One more example of a spitball getting ironmanned when challenged. Trump tweeted that millions of undocumented immigrants voted in the 2016 election.
I will be asking for a major investigation into VOTER FRAUD, including those registered to vote in two states, those who are illegal and….
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 25, 2017
even, those registered to vote who are dead (and many for a long time). Depending on results, we will strengthen up voting procedures!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 25, 2017
And he later told congressional leadership that the number was between 3 and 5 million. That’s how he explained losing the popular vote.
In his recent Time interview with Michael Sherer, Trump clarifies the claim:
Well now if you take a look at the votes, when I say that, I mean mostly they register wrong, in other words, for the votes, they register incorrectly, and/or illegally. And they then vote. You have tremendous numbers of people. In fact I’m forming a committee on it.
But there’s no evidence that 3 million people voted with…
We’ll see after the committee. I have people say it was more than that. We will see after we have. But there will be, we are forming a committee. And we are going to do a study on it, a very serious problem.
But this is, first, different from the claim that 3 million ‘illegals’ voted — there’s a difference between illegals voting and illegal votes, right? Second, this is another instance of the iron-manning of a spitball by turning it from an assertion to a query about something really important. If Trump is right, then it’s something that should be reformed. And perhaps we should investigate how widely it is the case that there is voter fraud of all the kinds he alleges. But there’s a difference between claiming that it’s happening and holding that we should find out whether it is happening. If you don’t have evidence for it at the time of the speech act, the claiming is wrong. But that’s of course, what the iron-manning afterwards does — you get the benefit of claiming but without having to defend the claim.