Republicans are secretly scoffing at Donald Trump.
The president and his staunchest acolytes have long banged the drum about election fraud, which was at the core of the January 6 insurrection that saw MAGA hardliners storm the Capitol in the wake of Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory.
Trump is still waging war against this so-called fraud, using a rally in Marietta, Georgia, on Wednesday to champion his SAVE America Act, which would see voters need to supply proof of citizenship to register and then bring ID with them to the polling booth.
Earlier this month, Trump gave a primetime address where he said his administration had unearthed “shocking vulnerabilities in our election infrastructure.” But afterward, members of his own party responsible for ensuring the GOP wins the midterms in November were underwhelmed. Some said there was no real news there at all. Others scoffed.
CNN spoke with several Republican election officials following Trump’s speech.
One of them was Colorado County Clerks Association boss Matt Crane.
He told the network that he is in a bipartisan group chat with colleagues, which was filled with “a lot of laughing emojis, and like, ‘you got to be kidding me?’ that this was all it was.”
During the speech, Trump bragged about declassifying intelligence reports that revealed the threat China and Venezuela posed to U.S. elections.
Again, the officials were underwhelmed.
“I read the documents,” an official told CNN. “It was old. I’ve already seen this stuff. It wasn’t new to me. We already had most of this information.”
The network reports that while some Republican election officials may toe the line with Trump in public, many were less supportive in private, with one who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of angering the administration saying: “We all know elections aren’t rigged, but we have to keep our heads down and do our jobs.”
Speaking in Georgia, Trump made it clear he disagreed.
“We’re not going to be able to take it much longer when they can’t get past voter ID, proof of citizenship, no mail-in ballots because they’re crooked as hell,” he ranted. “So right now, Congress is working to get as much of our plan as possible into the budget bill to identify and really terminate.”
The Daily Beast has contacted the White House for comment.
