WA GOP Remains Complicit in Increasingly Desperate Lies from Trump

WA GOP failed to condemn Trump’s attacks on safe and secure voting or his admission that he’s suppressing coronavirus case numbers

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE | June 22, 2020

SEATTLE — At a rally in Tulsa where the president was faced with the reality that not even his base believes his lies about the coronavirus pandemic, he admitted that he is willing to undermine the coronavirus response in order to protect his re-election by ordering “his people” to “slow the testing down.” Trump delivered this impossibly selfish remark showing total disregard for the 120,000+ Americans who have died from COVID-19 just a day after admitting that nationwide safe and secure voting by mail was his “biggest risk” to reelection. Trump reiterated his false attack on the security of vote-by-mail on Twitter this morning, making absolutely clear that his only strategy to win in November is to undermine Americans’ confidence in democracy and force us to risk our health to remove him from office. 

What have Washington Republicans done to push back on these lies from the president about mail-in voting or sabotaging the coronavirus testing that is essential to safely reopening our economy? Nowhere. Even Republican Secretary of State Kim Wyman, whose pinned tweet claims she hopes to “instill confidence across the political spectrum” in mail-in voting, has remained silent in the face of the leader of her party directly attacking the security of the elections she administers. 

If she is willing to be complicit in the president’s voter suppression by failing to speak out when Trump’s comments have been proven demonstrably false, is there anyone in the WA GOP who can be trusted to stand up to the president and our right to vote? Of course not, and Trump told Politico why:

“If they don’t embrace [me], they’re going to lose, because, you know, I have a very hard base. I have the strongest base people have ever seen[.]”

“This revelation that the president prioritizes his own political prospects over American lives is shocking but not surprising, as we’ve seen him do nothing but put his own personal interests first since he took office,” said Tina Podlodowski, Chair of the Washington State Democratic Party. “The only question remaining is how many American lives Republicans in either Washington are willing to risk this November with their complicity in his attacks on mail-in voting.”