote after this year\u2019s election.<\/p>\n
At a Faith and Freedom Coalition event in Washington, the former president said Christians \u201cdon\u2019t vote as much as they should.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cDo you know the power you have if you would vote? \u2026 You\u2019ve got to get out and vote, just this time. I don\u2019t care \u2014 in four years, you don\u2019t have to vote, okay? In four years, don\u2019t vote,\u201d he said. \u201cI don\u2019t care by that time, but we\u2019ll have it all straightened out, so it\u2019ll be much different.\u201d<\/p>\n
But if Democrats were to come into power, he said at the time, \u201cthey\u2019ll ruin it [and] we\u2019ll have to do this all over again.\u201d<\/p>\n
Erica De Bruin, a professor of government at Hamilton College whose research focuses on civil-military relations, civil war and policing, said, \u201cTrump frequently makes these kinds of deliberately ambiguous statements that can be interpreted in multiple ways.\u201d<\/p>\n
But she added that \u201cto understand what another Trump presidency would involve, I think it is more useful to look at his past behavior than to attempt to parse what might be the \u2018true meaning\u2019 of any individual set of remarks he makes.\u201d She pointed out that the last time he was in office, \u201che attempted to subvert the outcome of an election and remain in power longer than the American public voted to keep him there.\u201d<\/p>\n
Steven Levitsky, a professor of government at Harvard University, and co-author of \u201cTyranny of the Minority: Why American Democracy Reached the Breaking Point,\u201d also said that while he didn\u2019t think Trump\u2019s recent comment was \u201cindicative of an organized plot to end elections in the United States,\u201d it did represent yet another sign that \u201cthe guy has got authoritarian reflexes.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cOver the course of 10 or 15 years,\u201d Levitsky added, a growing number of Republicans \u201cconvinced themselves that they weren\u2019t going to be able to win elections in this new, multiracial America. I\u2019m not so sure that\u2019s true, but they were deeply fearful that was true. And so Trump, I think more than anything else, he senses \u2026 where they\u2019re going and they\u2019re feeling.\u201d<\/p>\n
Christian conservatives \u2014 White evangelicals, specifically \u2014 make up a substantial part of the voter base that Trump has been courting since his 2016 campaign.<\/p>\n
In both 2016 and 2020, a third of Trump\u2019s support came from White evangelical Protestants. So 1 one in every 3 votes Trump received came from White evangelical Protestants, a group that the Religion Research Institute estimates constitutes 14 percent of the population.<\/p>\n
Levitsky\u2019s co-author, Daniel Ziblatt, also a professor of government at Harvard, put a finer point on the significance of Trump\u2019s comment. \u201cI can\u2019t think of a major candidate for office in any democracy on Earth since at least World War II who speaks in such overtly authoritarian ways,\u201d said Ziblatt. \u201cNot Victor Orban in Hungary, not Recep Erdogan in Turkey. Nowhere.\u201d<\/p>\n
Jennifer Mercieca, a communications professor at Texas A&M University and author of \u201cDemagogue for President: The Rhetorical Genius of Donald Trump,\u201d said in an email that she interpreted Trump\u2019s comment as an attempt to address the \u201cdouble bind\u201d that supposed \u201cstrongmen\u201d leaders face.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey narrate a world of chaos and promise that they are strong enough to fix it in order to win elections, but they frequently don\u2019t actually solve the problems that they\u2019ve said that they could easily solve if given power,\u201d said Mercieca, whose research focuses on the relationship between democracy and American communication practices. \u201cI think Trump is here promising Christians that he will actually solve the problems that he has promised them he\u2019ll solve (a full abortion ban \u2026 and various \u2018culture war\u2019 issues) and so with all of the problems solved, they won\u2019t feel like the world is so chaotic that they have to vote to save the nation.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a big promise,\u201d she added, \u201cand he doesn\u2019t give specific details here.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Democratic lawmakers and Vice President Harris\u2019s campaign joined a chorus of online critics in calling out remarks Donald Trump aimed at a Christian audience on Friday, arguing that the former president and current Republican presidential nominee had implied he would end elections in the United States if he won a second term. At the conclusion […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":6854,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6853","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6853","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6853"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6853\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6854"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6853"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6853"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6853"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}