For Trump, it was a relatively short speech, about 40 minutes, in which he claimed there had been Chinese interference in the 2020 presidential election, that there were extreme vulnerabilities in the election system that need to be closed and that China obtained more than 200 million American voter registration records. He then released a trove of documents that he claims back up these allegations.
Now, the allegation that China interferes in the elections of Western liberal democracies is not new and, frankly, isn't even controversial. We know the Chinese do this. They've been doing it for years across multiple countries: the United States, Canada, Australia and even here in New Zealand. We've been subjected to interference as well.
The claim that China somehow involved itself in the 2020 presidential election is also neither new nor controversial. That allegation has been made before. The question then is: if none of this is new or controversial, why give a speech? Why set aside time to address the American people and revisit it all over again?
Whichever way you look at it, I think it's probably safe to assume it's because he's concerned about the midterm elections coming up later this year. He is either trying to rally support for the Save America Act, which would effectively return the United States to in-person voting with voter ID requirements, a system that would likely favour Republicans, or he's laying the groundwork for an excuse in the event Republicans perform poorly in the elections anyway.
Or it could be both.
And, given it's Trump, you can't rule out the possibility that he's going through this whole exercise so that, a few months from now, he can blame someone else, perhaps the Chinese, if Republicans underperform at the ballot box.
Heather du Plessis-Allan is a journalist and radio broadcaster who hosts Newstalk ZB's weekday Drive-Time Show – where this article was sourced.
2 comments:
After our last round of shenanigans that went on with local body postal voting I find myself agreeing with trump (again) in person voting with id should be the only way elections are handled worldwide.
Frankly if a subset of the population can’t organise themselves to get to a polling booth over a series of days and don’t have id then maybe they shouldn’t be voting (or maybe they don’t care for voting either).
So does that mean you agree that intervening in elections is OK?
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