The former president’s desperation could drive his actions even after the final votes are cast.
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“Trump, enraged and rattled, is reverting to his feral ways,” Peter Wehner wrote in The Atlantic today. Among those is Trump’s insistence on refusing reality: This weekend, the former president pushed a bizarre conspiracy theory that the massive crowds at recent rallies for Kamala Harris were faked by AI.
Apparently suffering from a severe case of crowd envy, Trump seized on right-wing social-media speculation and claimed that “NOBODY” had really shown up at Harris’s rallies. Despite extensive photographic evidence that thousands of supporters had turned out at an airport in Detroit, Trump insisted that the crowds “DIDN’T EXIST.” In fact, he declared, “there was nobody there,” and cited as evidence “the reflection of the mirror like finish on the Vice Presidential Plane,” which did not reflect images of the crowd that was otherwise in plain sight.
Trump’s claims were pathetically easy to debunk. His rally-crowd lie is yet another of his denials of the truth in front of him. But it was also a warning of a different sort: The former president is openly laying the groundwork for challenging the legitimacy of the November election.
After claiming that Harris had “CHEATED at the airport,” Trump telegraphed his other message: “This is the way the Democrats win Elections, by CHEATING – And they’re even worse at the Ballot Box.” Trump has been workshopping his claims that Harris’s candidacy is illegitimate; he has already suggested that the replacement of Joe Biden with Harris was somehow “unconstitutional.” (It wasn’t, because the Constitution is silent on party nominations.) In his weekend rant, Trump suggested that Harris “should be disqualified because the creation of a fake image is ELECTION INTERFERENCE. Anyone who does that will cheat at ANYTHING!”
In the 2020 race, Trump used the lie that the election had been stolen to incite a violent attack on the nation’s Capitol; now he and his allies have the added advantage of an infrastructure for sowing chaos the next time around. One of Trump’s campaign managers, Chris LaCivita, has already made it clear that Trump may fight the outcome of the election long after November 5. “It’s not over until he puts his hand on the Bible and takes the oath,” LaCivita said in a recent interview with Politico at the Republican National Convention. “It’s not over on Election Day, it’s over on Inauguration Day.” An investigation by Rolling Stone last month found that nearly 70 pro-Trump election deniers serve as election officials in key battleground counties.
In Georgia, Trump supporters on the state election board have adopted rules requiring “reasonable inquiry” before election results are certified, a move that could give GOP county-election-board members the ability to reject the 2024 election’s outcome. And as The Guardian reports, the lawyer and Trump ally Cleta Mitchell “has spent the last few years building up a network of activists focused on local boards of elections.” At the national level, the Republican National Committee says that it hopes to mobilize 100,000 volunteers, including thousands of poll watchers, to focus on “Democrat attempts to circumvent the rules.” Meanwhile, one RNC senior counsel for election integrity, Christina Bobb, was criminally indicted earlier this year for her role in trying to overturn the 2020 election (she pleaded not guilty).
Then there is the mood of the MAGA base. Trump’s lies about the 2020 election have become a litmus test in the GOP, and a recent Pew Research Center poll found that although 77 percent of Democratic voters believe that the election will be conducted “fairly and accurately,” less than half of Republican voters have faith in the system. Despite Harris’s recent surge, the majority of Trump supporters are confident that he will be victorious. (A recent YouGov poll found that nearly eight in 10 Trump supporters think he would win if pitted against Harris.) Trump fully intends to stoke his supporters’ disbelief and anger at the possibility that he could lose. As Wehner warned recently: “If you have friends who are Trump worshippers, a word of counsel: They’re heading to a very dark place psychologically … They felt this race was won; now it’s slipping away. Expect even greater self-delusion and more toxic rants.”
A defeated Trump could be even more dangerous this year than he was in 2020, because the personal stakes for him are higher than ever: Trump is already a convicted felon, but if he wins, he can make many of the remaining criminal cases against him go away. If he loses, he faces not only personal humiliation but also a potential legal nightmare. This makes Trump a desperate man—and that desperation could drive his actions even after the final votes are cast.
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