Trump claims without evidence Democrats plan to ‘steal’ election

The first night of the US Republican National Convention on Monday passed with harsh diatribes directed at the Democratic Party, with President Donald Trump painting a bleak picture of the future for the American people under a Joe Biden administration and leveling the accusation that Democrats seek to “steal” the forthcoming election.

Trump, who had earlier in the day won the Republican Party’s official nomination for the November vote, appeared at the convention venue in Charlotte, North Carolina, to deliver his speech, long expected to be littered with broadsides against his rival.

The Republican president asked his party delegates to be on alert for what he claimed was a Democratic plan to rig the election by expanding the use of mail-in voting during the coronavirus pandemic.

“They are trying to steal the election,” Trump told the delegates without providing any evidence. “The only way they can take this election away from us is if this is a rigged election.”

This is while postal voting is a method that has already been in wide use in the United States, and Democrats say the measure would be needed to protect people from contracting COVID-19 in crowded polling stations.

In a series of tweets last month, Trump said that mail-in voting would make the November election the “most inaccurate and fraudulent election in history” and a “great embarrassment to the USA.”

Trump’s resistance to absentee voting has been largely discredited by political experts as an attempt to make up an excuse to challenge the result of the upcoming election if he is defeated.

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Among other speakers at the convention was Trump’s son Donald Jr, who made no mention of the 177,000 Americans killed by the coronavirus and claimed that his father “quickly took action” to contain the outbreak.

“There is more work to do, but there is light at the end of the tunnel,” he said.

Trump Jr also attempted to provoke the party’s core base by describing the November election as a choice between “church, work and school” and “rioting, looting and vandalism,” in an apparent insinuation that the election of Biden as president would encourage political havoc across the country.

Biden and his running mate, US Senator Kamala Harris, had a four-day convention last week, when Biden accepted the Democratic nomination.

The speakers at that event characterized Trump’s four years in office as chaotic, with the party’s presidential nominee saying, “The current president has cloaked America in darkness for much too long. Too much anger. Too much fear. Too much division.”

During their convention, Democrats sought to present a diverse but united front with the integrity and faith they said Trump lacked.

Trump has over the past months witnessed a sharp decline in national support, with polls showing a major lead for Biden over his Republican opponent.

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Trump’s high disapproval rating has in part been attributed to the mismanagement and chaotic handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has so far taken a heavy toll on American lives and economy, as well as a surge in state-sponsored police violence and racial injustice against people of color in the US under his watch.

Trump has been under fire for an untimely relaxing of lockdown measures and a blatant disregard for personal protection equipment since COVID-19 was first detected in the US early in January.

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