Lara Trump Promises The RNC Will “Physically Handle The Ballots.” And Yes, This Is Terrible News

For the longest time, Lara Trump seemed like little more than a mouthpiece for her father-in-law, Donald Trump. Even when he incited the crowd to “fight like hell” while speaking to the MAGA crowd at the ellipse on January 6, 2021, Lara, to me anyway, didn’t seem like she was up to all that much. When she vowed “to take our country back” because the Trump family didn’t “get in this fight for just four years. We are in this fight to the bitter end,” she seemed like that fifth wheel in the Trump family.

What this really proves to me, is how quickly things can change in a relatively short time.

Now Lara Trump co-chairs the Republican National Committee, after her father-in-law’s considerable efforts to ensure she is enthroned there alongside his hand-picked RNC chair Michael Whatley, as David Badash, writing for The New Civil Rights Movement notes. Whatley, a Republican from North Carolina, served on George W. Bush’s recount team for the 2000 presidential election that was decided at the U.S. Supreme Court.  In the years that followed, Whatley claimed “It was really the first time that Republicans got down into the trenches and fought,” and asserted, “If we were not there, they were going to steal it.”

You may remember that this was the time when Bush won the state of Florida by a mere 537 votes when he was running against Democrat Al Gore. It’s a bit hard to believe the Democrats would have “stolen” this, considering Bush’s razor-thin lead, but that’s just me.

But now, since Michael Whatley and Lara Trump are at the helm of the RNC, with her dear old dad-in-law as the presumptive GOP presidential nominee, you can bet these two are adhering to the ex-president’s obsession with “election integrity.”

Tuesday night Lara Trump let us know that they are cooking up all sorts of bad ideas.

“we now have the ability at the rnc not just to have poll watchers, people standing in polling locations, but people who can physically handle the ballots. we want people all across this country —” she said before host eric bolling jumped in.

“i want to hear this, this is really fascinating to me,” bolling said. “you have 100,000 people who are, i think i saw paid at one point, but whatever — irrelevant, but so they will be stationed inside polling places? i didn’t even know you can do that. tell us about it.

Trump was more than happy to elaborate. “There was a moratorium for about 40 years on the RNC actually training people to work in these polling locations in the tabulation centers where the mail-in ballots come in. And last year, the judge who implemented that passed away, so that was lifted, and that gives us a great ability as we head into what I assume everyone understands is the most important election of our lifetime.”

Lara Trump: We now have the ability at the RNC not just to have poll watchers… but people who can physically handle the ballots… pic.twitter.com/xd06medJal

— Acyn (@Acyn) April 24, 2024

If there’s one thing you can say about middle Trump son Eric’s wife, it’s that she’s quite full of herself and also full of something not mentionable unless we want to get Facebook excited.

If this election is “the most important of our lifetime” it’s because we must find every way possible to keep a wannabe dictator out of office.

But Bolling, who is clueless since he works for Newsmax after all, stumbled past all of that and asked her “Will these people, will they be allowed to physically handle the ballots as well, Lara?”

“Yup,” she said. “and that means eric that they should know and they can count how many ballots come in, and how many ballots should go out of every single polling location.”“

She added that if anyone cheats, “we will prosecute you to the full extent of the law.”

“it is not worth it to cheat in a federal election, that is a crime my friends you do not want to commit,” she elaborated.

Trump is not fooling anyone here. All of this is due to Donald Trump’s ongoing “stolen election” claims, and no one, absolutely no one should like this. When I vote, the last person I want handling my ballot is some GOP mucky-muck who may or may not be honorable. I don’t trust people like this any further than I can throw them.

After Bolling made mention of the more than 100,000 attorneys and volunteers the RNC allegedly has lined up to monitor vote counting, the Trump campaign and the RNC issued a joint statement calling this “the most extensive and monumental election integrity program in the nation’s history.”

Well, I hope the Democrats will benefit from that “election integrity” but I’m surely not holding my breath.

This did not sit right with former RNC Chairman Michael Steele, who lambasted Lara Trump.

“lara, you know why there was ‘a moratorium on the rnc for 40 years?’ because the rnc was caught cheating. the rnc was placed under a 1982 consent decree for voter caging. voter caging hinders an eligible voter’s ability to vote. the process involves efforts to identify and disenfranchise improperly registered voters solely on the basis of undeliverable mail. it often leads to the unwarranted purging of election rolls of otherwise eligible voters.”

“so,” steele fumed, “given the continued lies about the 2020 election and your daddy-in-law claiming if he loses in 2024 it’s because the election is rigged, you’re planning to have your people ‘physically handle the ballots’— and we’re supposed to think that’s a good idea?”

This plan that Trump and Whatley have planned sounds like a first step into writing a brand new fascist manifesto. That’s what it sounds like to me.

And NYU professor of history Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a scholar on fascism, authoritarianism, propaganda, and the protection of democracy, voiced a similar opinion.

“what does this mean, they will have thugs to physically take the ballots to make sure they are marked for republican candidates?” she asked. “sounds like a perfect authoritarian election plan to me.”

She’s right, and I don’t think anything good can come from this. What happens if one of these “thugs” decides to pay visits to anyone voting as a Democrat, you know, like the Nazis did if they suspected anything during the 1930s? What then?

We are definitely heading into worrisome times.