Long before election day in 2020, Donald Trump was telling anyone who would listen that there was an effort underway to ‘steal’ the election, using COVID-19 and mail-in ballots. Now he’s regurgitating this unsupported claim for monkeypox, though President Joe Biden has said that he doesn’t foresee a need for lockdowns or similar measures.
In the clip below, Trump is speaking with Dan Ball on his Real America show on OANN. The host brings up monkeypox, a disease which, unlike COVID-19, is not new, has been studied, and already has known vaccines and treatments. Ball assures his audience that he’s not trying to engage in conspiracy theories, then spins one and carefully leads Trump through it, after which the former president happily parrots the claim.
Donald Trump on monkeypox concerns: “Here we go again back to mail-in ballots, fake mail-in ballots.” pic.twitter.com/9IKT0bVyrH
— PatriotTakes 🇺🇸 (@patriottakes) May 24, 2022
Ball suggests that countries are starting to go into lockdowns, and that this could happen in the U.S. next, forcing the country “back to all mail-in [ballots],” and election integrity concerns.
The problems with even this short spiel are numerous. while Belgium is, according to Politico, requiring quarantines for monkeypox patients, quarantining a sick individual is a far cry from locking down a country. Furthermore, the U.S. can hardly go “back to” a policy (“all mail-ins”) that never existed, and in 2020, people were absolutely able to vote in-person — but the mail-in option was made available to everyone. Finally, the claims about ‘election integrity’ were never supported by any real evidence.
Doesn’t matter — Trump is eating it up, and makes the same prediction in response:
“Yeah. Here we go again, here we go again. Back to mail-in ballots, the fake mail-in ballots, all the things that took place. What a disgrace…so now they have a new one. Let’s see what happens…let’s see where they’re coming from.”
Does Trump remember that he was the President of the United States when COVID-19 caused shutdowns, and that his downplaying of the virus cost American lives?
