It was in April when Joe Biden first made a provocative prediction about Donald Trump and the president’s likely electoral antics. “Mark my words,” the Delaware Democrat said, “I think he is going to try to kick back the election somehow, come up with some rationale why it can’t be held.”
Biden received a fair amount of criticism for floating an accusation like this without evidence, but it wasn’t long before the president gave his rival a hand: Trump raised the prospect of delaying U.S. elections in July.
Similarly, in June, the presumptive Democratic nominee made the case that Trump “wants to cut off money for the post office so they cannot deliver mail-in ballots.” A few days later, the folks at FactCheck.org, a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania, rebuked Biden for floating a “baseless” conspiracy theory.
Now, the fact-checking website has been forced to reverse course.
In late June, Joe Biden claimed President Donald Trump “wants to cut off money for the post office so they cannot deliver mail-in ballots.” At the time, we wrote that the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee had no evidence of Trump’s ulterior motive — but now he does…. We do know at this point that Biden’s earlier remarks that Trump “wants to cut off money for the post office so they cannot deliver mail-in ballots” have been confirmed — by the president himself. Quite right. It was, after all, just last week when the president told a national television audience, “They want $3.5 billion for something that will turn out to be fraudulent. They want $3.5 billion for the mail-in votes, OK. Universal mail-in ballots. They want $25 billion for the post office. Now they need that money in order to have the post office work, so it can take all of these millions and millions of ballots. Now in the meantime they aren’t getting there. By the way, those are just two items, but if they don’t get those two items, that means you can’t have universal mail-in voting, because they’re not equipped to have it.” To be sure, Biden, who’s earned a reputation as an undisciplined speaker, should exercise caution before making accusations he can’t back up, but now we have two high-profile instances in which Biden has been criticized for making reckless predictions, only to see Trump end up doing exactly what Biden said he’d do.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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