Trump floats idea of delaying election
Congressional Republicans reject idea
WASHINGTON • President Donald Trump on Thursday raised the idea of delaying the Nov. 3 U.S. elections, an idea immediately rejected by both Democrats and his fellow Republicans in Congress — the sole branch of government with the authority to make such a change.
Critics and even Trump’s allies dismissed the notion as unserious and simply an attempt to distract from devastating economic news.
Trump’s statement on Twitter comes as the United States is enduring the greatest crises of a generation: a coronavirus pandemic that has claimed more than 150,000 lives, a crippling recession sparked by the outbreak and nationwide protests against police violence and racism. On Thursday morning, the government reported the worst U.S. economic contraction since the Great Depression.
Trump, who opinion polls show losing ground to and trailing Democratic challenger and former Vice-president Joe Biden, also said he would not trust the results of an election that included widespread mail voting — a measure that many observers see as critical given the coronavirus pandemic. Without evidence, he claimed that mail voting would be rife with fraud.
“With Universal Mail-in Voting (not Absentee Voting, which is good), 2020 will be the most INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT Election in history. It will be a great embarrassment to the USA,” Trump wrote on Twitter. “Delay the Election until people can properly, securely and safely vote???”
The United States has held elections for more than 200 years, including during the Civil War, the Great Depression and two world wars. Article II of the U.S. Constitution gives Congress the power to set the timing of elections, and the 20th Amendment ends a president and vice-president’s term in office on the Jan. 20 following a general election.
Multiple congressional Republicans — including Senate Majority Leader Mitch Mcconnell and top House of Representatives Republican Kevin Mccarthy — rejected the idea.
“Never in the history of the federal elections have we ever not held an election and we should go forward with our election,” said Mccarthy. Senator Lindsey Graham, a Trump ally, said, “Delaying the election probably wouldn’t be a good idea.”
Democratic U.S. Representative Zoe Lofgren, who chairs the House committee overseeing election security, rejected any delay.
“Only Congress can change the date of our elections,” Lofgren said in an email to Reuters. “Under no circumstances will we consider doing so to accommodate the President’s inept and haphazard response to the coronavirus pandemic, or give credence to the lies and misinformation he spreads regarding the manner in which Americans can safely and securely cast their ballots.”
Trump’s tweet came without warning and surprised some White House staffers. The White House referred questions about the tweet to Trump’s re-election campaign, which in a statement said the president was simply raising a question.
A Republican close to the White House was stunned at the tweet, noting that it followed a period of relative stability in which Trump has largely stayed on message in response to advice from new campaign manager Bill Stepien and senior campaign manager Jason Miller.
“Obviously he just can’t help himself. This is starting to look like a real campaign, and then he does this,” the Republican source said. “It’s awful. It’s starting to look like he doesn’t even want to win.”
Trump had previously suggested he would not trust election results — complaints similar to those he raised going into the run-up to the 2016 election — but had not so directly suggested changing the Nov. 3 date.
Trump without evidence has cast doubt on the legitimacy of mail-in ballots, which have been used in far greater numbers in primary elections amid the pandemic. He has also made unsubstantiated allegations that voting will be rigged and has refused to say he would accept official election results if he lost.
Many states earlier this year rescheduled primaries due to the fast-spreading coronavirus.
China on Thursday also accused the United States of stoking a new Cold War because certain politicians were searching for a scapegoat to bolster support ahead of the election.
Trump identifies China as the West’s main rival, and has accused President Xi Jinping of taking advantage over trade and not telling the truth over the novel coronavirus outbreak, which Trump calls the “China plague.”
Asked if he saw a new Cold War, China’s ambassador to London, Liu Xiaoming, said the United States had started a trade war with China and that there would be no winner from such an approach.
“It is not China that has become assertive. It’s the other side of the Pacific Ocean who want to start new Cold War on China, so we have to make response to that,” Liu told reporters. “We have no interest in any Cold War, we have no interest in any war.