Former President Donald Trump referred to Senator Mike Rounds as a “RINO” — Republican in name only — after Rounds, who represents South Dakota, rejected Trump’s lies about the integrity of the 2020 general election.
“Is he crazy or just stupid?” Trump said in the statement. “The numbers are conclusive, and the fraudulent and irregular votes are massive. The only reason he did this is because he got my endorsement and easily won his state in 2020, so now he thinks he has time, and those are the only ones, the weak, who will break away. Even though his election will not be coming up for 5 years, I will never endorse this jerk again.”
Insisting that Rounds “will never receive my Endorsement again,” Trump vowed to withhold his support from Rounds the next time Rounds is up for reelection, which won’t be until 2026.
Rounds had earlier said during an interview on ABC’s “This Week” that the election was both free and fair and pushed back against falsehoods that the election was stolen, a claim repeated by Trump, whose supporters, spurred by his lies, attacked the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021 as part of a failed bid to delay the electoral certification of President Joe Biden’s win.
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“While there were some irregularities, there were none of the irregularities which would have risen to the point where they would have changed the vote outcome in a single state,” Rounds said, adding: “The election was fair — as fair as we’ve seen. We simply did not win the election as Republicans for the presidency.”
There is no evidence of widespread election fraud and Trump’s own security agencies affirmed this in 2020 even as he continued to claim fraud had been responsible for his election loss.
A statement from the federal Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), part of a joint statement from the Election Infrastructure Government Coordinating Council and the Election Infrastructure Sector Coordinating Executive Committees, revealed the agencies found “no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.” The statement went on to refer to the 2020 general election as “the most secure in American history.”
Alan is a writer, editor, and news junkie based in New York.
