But he sure can stir up a lot of anxiety about voting.
Hi. Welcome to On Politics, your guide to the day in national politics. I’m Lisa Lerer, your host.
At 8:30 this morning, the Commerce Department announced a record economic decline during the second quarter of this year — a drop that was stunning in its severity and breath.
Sixteen minutes later, President Trump tweeted. No, not about the historic drop in the gross domestic product or the 1.4 million Americans filing for unemployment.
What the president wanted to talk about was the election. Specifically, he wanted to float the idea that it could be delayed, an action that would mark an extraordinary breach of democratic norms.
Before we get all wound up about this incendiary tweet, let’s spend a minute talking about what we know to be true.
I don’t want to minimize the real risks of Mr. Trump’s remark. Already, this election has been messy, with many voters worried about voting in person and uncertain about how to cast ballots by mail. There’s plenty of evidence that state and local election officials are unprepared for a potential deluge of early and absentee voting this fall.
Mr. Trump has tried to exacerbate the confusion, sowing doubt that the election will be conducted fairly and working to undermine voting by mail, which many Republicans believe will hurt their electoral chances. (There is no evidence to back up the argument from the right that all-mail elections favor Democrats.)
Mr. Trump is dragging behind in polling, so raising doubts about voting may be a way for him to lay the groundwork to question the legitimacy of the election should he lose. At a White House briefing later in the day, Mr. Trump defended his suggestion that the election be delayed, falsely warning that “hundreds of millions of mail-in ballots” would be cast and saying he didn’t want to wait for the results of the election.
Yet, even Mr. Trump’s Republican allies on Capitol Hill seemed uncertain what to make of Mr. Trump’s suggestion — that is, those who didn’t completely avoid answering questions about it. None supported the idea of postponing the election.
