Former President Donald Trump on Friday urged his supporters to put a stop to “bags of crap” arriving at polling places during this year’s election, warning of potential fraud.
At a rally in Mason City, Iowa, Trump echoed his false claims that the 2020 election had been stolen from him through tactics like ballot stuffing, and said that “we’re not going to let it happen again.”
He added: “You should all stay in those voting booths. You should stay there and watch it. If you see bags of crap coming into the voting areas, you’ve got to stop it. You can’t let it happen, because these guys are crooked as hell. They know how to cheat.”
Trump, the current front-runner for the GOP presidential nomination, went on to declare that he and his backers wouldn’t allow Democrats to “rig” the 2024 election.
“We will fight for America like no one has ever fought before,” Trump said at the rally, held in advance of this month’s Iowa caucuses. “2024 is our final battle.”
His comments arrive after he told supporters at a previous Iowa rally to “guard the vote” during the election.
“You should go into Detroit and you should go into Philadelphia and you should go into some of these places, Atlanta, and you should go into some of these places and we’ve got to watch those votes when they come in,” the former president said last month.
Susan Benesch, who runs a research group called the Dangerous Speech Project, told The Associated Press at the time that Trump’s remarks suggested that the election’s outcome is “foregone.”
“Is it actually guarding the election against fraud, or is it guarding the election against a result in which Trump is not declared the winner?” she asked.
Trump made similar calls prior to the 2020 election when, during a presidential debate that year, he urged supporters to watch polling places and warned of “bad things” happening in Philadelphia.
Critics on X (formerly Twitter) reacted to Trump’s latest rally remarks, alleging that the former president was engaging in “voter intimidation” in the months leading up to Election Day.