New York Times article. Probably behind a paywall. A few snippets.
Trump’s Ugly Closing ArgumentHe delivers a mix of disinformation, false claims about cheating in elections, and personal attacks.
Never mind that he was in Wisconsin. Never mind that it was perfectly sunny, albeit windy. Former President Donald Trump was going to talk about hurricanes.
It was the 9th minute of a campaign rally yesterday that would stretch to just under two hours, and Trump used it to accuse Vice President Kamala Harris of sending billions of dollars to foreign nations while providing only $750 each to domestic disaster victims — a falsehood that the Federal Emergency Management Agency has been working for days to combat.
He then went further still, falsely accusing the White House of playing politics with disaster relief while he did exactly that.
“You know, it’s largely a Republican area so — some people say they did it for that reason, I don’t even think they’re that bad, but they probably — maybe they are,” Trump said in Juneau, Wis., where I had traveled to hear his final pitch to voters, or that day’s version of it, in its entirety.
There are less than 30 days to go before the November election, and Trump’s closing argument, delivered at campaign rallies all over the country, is a slurry of polarizing disinformation, false claims about his opponents cheating in elections, and a series of unfounded personal attacks on Harris that his advisers and outside Republican allies have been urging him for weeks to stop making.
For Trump, it’s a strategy aimed squarely at delighting his base, and it brings to mind the way he careened toward Election Day in 2016.
His claims have spread fast. At the rally, I spoke with a 22-year-old voter with 50,000 TikTok followers, Kruz Kitelinger, who cited the false claim about the $750 aid limit, which Trump had previously made elsewhere, practically word for word before Trump uttered it in Juneau. (On its website, FEMA says that people can apply for $750 in “serious needs assistance,” which is an upfront payment to help with costs like food, and that they can also apply for additional funds to cover the cost of temporary housing, home repairs and more.)
More concerning, the claims appear to have helped to fuel misinformation on the ground even as Republican governors have praised the federal response, echoing the way Trump has spread false claims about migrants in places like Springfield, Ohio, while local officials begged him to stop.
It all involves considerable political risk for Trump, by playing directly into the case against him made by Democrats and others who have cast him as a threat to democracy that voters across the political spectrum ought to unite to stop.
But he doesn’t seem very worried about that.
“I’d like to be nice. I want to be nice. I think I’m a nice person,” Trump said. “But we can’t take a — we can’t, if we lose this election this country is finished, I really believe it.”
Unfounded accusations of cheating
Trump’s allies have all but acknowledged that his fixation on the 2020 election, which he has falsely maintained was marred by fraud, is a political liability. It was just a week ago on the debate stage that Senator JD Vance, his running mate, tried to avoid a question about whether Trump had actually lost the election, saying that he preferred to focus on the future; two days later, Harris and her most prominent Republican supporter, former Representative Liz Cheney, campaigned together in Wisconsin and called Trump a threat to democracy.
But here in Juneau, as he does nearly everywhere, Trump railed about the last election and made dark warnings about the next one.
“They’re going to cheat. They cheat. That’s all they want to do is cheat, and when you see this, it’s the only way they’re going to win,” Trump said. “And we can’t let that happen and we can’t let it happen again.”
Democracy experts have expressed deep concern that Trump is seeking to stoke doubt in the result of the election, laying the groundwork for him to contest it if he does not win.
Rest of article here:
Trump’s Ugly Closing Argument
