Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) on Tuesday blasted President Donald Trump over his upcoming primetime address Thursday, in which the MAGA leader is set to revisit baseless claims about the 2020 election, calling it an “absurd” and “pathological” obsession.
“It’s just absurd that he’s still obsessed with that lie,” Raskin told MeidasTouch reporter Pablo Manriquez. “So I suppose it is news that the president continues to manufacture fantasy propositions and conspiracy theories and lies, but that’s what it should be covered as.”
He continued, “It should not be covered as news because he has failed to develop one body of evidence that contradicts one sentence in the Jan. 6 report, for example. They have failed to contradict any of the findings of any of those federal court decisions.”
Raskin said Trump is nonetheless still “running off in this absolutely pathological direction.”
Trump infamously refused to concede at the time that he lost the election to former President Joe Biden, spurring loyalist MAGA voters to riot and storm the Capitol building in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6, 2021, and continues claiming to this day that the election was rigged.
Trump also told Georgia’s Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger, at the time to “find” enough purportedly uncounted votes there to help Trump win the state, even after his then-Attorney General, William Barr, confirmed there was no evidence of widespread election fraud.
“He lost the election by more than 7 million votes and 306-232 in the Electoral College,” Raskin told Manriquez. “The story is that he continues to lie about it, and they’ve organized an entire political party, albeit a dwindling and shrinking one, around a lie.”
The congressman continued, “And then out of that lie flow all these other lies, like the lie about Jan. 6, which he says was a beautiful day of hugs and kisses.”
Raskin discussed the matter further during an appearance on MS NOW, telling “Weeknight” co-host Symone Sanders-Townsend that Trump will reportedly be “pinning” alleged fraud in the 2020 election on China — and wants to “manufacture a crisis here that doesn’t exist.”
Trump has also repeatedly floated over the past year that he plans to run for a third, unconstitutional term, and while he has acknowledged that the Constitution is “pretty clear” that this is prohibited. He said last year, “I’m not joking.”
“It’s very clear that he envies the authoritarian and totalitarian leaders of the world,” said Raskin, adding: “But the good news is that the vast majority of Americans across the political spectrum are standing up for our democracy and our freedom in our free and fair elections.”