U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas) suggested on Sunday that tech billionaire Elon Musk helped rig the presidential election in Pennsylvania for President-elect Donald Trump.
Trump narrowly won the critical swing state of Pennsylvania over Vice President Kamala Harris last fall, which clinched his return to the White House. During his pre-inauguration rally speech on Sunday, Trump lauded Musk for all his help with the campaign.
His praise of Musk raised questions from Crockett, an outspoken progressive in the U.S. House of Representatives.
“It’s pretty amazing, but he did that, and then he journeyed to Pennsylvania, where he spent, like, a month and a half campaigning for me in Pennsylvania. And he’s a popular guy, and he was very effective,” Trump said at one point.
“And he knows those computers better than anybody. All those computers, those vote counting computers, and we ended up winning Pennsylvania, like in a landslide so it was pretty good. It’s pretty good. So thank you to Elon,” he added.
Crockett weighed in on Trump thanking Musk in a post on social media platform X.
“So Trump is rambling on about he and Elon rigging the election?! Am I missing something or is he confessing to yet another damn crime?!” she wrote on X.
There’s been no widespread claims of voter fraud in the 2024 election. Trump also suggested that he is only the president now because the election was “rigged” in 2020, a claim that also has no evidence.
Musk has emerged as one of Trump’s top allies ahead of his inauguration on Monday, serving as one of the president-elect’s closest advisers. He has also been taken with leading the new “Department of Government Efficiency” to reduce the size of the federal government and its spending.
During Sunday’s rally, Musk said “we’re looking forward to making a lot of changes.”
“What matters going forward is to actually make significant changes, cement those changes and set the foundation for America to be strong for a century, for centuries, forever,” he said.
Trump has been promising a flurry of executive action on Day 1, and there are executive orders already prepared for his signature. Those orders will end diversity, equity and inclusion funding, crack down on border crossings and ease regulations on oil and natural gas production. The Republican has promised dozens of actions, though it’s unclear whether he’ll make good on his pledge to do them all on his first day.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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