Donald Trump made clear over the weekend that he still wants to force Republicans to pay a political cost for failing to help him overturn the 2020 election results. “The people of Georgia must replace the RINOs [Republicans In Name Only] and weak Republicans who made it all possible,” Trump said at a rally in Georgia on Saturday, referring to his election loss. Trump called Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, the Republican who refused to help him “find” enough votes, “incompetent and strange.” He also turned Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, who he declared “a complete and total disaster on election integrity,” into a rally joke. The former president suggested he would have preferred Democrat Stacey Abrams, who ran in 2018, over the incumbent Republican. “Stacey, would you like to take his place?” said Trump, per the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “It’s OK with me.”
The former president visited the Georgia National Fairgrounds in Perry to promote three candidates he’s endorsing in the 2022 Republican primaries and reiterate his Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen. The falsehood has become a litmus test for members of Trump’s party and a cause for much of its base. In a CNN poll earlier this month, 78 percent of Republicans said President Joe Biden did not win, and 54 percent believed there was evidence to support that view, even though multiple court rulings, recounts and investigations, and bipartisan state and federal officials have found no such evidence.
Trump is “playing factional politics in the party,” University of San Diego professor Casey Dominguez told the Associated Press. And those with Trump’s backing echoed his political strategy on Saturday. State Rep. Jody Hice, who is vying for secretary of state, was reportedly met with applause when he claimed Raffensperger “has opened wide the door for all sorts of irregularities and fraud to march into our election system, and it’s time we take charge of this.” Trump on Saturday was focused not only on rewriting his own loss in Georgia but in Arizona, where, a day before, a partisan recount confirmed the validity of Biden’s victory. Trump, apparently in denial about this outcome, claimed the opposite.
That claim, among many others he made at the rally, was patently false. The findings of the ballot review in Arizona, commissioned by the Republican-controlled state Senate, not only affirmed Biden’s win in Maricopa County but revealed Biden actually beat Trump by more votes than previously thought. This outcome emerged even though election experts derided the audit because, among other things, it was conducted by a firm well-versed in pro-Trump conspiracy theories but with no viable experience reviewing elections. That the months-long and costly attempt to vindicate Trump’s lies through a bogus investigation ended this way was something of a comical cherry on top for those following the futile effort. “The takeaway is that this was a colossal waste of time,” Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs told Politico on Friday. “Anyone who is considering replicating it in their state, or taking further action based on this report, should not be considered a serious leader,” she added.
But Trump’s comments on Saturday reflect how the findings of such partisan audits are in some ways besides the point for the former president. Trump’s fixation on the election he lost ten months ago and his relentless search for a conspiracy theory to explain it “is a rallying point for the base” and “something a lot of his supporters believe in,” one Trump aide told Politico. Republicans launching copycat election reviews have only strengthened the myth, a list that now includes Texas Gov. Greg Abbott. Last week, he became the latest GOP leader to submit to Trump’s calls for an audit in four large counties. “Voters are demanding it,” according to Trump’s spokesperson Liz Harrington, who told the outlet that election integrity is “the number one issue of concern we hear.”