Donald Trump was in Iowa on Saturday for two campaign stops, the first in Ankeny, followed by another in Cedar Rapids. And his obsession with the 2020 election continues to be a subject he seems to think is crucial as he campaigns to win the Republican presidential nomination, despite his position that he won being debunked time and again.
During his “Commit to Caucus” speech in Ankeny, Trump went over similar tropes he’s been touting throughout his campaign, calling media “fake news” and reiterating his false claim that the 2020 election was stolen when President Biden was rightfully declared president. “The one thing they don’t want to talk about is the [2020] election. They are guilty as hell, they cheated like hell,” Trump claimed, presumably of everyone who correctly recognized and validated the actual election results. “They know it, and you’ll never find out all the ways. But we don’t need all the ways because, you know, it was, I think 22,000 votes separated it, and we have millions and millions of votes. It’s a very sad thing.”
He then encouraged the crowd to “go into” places like Philadelphia and Atlanta and “watch those votes when they come in, when they’re being, you know, shoved around in wheelbarrows and dumped on the floor and everyone’s saying what’s going on?”
“We’re like a third world nation, a third world nation,” Trump added. “And we can’t let it happen.”
At the Cedar Rapids event that followed, Trump homed in on attacking “crooked” President Biden while continuing to harp on his unsubstantiated claim that the 2020 election was rigged and, even further, that Jesus and God would declare him a winner now. “I think if you had a real election and Jesus came down and God came down and said, ‘I’m gonna be the scorekeeper here,’ I think we’d win [in California], I think would win in Illinois, and I think it we’d win in New York.”
He added that “when we go through courts … we want to redo the election — only from the standpoint we want that election, we want to look at it very carefully. We have so much information. There was so much corruption in that election.”
Trump also claimed that he invented the term “caravan,” that many of his opponents say he had one of the great presidencies, and even that he “saved” Obamacare, his predecessor’s health care plan that Trump was obsessed with axing only to have Sen. John McCain vote to keep. Trump has in recent days suggested that he will again move to terminate Obamacare if he wins back the presidency.
In the ultimate irony, Trump early on accused his opponents of “waging an all-out war on American democracy.”
“You look at what they’ve been doing, and becoming more and more extreme and repressive. They have just waged an all-out war with each passing day,” the man who tried to overturn the results of a democratic election and stay in power said.