Trump Demands GOP Kill Filibuster in First Remarks After Election; Says Democrats ‘Want to Cheat!’

President Donald Trump urged Republicans to kill the filibuster and implement electoral reform during an address at a breakfast with his party’s senators on Wednesday, just hours after a bruising series of electoral losses, claiming that Democrats “want to cheat.”

In an aside, the president insisted Republicans should torch the 60-vote rule and ram through their agenda before Democrats can block them.

Most Republican senators remain deeply reluctant to go there, mindful that Democrats would inherit the same power the next time they control the chamber. Trump warned that the future could already be lost and that Democrats will blow through norms, rules, and guardrails anyway – casting the stakes for Republicans in existential terms.

“It’s time for Republicans to do what they have to do, and that’s terminate the filibuster,” he said. “It’s the only way you can do it. And if you don’t terminate the filibuster, you’ll be in bad shape. We won’t pass any legislation.”

The president pressed for changes to voting that he said Republicans could make in “15 minutes” when the government reopens, a ban on mail-in ballots and for mandatory voter ID, warning that Democrats would “vote almost unanimously against voter ID” and argued “mail-in ballots” make a vote “automatically corrupt”:

We should open up, we should start tonight with the country open, congratulations, and then we should pass voter ID, pass no mail-in voting, we should pass things we want to pass, make our elections secure and because California is a disaster. Many of the states are disasters.

He also recalled being ID’d himself at the booth in Palm Beach:

[Voter ID is the] way it is supposed to be. These people don’t want that. They have legislation in California where it is illegal to ask somebody for voter ID. If you ask somebody for voter ID, if you’re an official, they can arrest you. Okay? They can arrest you.

Because they want to cheat and they get away with it and Republicans let them get away with it. And we won’t do that if we have the filibuster. We’re going to talk about that a little bit and see if we can sway, because I know we have a lot of – not a lot, maybe half feel this way, maybe less than half – and it’s time to have a really good talk.

The president warned:

If I thought they were not going to pass the filibuster, I wouldn’t even bring it up. They’re going to pass it within the first hour. If they take power, and more likely they take power if we don’t do [anything] because we’re not going to be passing legislation.

We’re not approving anything, we’re going to go three and a quarter years and there won’t be one bill we’re gonna pass because the easiest thing to pass is exactly right now, what they want passed, and they’ll do that and wreak havoc. But let’s assume they get in – they’re doing it anyway, it wouldn’t matter.

Watch above via Fox News.

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