Donald Trump was not the only member of his family to vote by mail during this week’s Florida special election; Melania and Barron did so, too, despite the president spending six years complaining about the practice.
USA Today reports that the first lady, like her husband, requested a postal ballot on Saturday March 14 and listed her home address as 1100 South Ocean Boulevard in Palm Beach, the location of Mar-a-Lago, their sprawling Palm Beach estate and private members club.
Their son Barron, now a student at New York University’s Stern School of Business, did the same, also giving the private club as his home address.
Both Melania and Barron’s postal ballots were cast, according to the Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections website, although it does not say when.
The nearest polling place to Mar-a-Lago, the newspaper states, is the Morton and Barbara Mandel Recreation Center at 340 Seaview Avenue, 3.9-miles away, or a roughly 13-minute drive without traffic.
The president’s decision to vote by mail – despite repeatedly complaining that postal voting is vulnerable to fraud since his defeat in the 2020 presidential election to Joe Biden, and despite his being in Florida over the weekend when early in-person voting was available to him – has invited accusations of hypocrisy.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer wasted little time in going after Trump over the double standard.
“Vote by mail is cheating when other people use it but perfectly fine when he does it himself,” the veteran New York senator told Congress this week.
“His decision to vote by mail shows just how hypocritical Donald Trump is about fraud and cheating.”
Unmoved, the president repeated his rhetoric on the subject at a law enforcement roundtable in Memphis on Tuesday, declaring, “Mail-in voting means mail-in cheating. I call it mail-in cheating, and we got to do something about it all.”
Trump has voted multiple times by mail in the past, including in the 2020 presidential primary and a 2021 Florida election, leading the White House to attack The Washington Post, which first reported his ballot, for running a “non-story.”
Meanwhile, Trump continues to bang the drum for his party’s SAVE America Act, a new bill that would impose ID requirements on federal elections, including requiring citizens voting by mail to provide photocopies of their identification with their ballots.
White House spokeswoman Olivia Wales said the proposed act contains “commonsense exceptions for Americans to use mail-in ballots for illness, disability, military, or travel, but universal mail-in voting should not be allowed because it’s highly susceptible to fraud.”
Negotiations over the legislation have gummed up the works in D.C., with the president saying he will not sign any new bills until the act lands on his desk, even though the Republican-controlled Senate appears unlikely to advance it amid widespread Democratic opposition.
GOP senators remain anxious about the prospect of eliminating the chamber’s filibuster and its supermajority requirement, as Trump has demanded.
Urging them to pass the act this week, the president told his side, “Don’t worry about Easter, going home. In fact, make this one for Jesus, OK?”
Ahead of the Florida special election in question, Trump endorsed Republican candidate Jon Maples to win the race for the state legislature in Palm Beach County, only for his man to lose to Democrat Emily Gregory.
In a parallel race for the Florida Senate, the same day, another Republican, Josie Tomkow, lost to Democrat Brian Nathan, proving the opposition is picking up steam in red states ahead of this November’s midterms amid growing discontent over Trump’s leadership.
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