President Donald Trump delivered a primetime speech Thursday night so full of lies and devoid of evidence that almost every major news network refused to carry it live..
Ostensibly about the 2020 election, Trump’s eyes were squarely set on 2026 and 2028.
Trump and his allies need to create chaos around this November’s election to stave off a near-certain Democratic takeover of the U.S. House of Representatives. Even conservative predictions give Democrats a nearly 2-to-1 chance of winning a majority, probably by a healthy margin. There is even a significant chance they win control of the Senate, too.
Such an outcome would be intolerable to Trump. Given his disdain for legal constraints, it is no wonder that he would not abide by a free and fair election. He will do everything in his power — and well beyond that — to stop such an outcome. That is what his speech Thursday was really about.
Trump and his army of election deniers want to sow chaos into this election so they can dispute the outcome. If they lose, they will claim they did not. They will then use every lever of power to grind our democracy to a halt.
Think in terms of National Guard and ICE officers standing guard at polling locations. Consider Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordering soldiers to seize voting machines. Imagine election officials taken into custody by the FBI under Kash Patel’s direction.
If it seems more likely than outlandish, then you understand Trump’s goal.
This is a playbook Trump has run before. In 2016, sensing that he would lose, Trump began preemptively citing “large scale voter fraud” and an election “absolutely being rigged” against him. To the surprise of every political professional, media pundit and many of Trump’s own team, he won the election. And after the fact it was apparently a perfect election.
In 2020, he did not make as much noise before the fact. After all, he had been president for four years and he would be pointing the finger at himself. It was not until after the election, and his loss to Joe Biden, that Trump shifted gears and began a full-scale assault on the validity of the election. We all know how that ended.
Trump and his team brought more than 60 cases and lost all but one or two minor victories. The rest were often so devoid of evidence, contrary to law and filled with lies that they were summarily rejected and the attorneys responsible lost their licenses. For example, three years after the fact the Colorado Supreme Court censured Trump lawyer Jenna Ellis.
Of course, that was the least of his efforts.
Trump incited the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. Along with his most fervent sycophants, Trump wound up a crowd and directed them toward the very place where representatives were tallying the votes for president. Two different courts agreed with that conclusion in the lawsuit I filed to keep him off the ballot in 2024. The U.S. Supreme Court overturned the outcome of that case, but did not vacate the underlying factual findings.
The 2020 loss has festered in Trump ever since. As White House reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan highlighted in their recent book, “Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump,” Trump made public defense of the insurrection a prerequisite for employment in his current administration.
Now he is leaving nothing to chance. He did not suddenly find new information about the 2020 election less than four months before Congress could change hands. He repeated debunked lies over and over because he knows it gives him a platform to launch an even more audacious assault on democracy than Jan. 6.
Expect Trump to begin making executive orders and directives in the name of “election integrity.” In Trump’s Brave New World, he will use every advantage to clamp down on voting, employ scare tactics and control the outcome of the election. And if it still does not look like it is going his way, he may even destroy ballots.
Of course, he will also lean heavily on election officials in his corner. With her new-found freedom — thanks to Gov. Jared Polis — Tina Peters has already begun the drum beat for MAGA-aligned election officials to undermine outcomes they do not like. She went free, met with Trump in the Oval Office, and became a heroine to those who would follow in her footsteps.
Democrats may win the votes, but it will be hard to win the election if the officials charged with tallying ballots refuse to do so. Just imagine if it looks like Democrat James Talarico is headed to victory over embattled Republican Ken Paxton (who appears to have committed election fraud himself) in Texas; it would only take a few Republican election officials in some critical counties to skew the vote. It would just be 1948 in reverse.
The chaos and controversy that followed would only serve Trump further. He has already flirted with alternatives to staying in power past his second term. None would be so sure as simply postponing the 2028 presidential election. In the aftermath of election carnage he seems to be sowing, it is not hard to imagine him trying to reap the benefit of proclaiming a “national emergency.”
And, of course, in such a state of emergency America could not have confidence in an election until Trump fixed it at some indefinite point in the future, a future where he would continue to serve as president.
Trump talked about past elections Thursday, but it was coming elections he intended to undermine. Through any means necessary.
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Type of Story: Opinion
Advocates for ideas and draws conclusions based on the author/producer’s interpretation of facts and data.
