President Trump mused about delaying this year's election based on unsupported conspiracy theorizing about the integrity of voting during the coronavirus disaster.
In a Twitter post on Thursday, Trump repeated what has become a pet theme about the prospect of inaccuracies or fraud with mail-in voting.
With Universal Mail-In Voting (not Absentee Voting, which is good), 2020 will be the most INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT Election in history. It will be a great embarrassment to the USA. Delay the Election until people can properly, securely and safely vote???
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 30, 2020
White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany on Friday condemned the decision to delay legislative elections in Hong Kong, one day after President Trump asked if the U.S. should postpone its own November election.
"We condemn the Hong Kong government’s decision to postpone for one year its legislative council elections and to disqualify opposition candidates," McEnany said at a press briefing, reading from a prepared statement. "This action undermines the democratic processes and freedoms that have underpinned Hong Kong's prosperity, and this is only the most recent in a growing list of broken promises by Beijing, which promised autonomy and freedom to the Hong Kong people until 2047 in the Sino-British joint declaration."
The Hong Kong government announced Friday that it would postpone elections scheduled for September due to the coronavirus pandemic, The New York Times reported, citing risks to public health and strains on campaigns and voters caused by social distancing requirements and travel restrictions.
Pro-democracy groups viewed the decision as an attempt to thwart opposition candidates challenging those supported by Beijing. Anti-establishment protests have roiled Hong Kong for more than a year, and have faced increasingly harsh crackdowns from the Chinese mainland.
Calabresi's public distancing from the 45th president was applauded by other conservatives critical of Trump.
"Steve Calabresi, welcome to the Resistance," tweeted Washington attorney George Conway, the famously Trump-bashing husband of senior Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway.
Former national security adviser John Bolton, whose scorching tell-all account of his time in the Trump White House was published last month over the objections of Trump's lawyers, tweeted that Calabresi's op-ed was "a must-read."
