Rex Huppke: Trump hates mail-in voting, except when he does it. Got it?

Everyone’s laughing at my president, Donald J. Trump, because he cast a mail-in ballot for a Tuesday special election in Florida. They think it’s funny that the GOP candidate he endorsed, in a district that contains the president’s Mar-a-Lago resort, lost.

They find it hilarious that Trump, who has bravely and boldly and incessantly criticized mail-in voting and suggesting it was “rigged,” just went ahead and voted that way anyway, even though the polls were open when he was in Florida.

Well, hah-hah-hah, you chuckling losers. Very funny. Once again, you’ve proved your own ignorance.

Is Trump pushing the SAVE America Act, which would make it much harder to vote by mail, like a man facing an existential crisis? Yes. Did he say the day before the Florida special election, “I call it mail-in cheating”? Also yes.

Has Trump, in the past, said mail-in voting is the only way Democrats can win? Affirmative.

But guess what, laughers? What you see as a spectacular and deeply hypocritical failure in the Florida election is just another example of Trump playing 3D chess.

By using the very voting method he has lambasted and then seeing the Republicans lose, Trump proved himself right! He used “FRAUDULENT” mail-in voting and the Democrat won. In order to show Americans what mail-in cheating really looks like, the president had to mail-in cheat.

Trump has not made it clear how all this mail-in cheating happens, presumably because it’s cloaked in a cloud of left-wing secrecy. Nor has he explained why no one has found significant fraud through years of mail-in balloting.

A Brookings analysis of voter fraud concluded that there are “four cases of mail voting fraud out of every 10 million mail votes.”

The conservative Heritage Foundation maintains a voter fraud database, and it shows only 387 cases of “fraudulent use of absentee ballots” in elections going back to 1982.

That all seems suspicious, mainly because I don’t trust “data” and I do trust President Trump when he posts things on social media like this, from 2025: “ELECTIONS CAN NEVER BE HONEST WITH MAIL IN BALLOTS/VOTING, and everybody, IN PARTICULAR THE DEMOCRATS, KNOWS THIS. I, AND THE REPUBLICAN PARTY, WILL FIGHT LIKE HELL TO BRING HONESTY AND INTEGRITY BACK TO OUR ELECTIONS.”

I mean, the man used all-caps. It simply must be serious.

Trump wrote in that same post: “We are now the only Country in the World that uses Mail-In Voting.”

Some libs out there claim that’s false because, according to the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, there are more than 30 countries that allow mail-in voting.

Well, guess what, dummies, Trump was just rounding down to zero, which is what any true American would do when confronted with a number lower than 50. Duh.

Anyway, the so-called embarrassment the president should be feeling over what looks like a hypocritical mail-in vote in an election in his own front yard that his preferred candidate wound up losing is … wait, sorry, I lost my train of thought.

Oh yeah. President Trump’s clever vote-by-mail gambit in Florida proved once again that he’s always right. This election was rigged because the person Trump wanted to win didn’t win, and Trump’s mail-in vote was part of the rigging, and we know this despite a complete lack of evidence because … well … reasons.

It all makes sense if you don’t think about it.

Follow USA Today columnist Rex Huppke on Bluesky at @rexhuppke.bsky.social and on Facebook at facebook.com/RexIsAJerk