David Perdue, former President Donald Trump’s pick to replace Brian Kemp as governor of Georgia, got trounced in last week’s Republican primary, only receiving about 22 percent of the vote compared to Kemp’s 74 percent. Trump is now pushing the false idea that the 50-point defeat was the result of “obvious” voter fraud.
An email sent out Tuesday by Save America PAC, Trump’s political action committee, links to an article from last Thursday by Emerald Robinson, a former OANN and Newsmax correspondent, titled “Something Stinks In Georgia.”
“Nobody in any election in America gets 74% of the votes. Ever. It doesn’t happen,” the article claims, falsely, with added emphasis. “Obvious fraud.”
Trump blasts out article that claims Kemp’s 50 point victory in the Georgia GOP gubernatorial primary was due to voter fraud. 400,000 Mules? pic.twitter.com/2udbJiGxgX
— Jonathan Swan (@jonathanvswan) May 31, 2022
Robinson doesn’t seem to understand how Perdue, whom Trump himself called a longshot to win back in March, could have performed so poorly given how the former senator obtained Trump’s endorsement, largely for refusing to accept the results of the 2020 election. Trump’s endorsement, according to Robinson, is “the single most powerful force in the universe of American politics.” (Again, emphasis hers.)
Robinson is a decidedly unreliable source. Last fall, she falsely claimed that Covid-19 vaccines contain a tracking device linked to Satan. “Dear Christians: the vaccines contain a bioluminescent marker called LUCIFERASE so that you can be tracked,” she wrote in a Twitter post that the site later removed. “Read the last book of the New Testament to see how this ends.”
Newsmax, for whom Robinson was then White House correspondent, initially distanced itself from her comment, although she had made claims of that nature before. The right-wing news outlet eventually replaced her with a former Fox News reporter, after which she was hired by none other than “Big Lie” proponent Mike Lindell to host a show on his broadcasting network called, ironically, “The Absolute Truth.”
The article Trump’s PAC shared on Tuesday feeds into his relentless push to convince Americans that Georgia’s voting systems are corrupt. After the 2020 election, in the same call in which he urged Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” enough votes to overturn Biden’s win, Trump insisted that “close to 5,000” deceased Georgians had voted. The real number, it was later revealed, was four.
Trump lined up behind Raffensperger’s primary opponent just as he lined up behind Kemp’s. Raffensperger defeated Rep. Jody Hice last week by a 19-point margin, 52 percent to 33 percent. Trump was reportedly “stunned.”
The former president chose not to sow any doubt after Herschel Walker, his controversial Senate pick, easily advanced to the general election with more than 68 percent of the vote and by a larger margin than Kemp.
Source: Rolling Stone
