President Donald Trump has made a series of bizarre claims about voter fraud over the years, but his latest might take the cake.
Despite receiving nearly three million fewer votes than Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election, Trump insisted that he would have won the popular vote if not for millions of illegal ballots which didn’t exist.
As president, Trump continues to claim that Democrats are trying to “steal” elections in Florida by attempting to ensure that all proper votes are counted, and he floated the wildly dictatorial notion of holding an entirely new election after mail-in and provisional ballots put Rep. Kyrsten Sinema, the Democratic Senator-elect, over the top for good in the Arizona Senate race.
So we already knew the president of the United States had little to no grasp of the realities of elections and vote-counting well before he spoke with the conservative Daily Caller on Wednesday at the White House.
But buried among his numerous lies about Florida’s still-too-close-to call elections, Trump made an illuminating remark regarding his thought-process on voter fraud.
“The Republicans don’t win and that’s because of potentially illegal votes. When people get in line that have absolutely no right to vote and they go around in circles. Sometimes they go to their car, put on a different hat, put on a different shirt, come in and vote again.”
The leader of the free world, who has thousands of nuclear weapons at his disposal, then explained how Froot Loops means we should have voter ID.
“If you buy a box of cereal — you have a voter ID. They try to shame everybody by calling them racist, or calling them something, anything they can think of, when you say you want voter ID. But voter ID is a very important thing.”
So to recap, Donald Trump believes people wear secret disguises so that they can vote illegally, and are asked for photo identification when buying a box of Cocoa Puffs.
This is not the first time Trump has indicated he has no idea how grocery stores work. At a July rally in Florida, the president also mentioned grocery shopping to make a case for voter ID.
An exhaustive ThinkProgress investigation reveals that you do not, in fact, need photo identification in order to buy cereal. Cash is still a widely accepted form of payment across the United States, and many stores do not ask for photo identification when using a credit or debit card.
Trump has previously claimed, without evidence, that “the same person votes many times,” but this appears to be the first time the president of the United States has invoked costumes to explain his theory on voter fraud.
Trump’s voter ID proposal is one of many ideas Republicans have introduced as a means to stop the imaginary scourge of voter fraud and/or breakfast fraud.
The president disbanded his own voter fraud commission after it was unable to find any evidence to substantiate his claims of irregularities in the 2016 election.
The White House also admitted it had found no evidence of voter fraud in a January court filing.
The “expert witness” brought forward by failed Kansas gubernatorial candidate Kris Kobach (R), the vice chair of Trump’s defunct voter fraud commission, also admitted there was no evidence of voter fraud in a lawsuit filed over the voter ID law that Kobach oversaw while he served as Kansas’s Secretary of State. The trial turned out to be a disaster for the Trump-endorsed Kansas Republican, who was held in contempt of court for disobeying the judge’s orders, ordered to attend remedial classes for failing to comprehend basic legal concepts, and criticized for plagiarizing the ACLU, before his law was ultimately struck down.
As ThinkProgress has explained, voter fraud is extremely rare.
Shark attacks and lightning strikes are more common occurrences than instances of voter fraud in which a person impersonates another voter and casts a fraudulent ballot under their name. There were just four documented cases of voter fraud in the 2016 election. Two were Trump supporters who voted for Trump twice, one was a Republican who voted for her dead husband, and the fourth was an election worker in Florida who tampered with absentee ballots.