During a January 16 meeting with municipal educators in Moscow, Russian President Vladimir Putin stated that public votes held in Russia’s new regions captured from Ukraine were honest and transparent as people showed up to cast their ballots in person, unlike the 2020 American presidential election when voting by mail was conducted.
“It’s probably possible to falsify anything. Just like the previous elections in the US were falsified through voting by mail. Well, it’s clear what voting by mail is. They bought ballots for $10, wrote them in, and without any supervision from observers, tossed them into mailboxes. And there you go,” Putin posited.
The Russian leader’s remarks came in response to a question about the voting in Kherson and Zaporozhye regions and the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics, four previously Ukrainian territories that joined Russia in 2022. According to Putin, no one pressured people there to show up at the polls, or banned them from doing so; voters simply voted with their feet.
“What is this, if not democracy? Democracy is when people express their will,” the Russian president said.
However, various U.S. states amended their election rules in 2020 to permit voting via mail-in ballots, citing the Covid-19 pandemic. The final official results depicted Democrat Joe Biden winning 81 million votes, the most ever in U.S. history, over the incumbent, Republican Donald Trump.
Trump has contested the election as “rigged,” noting various irregularities in half a dozen states as well as the mail-in ballots that were impossible to audit. He remains persuaded that the 2020 election was stolen from him. A February 2021 account in Time magazine reinforced the idea that Biden became president due to a “well-funded cabal of powerful people” who were “fortifying” the election by “working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information.”
As for the 2020 election, Dinesh D’Souza’s documentary on “ballot stuffing,” 2000 Mules , raises valid questions regarding election integrity, contending organized mail-in ballot fraud tipped the presidential election in Biden’s favor.
While there exists gaps in D’Souza’s analysis, some of which have been covered by Ben Shapiro, the loopholes are arguably insufficient to falsify D’Souza’s argument. Rather, D’Souza’s video should compel a more thorough investigation for evidence regarding the integrity of the 2020 U.S. elections.
For their part, the Democrats and most mainstream U.S. media have condemned anyone questioning the 2020 vote as an “election denier” and maintained that everything was perfectly legitimate.
Besides, the Democratic Party establishment is not leaving any stone unturned to ensure Biden’s reelection bid, despite rising dissatisfaction with Biden within their own ranks. More and more Democrats are quietly having doubts about Biden’s cognitive abilities and his chances of winning re-election. However, so long as the Democratic Party is trying to stop any open, fair, and honest debate about who their candidate should be, Democratic or Independent voters cannot make a well-informed evaluation of whom to vote for.
To complicate matters, the Republican Party seems to be trying to stop the Trump wave in the upcoming presidential elections. They have organized a series of unprecedented candidate debates during the fall, the first time a party conducted held formal debates between presidential candidates before the first primary.
Yet Trump seems unstoppable, at least for now. Based on recent numbers from fivethirtyeight.com, Trump commands around 50 percent of the Republican primary votes, with Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley hovering around 11.5 percent.
Even Biden has acknowledged Trump as “the clear front runner” on the Republican side, after Trump scored a resounding victory at the GOP’s Iowa caucus.
“Looks like Donald Trump just won Iowa,” Biden’s team posted on X after the results were announced. “He’s the clear front runner on the other side at this point.”
“But here’s the thing: this election was always going to be you and me vs. extreme MAGA Republicans,” Biden ranted. “It was true yesterday and it’ll be true tomorrow.”
The incumbent Democrat leader’s campaign has accused Trump of trying to “erode American democracy and excuse — and even promote — political violence,” over images of the January 6, 2021 riot on Capitol Hill. In a speech he delivered, Biden addressed Trump by name more than 40 times, castigating him as a threat to democracy itself.
Trump called the speech a “pathetic fear mongering campaign event,” and lambasted Biden’s “unbroken streak of weakness, incompetence, corruption, and failure.”
Enter the de-balloting movement, relying on the courts as platforms to keep political opponents off the ballot entirely.
As per reports by ABC News, the recent efforts in Colorado and Maine to strike Trump off the presidential ballot are not the only ones out there: “Overall, the former president’s eligibility under Section 3 [of the 14th Amendment] to be on the GOP primary ballots is still being challenged in more than a dozen states … if — or when, many experts and advocates predict — the US Supreme Court takes up appeals of the Colorado case by the state’s Republican party or the Trump team, it would effectively freeze the various legal challenges in state and federal district courts across the country.”
As the Colorado case reveals, such actions reek of political desperation by Trump’s opponents.
Just because some have accused Trump of inciting an insurrection against the U.S. government on January 6, 2021, the Colorado Supreme Court has laughably decreed that he has breached the 14th Amendment.
Having said that, the truth of the matter remains that there is not a single court in the United States that has found Trump guilty of anything, including insurrection.
On the other side of the Atlantic, the prospect of a second Trump term has been raising eyebrows among Eurocrats and globalists, amid concerns Trump will withdraw U.S. backing for European security efforts.
Belgian Prime Minister Alexander De Croo stated that Europe must be prepared to stand alone if Donald Trump sweeps back to the White House later this year.
“If 2024 brings us ‘America first’ again, it will be more than ever Europe on its own,” he warned in a speech at the European Parliament, at the start of a year in which both EU citizens and Americans go to the polls.
“We should, as Europeans, not fear that prospect; we should embrace it,” he contended, saying that Europe must become “stronger, more sovereign, more self-reliant.”
De Croo is a major figure in European politics this year as his country holds the rotating presidency of the Council of the EU for the next six months, providing Belgian diplomats the power to set agendas in key Brussels meetings.
His remarks bring to mind a famous 2017 speech by then-German Chancellor Angela Merkel following Trump’s election win in 2016, when she warned Europe could not depend solely on its allies. Thierry Breton, France’s European Commissioner, recently claimed that Trump said in 2020 that the United States would “never” come to Europe’s aid if it were attacked.
