In statements this Sunday to NBC News’ Meet the Press program, the Democratic representative for California agreed with recent comments by President Joe Biden, who expressed on Friday in the White House press room his confidence that the next elections will be “free and fair,” but perhaps not “peaceful.”
Schiff added that the former Republican president “has more reasons to show up at the polls than before (…), because Donald Trump believes, and perhaps rightly so, that if he is not successful, he can go to jail. So he is going to challenge the results.”
“What the president said was all too precise, all too astonishing, all too tragically accurate, which is that yes, I think the election will be free and fair, but will it be free of violence at the end of the day?” Schiff asked.
The congressman recalled the assault on the federal Capitol on January 6, 2021, as an example of the post-election violence that developed in the wake of Trump’s baseless claims that the 2020 election had been stolen from him.
Hundreds of his disgruntled supporters attacked the headquarters of Congress on the day of the joint session to certify Biden’s victory.
Almost on the threshold of a new election, Trump still insists that there was fraud four years ago. He is also adding fuel to the fire of his rhetoric by trying to sow the opinion that his political adversaries wanted to kill him, referring to the assassination attempt he was targeted for on July 13 in Butler, Pennsylvania, and then on September 15 while playing golf at his club in Florida.
This is Donald Trump’s legacy: we cannot now go into an election with full confidence that the results will be peaceful, stressed Schiff, who is running for the Senate in 2024.
He added that he hopes Harris will win the election, but that “it is still a very close election,” which is why he considered that larger than expected margins could curb the threat of violence related to the counts.
“The reason the margin is so important is because (the Republicans) will challenge the results when they lose. Widening that margin as much as possible and getting people out to vote has to be our priority,” he insisted.
For filmmaker Michael Moore, that is the question. “We need to make sure Trump loses in a landslide, with such massive numbers (…) because that is the only way to ensure his permanent removal from the public eye,” he wrote on his website on Friday.
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