In a heated address on the floor of the Senate, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York called President Trump the “greatest threat to our democracy” for Trump’s refusal to pledge for a peaceful transfer of power should he lose the November election.
“Where are our republican colleagues?” Schumer asked when noting the outcry over Trump’s blatant disregard for the Constitutional transfer of power.
“It doesn’t matter how false. It doesn’t matter how undemocratic. It doesn’t matter how corrosive it is to our democracy. The President doesn’t care: it’s his own ego and nothing else,” Schumer said of Trump’s statements. “The President says it if he thinks it’ll help him win.”
Schumer went on to cite the reporting in The Atlantic about Administration attempts to get commitments from republican-led state legislatures to ignore the popular votes in their states to appoint Electoral College electors to vote for Trump no matter what the outcome of the popular vote in their states.
“Under this nefarious scheme,” Schumer explained, “if the President loses a state controlled by republicans, they would ignore the result. They would ignore what the voters asked for and send a rival slate of electors to Washington instead, deliberately provoking a Constitutional crisis.”