False Claim That Trump Will End Elections
- July 28, 2024
The Atlantic has published an article claiming that former President Donald Trump promised Christian supporters that he will end elections if he takes office in 2025.
The Atlantic ‘s Brian Klass wrote :
Yesterday, former President Donald Trump told a group of supporters that they won’t have to vote again if they elect him to the presidency. “You won’t have to do it anymore,” Trump said at the Turning Point Believers’ Summit in Florida. “It’ll be fixed; it’ll be fine; you won’t have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians.”
Trump’s remarks represent an extraordinary departure from democratic norms in the United States—rarely if ever has a major party’s presidential candidate directly stated his aim to make elections meaningless, a notorious hallmark of autocracy.
There are at least two ways of interpreting this statement. First, Trump could be implying that there won’t be any future elections if he comes to power. He may imagine himself as an American Xi Jinping, the Chinese dictator he routinely praises , a leader who’s declared himself “president for life.” As he often does, however, Trump left just enough room in what he said for plausible deniability. A second and slightly more charitable interpretation of his remarks is that Trump believes his presidency will entrench so many pro-Christian policies into the United States government that no future election could realistically undo his transformation of the country. Both interpretations lead to the same conclusion: that Trump is telegraphing his authoritarian intentions in plain sight, hoping to sever the link between voters and government policy.
There is, in fact, a third possibility — in fact, a probability: that Trump was joking with Christian voters who are generally wary of participation in electoral politics, telling them that if he wins the election he will make voting so secure that their votes will no longer be needed in future to overcome the possibility of cheating by Democrats.