Election Deniers Have Taken Over The RNC After A Trump Shake-Up
HuffPost
Donald Trump never gave up his lies about the 2020 election. Now, party leadership is stocked with his picks.
The new team of Trump loyalists in charge of the Republican Party have spent years promoting the former president’s lies about the 2020 election. With the 2024 election around the corner, they’re set to pursue an agenda built on false claims of election fraud.
As dozens of Republican Party staffers have been purged in recent days and an incoming team takes power, much of the media attention has focused on new party co-chair Lara Trump ― who has said of Joe Biden’s presidency, “I don’t think he won it fair” ― and Christina Bobb, the far-right news anchor with a history of rejecting the 2020 election results, and who is now the party’s senior counsel for election integrity.
But the culture of election denialism starts at the top. Michael Whatley, the new Trump-endorsed chair of the party, is the former GOP general counsel and chair of the North Carolina GOP. He falsely claimed immediately after the 2020 election that there had been “massive fraud” nationwide.
“We do know that there was massive fraud that took place,” he said during a late-November radio interview, CNN and CBS News reported last month. “We know that it took place in places like Milwaukee and Detroit and Philadelphia.”
When reporters asked why he kept alleging that election fraud had occurred, Whatley claimed that “all you have to do is look at the stories that we’re seeing out of Philadelphia, the Detroit area, we’re seeing out of Milwaukee, egregious violations of election law. And there’s no question why it puts these elections at risk.”