During his speech at CPAC on Sunday afternoon, Donald Trump made no bones about the fact that he won the 2020 election.  The reason he's not in the White House is because of a system that was reconfigured for fraud and a cowardly Supreme Court.  He also warned Americans worried about future elections that HR1, a bill the Congressional Democrats are pushing, will permanently ensconce election fraud.

In his first public speech since he left the White House, Trump made it perfectly clear that he knows he was cheated out of his election victory.  During the course of laying out the Trumpism principles that should be at the center of the Republican Party, Trump said that one of the party's primary goals should be to ensure "honest elections that can give everyone confidence in the future of his country."  Currently, no one has confidence.  As matters stand, the process is completely corrupt:

Without honest elections, who has confidence? ... [Y]ou cannot have a situation where ballots are indiscriminately pouring in from all over the country, tens of millions of ballots. ... They're coming all over the place. Illegal aliens and dead people are voting, and many other horrible things are happening that are too voluminous to even mention.

[snip]

This election was rigged and the Supreme Court and other courts didn't want to do anything about it.

The CPAC crowd agreed, roaring, "You won!"

Trump explained that state changes to election processes that bypassed their legislatures were unconstitutional.  Trump also noted his extraordinary coattails.  One hundred twenty out of 122 House candidates whom he endorsed won.  In the Senate, Trump was able to get a lagging Mitch McConnell over the top and helped 8–10 other senators.

And Trump himself did spectacularly:

I received almost 1.5 million more votes than all of the Republican House candidates combined. So how the hell is it possible that we lost? It's not possible. I got more votes. I got more. And which it isn't just me. When I say, "I," I am talking about we. We, we got more votes than any incumbent, any incumbent president in the history of our country, almost 75 million votes.

Trump noted that he got 12 million more votes than in 2016; carried Florida, Ohio, and Iowa by large margins; and won 18 of America's 19 bellwether counties.  "There's never been anything like that.  And yet, did Biden win?  No!"  The election, Trump rightly said, was "a disgrace to our country."

Trump had a laundry list of ways to make the elections fair:

• Hold them on a single day, not over weeks;
• Limit absentee ballots to those who prove they cannot make it to the polls;
• Demand voter ID, universal signature-matching, and citizenship verification; and
• Enforce stringent chain of custody requirements.

Using COVID as an excuse, the Democrats ignored all the systems that ensure fair elections.  The result was an "election process [that] is worse than that in many cases of a third-world country."  And the Democrats, he said, are so proud of what they did, they "admitted [it] in Time Magazine[.] ... They just couldn't hold it in. They had to brag about it."

Trump saved some of his harshest words for the cowardly Supreme Court:

They didn't have the courage, the Supreme Court, they didn't have the courage to act, but instead used process and lack of standing. I was told the President of the United States has no standing. It's my election, it's your election. We have no standing. We had almost 25 ... if you think of it ... we had almost 20 states go into the Supreme Court so that we didn't have a standing problem. They rejected it. They rejected it. They should be ashamed of themselves for what they've done to our country. They didn't have the guts or the courage to make the right decision. They didn't want to talk about it.

Trump also warned Americans to fight against HR1, the misnamed "For the People Act":

We have no time to waste. Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats in Congress are racing to pass a flagrantly unconstitutional attack on the First Amendment and the integrity of our elections known as HR One.

Do you know what HR one is? It's a disaster.

Their bill would drastically restrict political speech, empower the federal government to shut down dissent and turn the federal election commission into a partisan political weapon. In addition, it virtually eliminates voter ID requirements nationwide. Effectively ends all registration deadlines. Can you believe this?

Requires states to give ballots to felons. Automatically registers every welfare recipient to vote and puts unaccountable unelected bureaucrats in charge of drawing congressional districts. That's going to be a lot of fun. This monster must be stopped. It cannot be allowed to pass.

Trump knows he's won, but, typical for Trump, while rightly bemoaning the past, he's looking to the future, which can only happen with free and fair elections.  It's time for the Supreme Court to worry about conservative wrath for a change, and it's a necessity to defeat HR1.

Image: Trump at CPAC.  YouTube screen grab.