For months after the 2020 election, former President Donald Trump repeatedly lied that the victory was "stolen" from him by Democrats engaging in widespread election fraud.
Generating millions of dollars in donations along the way, Trump and his enablers continued to repeat the lie, even as audits of the election produced the same results and after the campaign's frivolous lawsuits were constantly dismissed.
It wasn't until a mob of pro-Trump extremists stormed the United States Capitol in a deadly failed insurrection that Trump finally acknowledged then-President-elect Joe Biden would be taking over on Inauguration Day. Trump still didn't acknowledge that the election was fair and that he'd come out the loser.
Nearly six months after Election Day, Republicans in the Arizona Senate have forced an audit of the ballots in Maricopa County, a major target of Trump's election conspiracy theories. The state Senate has employed Cyber Ninjas, a company with no election experience and whose owner has expressed support for Trump's election lies, to oversee the process.
Now, Trump is once again claiming the audit will reveal that Arizona, which went blue for the first time since 1996, will flip to him and result in a second term.
He made the comments in an appearance at his Mar-a-Lago resort this past Thursday.
Regarding the audit, Trump told a crowd of his supporters:
"Let's see what they find. I wouldn't be surprised if they found thousands and thousands and thousands of votes. After that we'll watch Pennsylvania, and you watch Georgia, then you're going to watch Michigan and Wisconsin, and you're watching New Hampshire. They found a lot of votes up in New Hampshire just now ... you saw that?"
It's unclear what Trump was referencing in New Hampshire.
He then continued to claim the election was stolen from him.
"This was a rigged election, everybody knows it, and we're going to be watching it very closely."
Even if the audit somehow found that Trump was the winner of Arizona's 11 electoral votes, that would still leave Biden with 295—25 votes more than the 270 needed to take the White House. Trump assured his followers they'd be "watching" a number of key swing states Trump lost, even though there are no longer any ongoing proceedings challenging the results of the 2020 election.
At this point—with Trump out of the White House for months and the Biden administration firmly established as legitimate—Trump's antics were just pathetic.
There were still jokes to be made.
Astonishingly enough, Trump still enjoys widespread support in the Republican party.
@ElizLanders/X