MSNBC's Rachel Maddow on Monday sounded the alarm about former President Donald Trump's concerning comments about voting.
"Get out and vote just this time. You won’t have to do it anymore," Trump told a crowd of far-right Christian allies on Friday. “Four more years it will be fixed. It’ll be fine. You won’t have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians.”
"There's one last thing, in terms of the weirdness of this campaign, that I think is actually quite serious," Maddow said on Monday regarding the remark, while also gesturing toward the general peculiarities of the MAGA presidential campaign. Though many Republican figureheads have dismissed Trump's voting comments as hyperbole, Maddow, like many other progressives, was left deeply disturbed by his rhetoric.
"Now, this is not the first time Trump has told a campaign audience that they will never have to vote again once they vote him back in this time, and that is alarming for all the reasons you immediately think it is," she said while citing a similar instance that transpired in June while Trump sought to appeal to Black voters in Philadelphia.
"Christians go to church, but they don't vote that much. You know the power you have if you would vote," Trump said at an event in Washington organized by the Freedom and Faith Coalition, per Reuters. "You gotta get out and vote. Just this time. In four years you don't have to vote, OK? In four years don't vote, I don't care."
"He's positing this like it's a happy thing," Maddow argued. "'Oh joy! Never having the burden of voting again!'"
"The point of democracy is that we vote all the time," she added. "And we like it — that's how we decide what happens in our country. He's promising his followers that he'll end all of that. And it's exactly what you think it is."
Maddow continued by pointing out something that she alleged was "even more strange" than Trump's voting claims, though it hasn't gained as much attention. "The day before Trump made those remarks on Friday ... he didn't say that people wouldn't have to vote anymore once he was elected this November. No — the day before that, on Thursday, he told his supporters, not that they're not going to have to vote again, but that they don't have to vote this time. That they don't need to vote for him this November."
The MSNBC host then played an audio clip of the ex-president speaking to a group of Fox News personalities, saying, "My instruction — we don't need the votes. I have so many votes."
"He says this all the time now," Maddow continued, before airing a montage of Trump iterating the same point in various speeches.
"Of all the weirdness around this campaign, this is a truly strange thing to tell people, right?" she asked rhetorically. "Having a new position on literally anything you can think of as soon as any random rich guy tells you to — that's a weird thing. Picking the eccentric billionaire's intern for your running mate, even though you apparently had no idea who he was or what a disaster he is on television — all of this is weird," Maddow added, referring to Trump's Veep-pick, Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio.
"But telling voters, 'Do not bother to vote for me it doesn't matter if you do, I don't need your votes.' That is a thing that should prick up your ears," Maddow continued. "Because what that means, is that he doesn't think he needs to win the vote to win the election. He doesn't think he needs to win the election in order to take power. He thinks something other than votes is going to determine whether he gets back in the White House."
