Kn the run-up to Georgia’s runoff for the last vacant Senate seat, most Republicans are avoiding comment on Donald Trump’s recent speech. At the weekend, the former president not only claimed again on his online platform Truth Social that there had been massive fraud and corruption in the 2020 election and demanded that he be appointed president retrospectively or that new elections should be called. He also wrote, “A massive fraud of this nature and magnitude enables the repeal of all rules, regulations and articles, even those in the Constitution.” He added, “Unprecedented fraud requires unprecedented medicine.”
Trump’s statement reveals that he is aware that the constitution does not provide for new elections for the presidency or a subsequent decertification of the election results. The reason for Trump’s claims was a push by Elon Musk, the new Twitter owner. Before his takeover, Twitter blocked articles from the New York Post, the Murdoch Group’s tabloid, about Hunter Biden’s controversial foreign deals during the 2020 election campaign. The judiciary is investigating possible tax offenses against the president’s son. Jack Dorsey, the then Twitter boss, later called his actions a mistake. Musk recently leaked internal communications from former Twitter executives regarding the Hunter-Biden affair.
“Attack on the Republic”
The White House condemned Trump’s statement that “attacking the Constitution and all it stands for is anathema to the soul of our nation and should be universally condemned,” said spokesman Andrew Bates. Individual Republicans also voiced harsh criticism. Lisa Murkowski, the Alaskan senator who was confirmed in the recent congressional elections and an anti-Trump opponent, said: “It is not only a breach of the oath of office to suggest that the constitution be repealed, it is also an attack on the republic.
Meanwhile, the Republican leadership of Congress, led by Senator Mitch McConnell and Representative Kevin McCarthy, remained silent. Before Tuesday’s runoff in Georgia, they obviously don’t want to deepen the party’s division, which is particularly pronounced in the southern state. McCarthy is already careful not to arouse the wrath of Trumpists in his faction – he wants to be elected Speaker of the House in January.
Trump’s statement shows that the party leadership’s hope that after the outcome of the congressional elections, which was disappointing for him, he would end the debate about the alleged election fraud was deceptive. After the elections on November 8, in which many of his extremist candidates failed, Trump announced his renewed presidential candidacy for 2024 in Florida. In the speech in Mar-a-Lago he had refrained from talking about the alleged electoral fraud.
