“No credible allegations” of massive voter fraud were ever found by election officials from both parties, but that didn’t stop President Donald Trump from vowing to launch a “major investigation” into the matter. And while this latest bit of propaganda may be effected by daughter Tiffany Trump and senior advisor Steve Bannon’s being registered to vote in two states, the story behind Trump’s voting tirade makes the whole thing even more ridiculous than it already is.
According to the New York Times, during Trump’s Monday meeting with congressional leaders — when the president repeated his false post-election claim that 3 to 5 million illegal votes were cast for Hillary Clinton — he told a rather awkward story about the German golfer Bernhard Langer:
Mr. Langer, a 59-year-old native of Bavaria, Germany — a winner of the Masters twice and of more than 100 events on major professional golf tours around the world — was standing in line at a polling place near his home in Florida on Election Day, the president explained, when an official informed Mr. Langer he would not be able to vote.
Ahead of and behind Mr. Langer were voters who did not look as if they should be allowed to vote, Mr. Trump said, according to the staff members — but they were nonetheless permitted to cast provisional ballots. The president threw out the names of Latin American countries that the voters might have come from.
The championship golfer apparently left the polls “feeling frustrated,” according to Trump’s version of events, though a White House official subsequently “contradicted” the NYT‘s account. Regardless of attaining official confirmation, however, the story’s telling as relayed to reporter Glenn Thrush by several anonymous sources and apparent witnesses remains utterly bonkers. Especially since Langer is a German citizen living in the United States as a permanent resident, and therefore cannot vote in American elections anyway.
The golfer’s daughter, Christina, said her father was still a “citizen of Germany” and “not a friend of President Trump’s” as the latter had claimed. “I don’t know why he would talk about him,” she said. And to make matters even more confusing, a senior White House staffer clarified that Trump’s story wasn’t about Langer, though it concerned a friend of the golfer’s and was supposedly relayed to the president by him over the Thanksgiving holiday.
(Via New York Times)