CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa (Reuters) –Donald Trump, the frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination, told his supporters on Saturday to “go into” Philadelphia and two other Democratic-run cities to “guard the vote” in 2024, repeating his unfounded claims of widespread election fraud in 2020 as justification for the call to action.
Speaking at two events in Iowa, Trump also sought to counter growing concern among Democrats and some Republicans that his potential return to the White House posed a threat to democracy.
Even as he faces criminal charges over his efforts to reverse his 2020 loss, Trump attempted to flip the script and paint the winner, President Joe Biden, as a dangerous autocrat, calling him a communist, fascist and a tyrant.
A spokesperson for Biden’s re-election campaign said Trump’s comments portraying Biden as a threat to democracy were an attempt to divert the public’s attention from his own problems.
Looking ahead to next year’s general election, Trump said it was important to scrutinize the vote in the battleground states likely to determine the outcome. He singled out the biggest cities in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Georgia – all Democratic strongholds at the center of the blizzard of false voter fraud claims made by Trump and his allies three years ago.
“So the most important part of what’s coming up is to guard the vote. And you should go into Detroit and you should go into Philadelphia and you should go into some of these places, Atlanta,” Trump said in Ankeny, a suburb of Des Moines.
Trump’s comments foreshadow what is likely to be a contentious election in November 2024. Despite the failure of dozens of lawsuits filed by Trump and his allies challenging the 2020 outcome, Trump continues to claim, without evidence, that he lost to President Joe Biden due to fraud.
Trump did not specify who he was asking to “go into” the battleground-state cities. A campaign aide, when asked to clarify, said he was referring to poll-watchers and volunteers whose objective would be to ensure a secure election.
That would mesh with plans outlined by the Republican National Committee, which is aiming to recruit and train tens of thousands of poll workers and watchers in states that are hotly contested because their voting preferences could swing either to Republicans or Democrats.
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