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Just weeks into his presidency, Donald Trump met with a group of senators to discuss Neil Gorsuch’s Supreme Court nomination. As regular readers may recall, the then-president, for reasons that weren’t altogether clear, insisted at the meeting that he would’ve won New Hampshire in 2016 had it not been for widespread voter fraud.
According to a Politico report, after Trump insisted illegal votes were cast by people “brought in on buses,” there was “an uncomfortable silence” in the room.
The reaction from those in attendance was understandable. The Republican had already won the presidential election, so there was no reason for him to make weird comments about his victory. What’s more, the topic at hand had nothing to do with New Hampshire, the 2016 race, or election conspiracy theories.
But it was on Trump’s mind anyway, and he apparently wouldn’t let it go, despite the fact that his allegations about fraud and buses in New Hampshire had no basis in reality.
All of this came to mind anew after Trump celebrated his latest primary victory. NBC News noted one of the more ridiculous lines from the Republican’s remarks:
“We won New Hampshire three times now, three. We win it every time, we win the primary, we win the generals,” Trump claimed in his victory speech tonight. Trump has won three Republican primaries in New Hampshire, but he has yet to win a general election there: He lost to Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Biden in 2020.
The former president has fared well in New Hampshire primaries, and that ought to be enough for him. But it’s clearly not: Trump still wants his followers to believe that he secretly won the state in the 2016 and 2020 general elections — actual vote tallies be damned — based on evidence that exists only in his imagination.
What’s more, the rhetoric seems familiar for a reason. Shortly before last week’s Iowa caucuses, Trump boasted that he’d won the nominating contest twice before, despite the fact that Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas defeated him in Iowa in 2016. (Trump said at the time that his defeat didn’t really count, and could be attributed to fraud that never actually occurred. “Based on the fraud committed by Senator Ted Cruz during the Iowa Caucus, either a new election should take place or Cruz results nullified,” he wrote on Twitter at the time.)
After his 30-point win in this year’s Iowa caucuses, Trump again bragged that that he’d won the caucuses three times, pretending that he’d won in 2016, reality notwithstanding.
In other words, as the general election phase of the 2024 race begins in earnest, the presumptive GOP nominee is clinging to absurd conspiracy theories about Iowa, New Hampshire, and the 2020 general election. Trump has been warned repeatedly that his election denialism isn’t a winning tactic, especially with national audiences, but the former president apparently can’t quite help himself.
It’s going to be a long year.