President-elect Donald Trump and his team had been keeping mum on the recount drive launched by Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein. No longer. In less than 12 hours, Trump wrote at least nine tweets regarding the recount drive, which he said was pointless, a Green Party “scam” to fill up its coffers, and hypocritical considering what Hillary Clinton had said at a debate regarding not accepting the results of the election. Trump went into overdrive with his criticism of the recount on the same day as Clinton’s campaign said it would participate in a recount process in Wisconsin and vowed to also join any similar efforts launched in Pennsylvania and Michigan.
The president-elect began his attack on the recount by qualifying the “impossible” effort as a “Green Party scam to fill up their coffers that is “now being joined by the badly defeated & demoralized Dems.”
But then three hours later, he moved on to attacking Democrats more directly saying that when the party thought Clinton was going to come out on top they “asked that the election night tabulation be accepted,” Trump wrote. “Not so anymore!”
It seems Trump may have dreamed about the recount because he started tweeting about it again early Sunday morning, once again calling the whole thing pointless: “Hillary Clinton conceded the election when she called me just prior to the victory speech and after the results were in. Nothing will change”
Over the course of several tweets, the president-elect transcribed what Clinton said at the third presidential debate after Trump refused to say whether he would accept the results of the election with the now-infamous words, “I’ll keep you in suspense.” At the time Clinton called Trump’s comments “horrifying.”
And then Trump remembered how Clinton said Trump had won and her supporters should give him “the chance to lead.” But now things have changed, “So much time and money will be spent – same result! Sad.”
On Saturday afternoon, Trump took time off from planning the transition to issue a statement criticizing the recount effort.
“This recount is just a way for Jill Stein, who received less than one percent of the vote overall and wasn’t even on the ballots in many states, to fill her coffers with money, most of which she will never even spend on this ridiculous recount,” Trump said in the statement. “This is a scam by the Green Party for an election that has already been conceded, and the results of this election should be respected instead of being challenged and abused, which is exactly what Jill Stein is doing.”
