Jake Tapper Slams Trump’s Election Denialism at Minnesota Rally: 'These Lies — They Literally Have a Body Count' https://t.co/vvws6rNlvg via @mediaite <– Fortunately he said it on CNN so nobody heard it. More on this later …
— Paul Epps (@paulepps) July 31, 2024
A “body count” — this guy should be ashamed of himself.
Here’s what I think of when someone says “election denialism”:
- When was the last Democratic primary election that wasn’t rigged? 2016? Rigged. 2020? Rigged. (Both to prevent a Bernie Sanders nomination.) 2024? Double-rigged. No one was allowed to challenge Biden, probably to avoid debates. After he “won” the nomination, he was pulled and replaced by Kamala Harris. How many people voted for Kamala Harris as a presidential nominee? (Hint: it’s a round number.) And yet Democrats get huffy if you accuse them of rigging elections.
- Why is “election denialism” linked only to 2020? Did Democrats accept the results of the 2016 presidential election? They didn’t. House Democrats challenged the votes from nine states. The losing candidate, Hillary Clinton, called Donald Trump an “illegitimate president.” The Democratic party consensus was that Trump stole the election via collusion with Russia, although after a multi-year investigation, this was proved to be a hoax.
- Questioning election results is a perfectly fine thing to do. It’s not illegal, not immoral, not a threat to democracy. Threats to democracy include trying to prosecute and imprison your political foes, setting up a censorship regime in which tech companies are coerced into suppressing political dissent, things of that nature.
- When President Obama was elected in 2008 and 2012, he got 60-something million votes both times. When President Trump was elected in 2016, he got 60-something million votes. And remember, people were actually excited to vote for Obama and Trump. In 2020, Joe Biden was elected with, we’re told, 81 million votes! There’s not one person in America, including his wife, excited about Joe Biden — but he got 81 million votes?! I believe Joe Biden got 81 million votes like I believe the cow jumped over the moon.
I’ve noticed that blaming people for terrible events seems to be more of a Democratic thing than a Republican thing. Donald Trump is to blame for Jan. 6. Tucker Carlson is to blame for a guy shooting Black people in a Buffalo supermarket. Sarah Palin is to blame for Gabby Giffords being shot. Anytime there’s a high-profile shooting, it’s blamed on Republicans and the NRA.
Following this line of thinking, who can we blame for the assassination attempt on Trump? Trump himself seems to be taking the high road and not blaming it on anyone.
I’m going to take a different approach and blame it on Jake Tapper and everyone else who’s been comparing Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler for eight years. Who wouldn’t want to go down in the history books as the person who killed Adolf Hitler?
No one who isn’t an absolute nutjob actually believes that Donald Trump is the second coming of Hitler. How do we know this? After Trump was shot, every prominent Democrat (and possibly media figures, though I don’t follow the media closely) wished Trump a speedy recovery. Joe Biden did. Nancy Pelosi did. Chuck Schumer did. Even AOC, one of the leaders of the “Trump is Hitler” wing of the Democratic party, did.
Imagine if sometime between, say, 1933 and 1944, the real Adolf Hitler had been shot in the ear. Would anyone who wasn’t an actual Nazi have said, “We wish Mr. Hitler a speedy recovery. All the best to him and his family”? Would FDR have said, “Our prayers are with the Fuehrer and his Nazi followers. We’ll have to tone down the rhetoric to make sure something like this doesn’t happen again”?
Anyone who really believed that Donald Trump is in any way comparable to Adolf Hitler, the single most hated person in history, would have cheered the shooter, or at the very least, remained silent.
Then why have we had eight years of Trump-Hitler analogies? Again, who wouldn’t want to go down in the history books as the person who killed Adolf Hitler?