Trump Pushes Unhinged New Election Conspiracy During RNC Speech
Donald Trump has yet another explanation for why he lost in 2020.
![Donald Trump holds up his fist as he speaks onstage at the Republican National Convention](http://images.newrepublic.com/29475493b04b3577b7d4fd00d70d5c593cba2562.jpeg?auto=format&fit=crop&crop=faces&q=65&w=768&h=undefined&ar=3%3A2&ixlib=react-9.0.2&w=768)
Former President Donald Trump claimed that Democrats used the Covid-19 pandemic to cheat during the last presidential election.
During his speech Thursday at the Republican National Convention, Trump made a strange claim while talking about a failed deal he’d tried to make with Iran, ahead of the 2020 election.
“Iran was gonna make a deal with us, and then we had that horrible, horrible result that we’ll never let happen again. The election result, we’re never gonna let that happen again,” he said.
“They used Covid to cheat. We’re never gonna let it happen again,” Trump insisted, a strange shift in his election denialism.
Trump on the 2020 election: "We had that horrible, horrible result that we'll never let happen. The election results, we're never gonna let that happen again." pic.twitter.com/G5EYdBFoO4
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 19, 2024
Of course, Trump has been a broken record when it comes to believing he was cheated out of the White House. Earlier in his speech, Trump remarked that the Biden administration wasn’t “fierce” except for “cheating on elections, and a couple of other things.” But suggesting that Democrats had taken advantage of the deadly Covid-19 virus is a uniquely untethered claim, though it’s not totally clear how that would be even possible.
Earlier on Thursday, Lara Trump suggested that the former president had learned to embrace mail-in voting, a tactic pushed by Democrats in the previous election for the sake of public health. At the time, Trump heavily (and falsely) criticized the tactic as being rife with fraud.