Donald Trump pushed an unsubstantiated conspiracy theory that Democrats are “cheating” in high-profile elections in California while rallying against his old nemesis: mail-in ballots.
The 79-year-old president was up past 1 a.m. ET posting deranged takes on Truth Social, suggesting that the process of counting ballots sent by mail in the California gubernatorial primary and Los Angeles mayoral primary amounted to cheating.
California has a long history of vote counting continuing for days beyond Election Day due to the high number of late-arriving mail and drop-off ballots. As of early Thursday morning, only 56 percent of the votes had been counted in the California governor all-party primary, while 62 percent had been counted in the Los Angeles mayoral election.
Trump, who has long waged a war against mail-in ballots, including pushing the debunked claim that they caused widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election, is now falsely suggesting that Democrats are trying to “steal” the California elections from Republicans while promoting voter-fraud conspiracies.
This is despite the president admitting that he cast his ballot by mail in a March Florida special election.
“The Dumocrats are at it again! They are trying to STEAL THE GOVERNOR OF CALIFORNIA PRIMARY, AND THE MAYOR OF LOS ANGELES, PRIMARY, AWAY FROM TWO GREAT REPUBLICAN CANDIDATES. Here we go with the very late and massive numbers of MAIL IN BALLOTS,” Trump wrote at 12:48 a.m.
The 79-year-old, who has a habit of staying up late posting on social media, wrote in a follow-up post at 1:05 a.m., “There’s BIG cheating by the Dumocrats in California. Votes are all tied up. May not be in for weeks. Under investigation by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Los Angeles. Why the vote counting DELAY???”
Trump did not clarify further about the apparent federal investigation into vote counting in California.
In the California governor all-party primary, Republican Steve Hilton is currently ahead with 27.6 percent, followed by Democrats Xavier Becerra (25.6 percent) and Tom Steyer (19.8 percent), according to the Associated Press. Only the top two candidates from the primary will advance to the general election.
In the Los Angeles mayoral race, incumbent Mayor Karen Bass has already advanced to a run-off. With 62 percent of the vote counted, a second advancing candidate has not yet been declared, with MAGA reality TV star Spencer Pratt in second place on 29.9 percent and Democrat Nithya Raman in third on 22.8 percent.
Just as he did in the 2020 election, Trump has been laying the groundwork to wrongly suggest the California elections are rigged if Republican candidates lose.
In an interview with Fox News broadcast on May 28, the president made numerous false claims, including that mail-in voting is a “fraud,” that California does not have voting booths and that “everything’s by mail,” and that “no other country” in the world votes by mail.
In response to Trump’s 1 a.m. social media spree, California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s press office X account—which routinely mocks and ridicules the president—posted, “Trump is lying about California again—time to take the phone away from grandpa and put him to sleep.”
The Daily Beast has contacted the White House and the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Los Angeles for comment.
