A transactional relationship with the facts, the systematic recourse to delaying procedures, a strategy of avoiding setbacks: many of Donald Trump’s personality traits do not fit well with the rules governing elections. As on many subjects, he does not come forward masked as evidenced by his public statements and his messages published on his Twitter account.
Donald Trump’s beliefs about the election match his interests. On the evening of the 2012 presidential election, when the Republican camp was still convinced that its candidate, Mitt Romney, had won the popular vote against Barack Obama, but lost within the electoral college, Donald Trump thundered on his Twitter account. “This election is a total sham, a parody. We are not a democracy! “, he plague. “Let us fight to the end to end this immense and disgusting injustice. We are the laughing stock of the world ”, he adds, targeting the electoral college.
“I liked the idea of the popular vote, but now I realize that the electoral college is much better for the United States”, declared in 2019 the one who acceded to the Oval Office despite a delay of 2.7 million votes at the national level against Democrat Hillary Clinton. Donald Trump is also one of the most poorly elected White House tenants in the electoral college. With only 56.9% of the votes of the large voters, his election ranks forty-sixth out of fifty-eight the country has known. In front of John Kennedy, Jimmy Carter and George W. Bush, but far behind Barack Obama or Bill Clinton.
Frantic search for evidence of “massive fraud”
This frustration no doubt explains why the President of the United States is embarking on a frantic search for proof of a “Massive fraud” from the first months of his arrival at the White House. The task has fallen to a former Kansas Republican official, Kris Kobach, who from May 11, 2017 heads a commission created by presidential decree to back up these claims. Considered with the greatest skepticism by the elected representatives of the two major parties, the commission was dissolved on January 3, 2018 without having produced any results. Kris Kobach fell from grace a few months later after his defeat in the election for governor of his state.
Donald Trump was the first presidential candidate from one of two major parties to refuse in 2016 to pledge to accept in advance the verdict of the ballot box and to denounce a poll in advance. “Rigged” during a presidential debate. At the time, his voting intentions were at their lowest and the cheating argument was put forward to conveniently explain a defeat. Four years later, the theme of fraud made its reappearance when the Democratic primaries had just appointed a consensual candidate, Joe Biden. Donald Trump hoped to face a figure of the left wing, the independent senator of Vermont Bernie Sanders, considered less unifying.
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