Trump Got Super Weird and Conspiratorial Last Night

On Tuesday night, Donald Trump gave a talk to House Republicans at the National Republican Congressional Committee’s spring dinner, and warned them to be more “paranoid” about how votes are counted. He also said that noise from windmills could cause cancer. (This is, uh, wrong.)

Let’s just get that part out of the way.

Yeah.

The more pernicious stuff, of course, came when Trump started talking about the midterm elections.

“We’ve got to watch those vote tallies,” Trump said in reference to unnamed House races last November.

“I don’t like the way the votes are being tallied,” he continued. “I don’t like it, and you don’t like it either. You just don’t want to say it because you’re afraid of the press. You’re afraid of the press.”

Trump seemed to be implying, as he has in the past, that there is some kind of widespread voter fraud underway in national races, biasing them against the GOP.

Last year, Trump claimed that there was fraud in elections in closely fought elections in Arizona and Florida. He made similar statements about widespread fraud before the 2018 midterms.

Those claims, of course, were false, as were Trump’s claims that “millions” of illegal votes had been cast for Hillary Clinton in 2016. Trump even created a commission to investigate this supposedly widespread fraud, helmed by voter suppression champion Kris Kobach, only to dissolve it without producing any results.

The fact that Trump doesn’t seem to trust election results even in less important races is, of course, concerning. What will happen if he loses in 2020 and doesn’t accept the results? Who knows!

Speaking of fraud and House elections, there’s currently a special election underway in North Carolina’s 9th District thanks to a fraud scandal that enveloped the GOP candidate. So it’s not that election fraud doesn’t happen—it just doesn’t happen in the places and numbers Trump seems to believe it does.