Newly minted Republican National Committee co-chair Lara Trump said Tuesday that she believes the party is “past” litigating the 2020 election, comments that come as her father-in-law, former President Donald Trump, prepares to face two juries on charges alleging that he illegally tried to overturn the 2020 election results.
“I think we’re past that. I think that’s in the past,” Lara Trump told NBC News when she was asked whether it will be the RNC’s position that the 2020 election was not fairly decided.
“The past is the past, and unfortunately, we had to learn a couple of hard lessons in 2020,” she continued. “Believe me, we are applying them all across this country in every single state, and we want to ensure that, indeed, every single legal vote is counted.”
Trump went on to criticize voting laws that were changed in some key states during the pandemic, changes she said raised a lot of “questions” that “were never answered for a lot of people.” And she pointed to dozens of lawsuits the RNC has filed over election administration (most recently in Nevada, where the party is suing the state over its voter rolls) as examples of how the committee is wading into questions about election laws ahead of November.
Earlier in the interview, Trump said she wants to help the party start “encouraging Republican voters to do things like voting early [and] trust mail-in voting.” That was a big initiative started under the RNC’s previous leadership, one that came after Donald Trump’s repeated criticism of voting by mail. In her early weeks on the job, Lara Trump has been a booster of efforts to get Republicans to vote early and by mail — the issue was the topic of a recent Wall Street Journal editorial titled “Donald Trump Should Listen to Lara.”
