Trump employs misinformation tactic for re-election

Trump has amped up his misinformation tactic that callously endangers our nation. Photo courtesy salon.com

Reeling from the recent fervor geared towards the Democratic ticket, which boastfully touts the first-ever HBCU and Black female VP candidate, President Donald Trump has amped up his re-election campaign through a spate of misinformation dissemination.

In a tweet via his Twitter account that holds a ghastly record of disinformation, the president implore voters in the state of North Carolina to vote twice — both by mail-in and in-person ballots. However, what he purports as a method of “civic efficacy” is voter fraud and classifies as a Class I felony within the state.

Donald Trump’s recent tweet on Sep. 12 which encourages voters to vote twice in North Carolina November elections. Photo courtesy @realDonaldTrump on Twitter

With North Carolina on the roster of states that the Democrats need to snag for Senate majority, Trump’s tweets are not only exceptionally alarming with November nearing but also false. According to the North Carolina board of elections director Karen Brinson Bell, “absentee ballots that are received on Election Day are not counted until after the election.”

This means that if a voter utilized the mail-in ballot and it hasn’t been counted by Election Day, overt disenfranchisement is not the cause. Rather, all ballots postmarked by November 3 and received by November 6 will still be tallied.

Twitter issued a disclaimer atop the tweet citing that it violated the platform’s rules of “civic and election integrity,” yet it was still made accessible for “public interest.” This forewarning is flaccid at best as the tweet is allowed to actively mislead and endanger our nation.

As of 2016, high school educated and rural community voters overwhelmingly cast ballots in favor of Trump. These sectors of his electorate are extremely eerie of media outlets and cling to his word as the ultimate source of information.

Over the past few months, he has steered a baseless smear campaign on the United States Postal Service from the federal level and has remained gungho on delegitimizing the accuracy of mail-in voting, even as it is desperately needed in the midst of coronavirus. In battleground states, like Florida, Democratic voters lead Republicans in requesting absentee ballots and it points to why our incumbent commander-in-chief has chosen to contradict his previous 2016 statements that claimed in-person fraud.

With one of the most critical elections at stake, Democratic lawmakers have been trying to protect community ballot collections — a practice that has long protected vulnerable marginalized communities — yet at the helm of our nation sits a leader actively combating this. In response to such efforts, Trump said in an interview with Fox & Friends in March, “if you agree to [them] you’d never have a Republican elected in this country ever again.”

The recurring use of rhetoric that centers a Republican disenfranchisement fallacy interlocked with invoking a looming fear of the majority-minority concept has impassioned his base more than ever.