Trump campaign’s claim about the ‘rigged’ Iowa caucus debacle recalls Kremlin talking points from 2016: report
Countless Democrats all over the United States are furious over what has been called “The Great Iowa Caucuses Debacle” and the fact that as of Wednesday morning, February 5, it was still unclear who the winner was. President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign, meanwhile, has been trying to use the Iowa fiasco to its advantage, claiming or speculating that it occurred because the caucuses were rigged. And that Trumpian assertion, according to an article published on the Moscow Project’s website, is an example of Trump’s 2020 campaign echoing Russian talking points about U.S. elections.
Speculation that the Iowa caucuses are “rigged,” the Moscow Project notes, has come from Trump allies ranging from Donald Trump, Jr. to Brad Parscale (chairman of Trump’s 2020 campaign) to Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina — and the Moscow Project notes that this claim “echoes back to the effort by Russia and the Trump campaign to describe the 2016 November general election as ‘rigged.’”
“In the final weeks of the 2016 election, when Trump looked likely to lose, Russian bots and trolls were gearing up to claim that the system was rigged,” the Moscow Project explains.
The Moscow Project’s article goes on to point out that according to former special counsel Robert Mueller’s indictment of 13 Russian operatives, Kremlin-funded trolls who were affiliated with the Internet Research Agency “began to promote allegations of voter fraud by the Democratic Party” on social media during the Summer of 2016.
“That disinformation campaign allegedly included specific allegations that ‘Hillary Clinton has already committed voter fraud during the (Democratic) Iowa Caucus’ — eerily close to Trump Jr.’s accusation that the Iowa Democratic Party is using technology problems as cover to ‘get the candidate the Democrat overlords in DC want,’” the Moscow Project observes.
In 2016, the article recalls, Trump asserted that if Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton won the election, it would be due to massive voter fraud.
“The threat that President Trump poses to American democracy only continues to grow,” the Moscow Project warns. “Even as he faces the prospect of impeachment and removal from office for his efforts to cheat in the 2020 presidential election, he and his allies are laying the groundwork to further undermine American democracy any way they can.”
