Pennsylvania’s Republican Senate primary race between TV wellness grifter Dr. Mehmet Oz and former hedge fund bro David McCormick is still too close to call two days after Election Day. Election officials are currently working their way through mail-in ballots—a thing Republicans are suddenly fine with, after years of trying to shut down the entire system of voting by mail—and there’s likely to be an entire recount.
But Donald Trump, who endorsed Dr. Oz, is already impatient. He took to his terrible social media app Truth Social to give some predictable advice.
“Dr. Oz should declare victory,” Trump wrote Wednesday morning. “It makes it much harder for them to cheat with the ballots they ‘just happened to find.'”
The Senate race in PA hasn’t been called yet but Trump on Truth Social is calling for Dr. Oz to go ahead and declare — pic.twitter.com/4WxuahprpA
— Meridith McGraw (@meridithmcgraw) May 18, 2022
Ah, there’s that Republican distrust of mail-in voting we’ve come to know and hate. Trump is just rehashing his 2020 playbook, when he insisted that absentee ballots were all fraudulent. (Or rather, he insisted all the absentee ballots that were cast for Joe Biden were fraudulent, while the down-ballot races that went to Republican candidates in those same scrutinized districts were never called into question. Somehow those were deemed legit.)
Trump tried to declare himself the winner of the 2020 Presidential election, refusing to concede to Biden. While his plan didn’t fully work—he is out of office, after all—it didn’t not work. He did inspire a full-on violent insurrection and he’s still to this day holding his party hostage, making any Republican who acknowledges the reality of the election into a pariah.
So no, Oz cannot just “declare victory” but it’s entirely unsurprising that that’s the advice Trump is offering him.
(via HuffPost, image: Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)
Published: May 19, 2022 01:57 pm