June 22, 2020 09:45 AM UTC

Trump Mail Ballot Rage Really Starting To Look Suspicious

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• by: Colorado Pols

UPDATE: Joe St. George of Scripps News point-blank asks Donald Trump to justify his claims of mail ballot fraud after years of covering fraud-free elections in Colorado, and this rambling mess of nonsense is what followed:

VIDEO: I asked President Trump to cite specific evidence as to why mail-in ballots are fraudulent. I told him I covered politics for 5 years in Colorado (an all mail-in ballot state) and never heard @SenCoryGardner complain once. #copolitics @DenverChannel @KOAA pic.twitter.com/AebXDaDf4f

— Joe St. George (@JoeStGeorge) June 22, 2020

Cory Gardner, who won his Senate seat in the state’s first federal election test of mail ballots in 2014, knows better.

But will he ever say so?

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RIGGED 2020 ELECTION: MILLIONS OF MAIL-IN BALLOTS WILL BE PRINTED BY FOREIGN COUNTRIES, AND OTHERS. IT WILL BE THE SCANDAL OF OUR TIMES!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 22, 2020

Fresh off a terrible weekend featuring a half-empty rally in Tulsa and horrifying statements about management of the COVID-19 pandemic that invited a fresh look at the 25th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, President Donald Trump this morning returned to his all-caps rhetorical assault on mail-in ballots–which have been in use in Colorado without controversy since 2013, and which Republicans and Democrats alike in this state know work safely and securely.

The claim Trump makes above is of course baseless, since there are numerous safeguards in place to prevent anything other than an official and properly accounted-for ballot from being counted in any Colorado mail ballot election. Back in 2014, then-FOX News host Megyn Kelly was forced to correct a breathless report that Coloradans could “print ballots” to return in elections, a claim that simply had no basis in reality.

After Trump lost the popular vote by the widest margin of any victorious President, he laid the blame for that embarrassment on baseless allegations of vote fraud. This time, however, there’s much more at stake than Trump’s ego. By sowing doubt in the election ahead of time, Trump may be in the early stages of a strategy to dispute the result of a losing election. States increasing access to mail ballots in response to the COVID-19 pandemic are doing the right thing–and setting themselves up to be Trump’s electoral scapegoats.

There’s no nice way to say this: discrediting the results of the upcoming election based on demonstrably false claims from Trump represents a clear and present danger to American democracy. It is therefore crucially important that Colorado political leaders, especially Colorado Republican political leaders, speak out loudly as and many times as necessary to debunk what Trump is saying–before he uses it as an excuse to not give up power.

We’re getting uncomfortably close to something that’s not ever supposed to happen in America. And Colorado knows this is based on nonsense. Will local Republicans have the courage to stand up for democracy if the worst-case scenario comes to pass?

Because the worst case scenario here…is pretty bad.