Former President Donald Trump joined the battle over Georgia's recently-passed voting law and the reaction against it by Major League Baseball and major corporations Saturday, while also repeating his unfounded claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him. Trump urged supporters to fight "WOKE CANCEL CULTURE" by boycotting the entities.
The Atlanta-metro area lost Major League Baseball’s summer All-Star Game and amateur draft on Friday over the league’s objections to sweeping changes to Georgia voting laws that critics — including the CEOs of Atlanta-based Delta Air Lines and Coca-Cola — have condemned as being too restrictive.
The decision by MLB to pull the July 13 game from Truist Park amounts to the first economic backlash against Georgia for the voting law that Republican Gov. Brian Kemp quickly signed into law March 25.
A joint statement from executives at nearly 200 companies, including HP, Microsoft, PayPal, Target, Twitter, Uber and Under Armour, took aim at state legislation “threatening to make voting more difficult" and said “elections are not improved” when lawmakers impose new barriers to voting.
Kemp has insisted the law’s critics have mischaracterized what it does, yet GOP lawmakers adopted the changes largely in response to false claims of fraud in the 2020 elections by Trump and his supporters. The law includes new restrictions on voting by mail, greater legislative control over how elections are run and makes it a crime to give food or water to people waiting in line to vote.
Kemp decried "cancel culture," something Trump echoed Saturday.
"For years the Radical Left Democrats have played dirty by boycotting products when anything from that company is done or stated in any way that offends them. Now they are going big time with WOKE CANCEL CULTURE and our sacred elections," Trump said in a statement released by his office. "It is finally time for Republicans and Conservatives to fight back—we have more people than they do—by far! Boycott Major League Baseball, Coca-Cola, Delta Airlines, JPMorgan Chase, ViacomCBS, Citigroup, Cisco, UPS, and Merck."
He then falsely claimed the election was "rigged and stolen" and that he won "by a landslide."
President Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election by more than 7 million votes and an electoral college count of 306-232. There was no widespread election fraud. Those claims were rejected by Democratic and Republican election officials in Georgia and other states, by U.S. cybersecurity officials and federal judges appointed by Trump and by the U.S. Supreme Court, which included three justices selected by the former president. Also, then-Attorney General William Barr said there was no evidence of fraud that could change the election outcome.
Fani Willis, the district attorney for Georgia's Fulton County, is investigating a call Trump made to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger after the election in which Trump said "I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have." Trump lost Georgia by 11,779 votes.
This is not the first time Trump has taken on a major sports league. Early in his presidency, he called on NFL owners to fire players who kneeled during the national anthem.
Trump finished his statement Saturday saying, "The Radical Left will destroy our Country if we let them. We will not become a Socialist Nation. Happy Easter!"
Bill Barrow and Ronald Blum of the Associated Press contributed to this report.