The President Accidentally Speaks Some Truth for a Change

Salon and other sources are reporting that the president openly admitted that the Trump Party (formerly the GOP) has to suppress voters to allow republicans win elections. That is blatantly authoritarian and anti-democratic. Salon writes:

“Trump admits "you'd never have a Republican elected in this country again" if voting access expanded -- Trump says the quiet part out loud on the GOP not wanting higher turnout

President Donald Trump on Monday came right out and admitted his Republican Party would soon be defunct if voting in the United States was easier in a way that allowed more citizens to vote in elections, telling a national television audience it was a good thing that Democratic proposals for increased voting protections and ballot access were left out of last week's coronavirus relief package.

The comment came during an interview with Fox & Friends, the president's go-to show for positive coverage.

‘The things they had in there were crazy,’ Trump said of the voter protection and expansion proposals in the bill. ‘They had things—levels of voting that, if you ever agreed to it, you'd never have a Republican elected in this country again.’

As the Washington Post's Aaron Blake noted:

Trump didn't expand on the thought. But he clearly linked high turnout to Republicans losing elections. The most generous reading of his comment is that he was referring to large-scale voter fraud resulting from the easier vote-by-mail options; Trump has in the past baselessly speculated about millions of fraudulent votes helping Democrats in the 2016 election. The more nefarious reading would be that allowing more people to participate in the process legally would hurt his party because there are more Democratic-leaning voters in the country.

That's apparently true, but you typically don't see Republicans expressing the sentiment so directly. Generally, they'll connect tighter voting rules such as Voter ID to protecting the integrity of the process.”

It is amazing that Trump actually stated truth. Trump Party excuses about voter fraud and election integrity are deflections from the reality that they win elections by disenfranchising voters. That is authoritarianism, pure and simple.

It will be interesting to see how Trump Party blowhards spin this. There are two reliable ways to spin it. The first is this:

The second is this:

I suspect that both tactics will be used and the one that seems most effective will become the go-to Trump Party lie about the truth.

On the other hand, could this be something that Trump just made up? That is always a possibility. Pelosi and crew now have a profound moral responsibility to show us exactly was was in the bill about voting rights and every other thing that got taken out. The public has every right to see how it  has been deceived, lied to, betrayed and manipulated.

Or, do the two parties shield themselves from transparency by some norm or law that says that the public cannot see exactly how the two parties operate when making their disgusting sausage of lies, deceit and self-dealing?