Former President Donald Trump is attempting to “preemptively cast doubt” on election systems to get ahead of a potential loss in November, said Alyssa Farah Griffin, his former White House aide.
The Republican presidential nominee has ramped up rhetoric about the chances of fraud in the 2024 election as several states open early voting options with roughly six weeks until Election Day. But several Trump allies, including the Republican National Committee (RNC), have urged voters to embrace different voting methods this election cycle, giving supporters mixed messages on the systems in place.
Griffin, who appeared on CNN‘s The Source with Kaitlan Collins Monday evening, said that Trump’s rhetoric is “giving me 2020 whiplash,” referring to the former president’s attacks against early and mail-in voting during the last presidential election despite the rise in mail-in ballots due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“He’s got something intellectually—he cannot accept the fact that you can vote early, it can be safe, it can be tabulated,” Griffin, Trump’s former White House director of strategic communications, said Monday. “He just has this very sort of arcane way of looking at it.”
“But there’s also the secondary thing that comes with Trump, which is he wants to preemptively cast doubt on the results in case he loses,” Griffin continued. “He’s incapable of losing and accepting that he lost.”
Former President Donald Trump looks on as he visits Sprankle’s Neighborhood Market on September 23 in Kittanning, Pennsylvania. Alyssa Farah Griffin, Trump’s former White House aide, said the GOP presidential nominee “wants to preemptively cast doubt on the results in case he loses” the presidential election in November.
Win McNamee/Getty Images
Several of Trump’s warnings about protecting the vote ahead of the 2024 election are reminiscent of his baseless claims in 2020 that his loss to President Joe Biden was stolen from him due to voter fraud. During a campaign rally in Indiana, Pennsylvania, on Monday before Griffin’s comments to CNN, Trump said that early voting was “stupid stuff,” but urged his supporters to “get out and vote.”
“It’s terrible,” he added. “What happened the last time was disgraceful, including right here. But we’re not going to let it happen again, too, you know, too big to rig, right? That’s one way you do it.”
Trump has also recently attacked the U.S. Postal Service over its handling of mail-in ballots, claiming during an interview with right-wing outlet Real America’s Voice this month that the post office “maybe purposely” loses “hundreds of thousands of ballots.” American Postal Workers Union President Mark Dimondstein said in a statement a day after the interview that Trump’s claims were “lies” and a form of “voter suppression, plain and simple.”
In contrast, RNC co-chair Lara Trump, the former president’s daughter-in-law, has urged Republican voters to embrace several forms of voting, telling CNN this month that the GOP has “worked very hard on the ground” to “make sure every voter in this country feels like when you cast a ballot, whether it’s via mail, whether it’s early voting in-person, or whether it’s on Election Day in an election office, around the country, your vote matters, and your vote counts.”
Trump has also looked for other scapegoats ahead of November, including pointing a finger at Jewish voters during an address before the Israeli American Council summit last week, where the former president said that “Jewish people would have a lot to do” with it if he loses to Democratic nominee Vice President Kamala Harris. The comments received backlash from several prominent Jewish leaders, including Democratic Congressman Jamie Raskin, who called on “any self-respecting Republicans” to “denounce this kind of rhetoric.”
Griffin noted Trump’s comments about Jewish voters during her CNN appearance on Monday, adding that Trump “casts doubt on the system.”
“It’s kind of twofold,” she continued. “He [Trump] genuinely does not, in my understanding, trust early voting, but he also wants to have something to blame.”
Newsweek reached out to Trump’s campaign via email for comment Monday evening.
In the 2020 election, 69 percent of votes were cast by mail or through early voting, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Some states offer in-person early voting opportunities in addition to mail-in ballots. On Friday, in-person voting launched in Minnesota, South Dakota and Virginia.
