Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R) took aim at former President Trump on Wednesday for repeating “recycled conspiracy theories” about his 2020 election loss while on the campaign trail again in 2024.
In an editorial published Wednesday in National Review, Raffensperger said Trump and his supporters are “merely repeating the same tired and long-disproven assertions” about the 2020 election, which Raffensperger described as “repetitive, boring, and sad.”
He compared Trump’s false 2020 election fraud claims to the “the water fixtures in front of the Bellagio in Las Vegas,” which he said are “certainly entertaining at first” but soon “become predictable and boring.”
“The big lie about the 2020 election, repeated now for more than three years, has brought forward no proof and nothing that hasn’t been publicly known since January 2021,” Raffensperger wrote.
“The current variations, on display regularly during Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign thus far, are merely part of the dancing fountain of lies that have been disproven by the count, the recount, and the audit of the 2020 vote in Georgia. Not one single shred of evidence has been offered in its support, in my state or in any other,” he wrote.
Raffensperger rose to national prominence during the 2020 election, when, as chief elections officer in Georgia, he rejected Trump’s pressure to “find” more Trump votes, after the sitting president lost. As a result, he became a frequent target of Trump’s ire but consistently held firm in his position.
Raffensperger, in the editorial Wednesday, recalled the pivotal Jan. 2, 2021, phone call in which Trump requested Raffensperger find “11,790 votes, which is one more than we have.”
“I looked, and what I found clearly showed why he lost,” Raffensperger wrote, noting that Trump’s loss in his state can be largely attributed to Georgia Republicans who supported other Republicans down ballot but who did not support the former President.
Raffensperger noted that, as made clear in the Iowa caucuses results Monday, when Trump won 51 percent of GOP support, many still do support the former president, despite what he described as “nothing but recycled conspiracy theories and repetition of already disproven allegations.”
He added: “The three-ring circus that was once the Trump entertainment spectacle has withered away to a single decrepit pony, desperately performing its one trick, hoping to regain the audience it once held in thrall. Iowa showed that performance can still keep some people entertained. Others can make up their own minds.”