It’s no surprise Trump again is pulling this crap. Moreover, he has tied his groundless complaint about the California election to his never-to-die Big Lie about the 2020 election, insisting that “it’s been proven” that race was rigged (fact-check: baloney!) and that his administration will “release the full files” to show how “crooked” it was. And after appointing Bill Pulte acting director of national intelligence last week, Trump said this political hatchet man who has absolutely no intelligence experience will be investigating “rigged elections”—suggesting that Pulte, whose time in the post is limited, will pursue assorted conspiracy theories about the 2020 election. We can expect Pulte to release unsubstantiated intelligence or misrepresent intelligence documents in an attempt to hornswoggle the public.
While Trump continues to fixate on 2020, a big question for many people is whether they ought to worry about him threatening the upcoming congressional elections. Are his outlandish assertions about the California election a prelude to an assault on the November contests? Will he try to screw with the voting? Will he attempt to mess with the vote tallying? Will he use ICE agents or other federal troops to intimidate voters? Will he declare results he doesn’t fancy fraudulent and strive to provoke a crisis? (Sound familiar?)
Trump has already trained his millions of diehard followers to accept his groundless accusations of voter fraud. He doesn’t need to supply any proof to whip up his base and the MAGA media. His supporters and his press lackeys are primed to run with any bogus charge he might concoct and embrace and advance any attempt to delegitimize the elections. As Andrew Egger recently wrote in the Bulwark, “So thoroughly poisoned are the minds of Trump’s base voters by now that they no longer need to see even pretend evidence to believe his claims that this or that election are rigged. For the election to turn out more Democrat-friendly than they expected is all they need.” Trump’s horde will buy whatever guff he peddles about the midterms. So, yes, buckle up. His bellyaching about California feels like a test run.
But depending on what Trump tries to pull off, it may not be so easy for him to derail the midterms. US elections are a patchwork of local elections conducted by 50 states and more than 10,000 local jurisdictions. It’s not easy for a malfeasant in Washington, DC, to skew all of them. Of the 18 House races now deemed toss-ups, 13 of them are in states run by Democratic governors (Arizona, California, Colorado, Michigan, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Virginia, Washington, and Wisconsin). It might be tough for Trump to intervene in those areas.
He has already tried to tilt the election in the GOP favor, with racist gerrymandering, as well as so-far unsuccessful efforts to create a federal database of registered voters and to bar the US Postal Service from delivering mail-in ballots to anyone not on this list (a likely illegal action). And, no doubt, in the wee hours, when he’s not shitposting, he’s conjuring up scenarios under which he could declare an emergency and take extreme steps to limit or impede voting. But my hunch is that it won’t be easy for him to launch an all-out assault on the midterms. And Trump has demonstrated he’s inept when it comes to prosecuting a difficult war.
What’s most absurd and dispiriting is that we have to contemplate this. Trump tried to destroy American democracy after the 2020 election. And he came close to overturning the election results. What if Veep Mike Pence had gone along with his plans? Or various GOP-controlled state legislatures? Or what if the January 6 riot went further?
Any political system with a survival instinct would have done all it could after such an attack to neutralize and expel the threat. But a vast majority of House Republicans refused to impeach Trump, and most Senate Republicans refused to convict him. And while much of the corporate elite initially recoiled at Trump and the GOP following J6, most of it scurried back when it became clear Trump still had a hold on the party—and then eagerly licked his boots once he regained power.
So now we’re back to where we were in 2020: A narcissistic authoritarian pushing paranoid and proof-free conspiracy theories is threatening the constitutional order. Trump should have been ostracized after January 6—prosecuted and perhaps imprisoned—and regularly characterized in the media as a profound liar and conman who endangers American democracy. Yet he was never held accountable and treated with the appropriate opprobrium.
I’m not sure our pals in the mainstream media now know how to fully convey the threat at hand. A few days ago, the New York Times published a solid piece by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan on Trump’s phony claims about the California election. But this is how it was headlined in the hard copy:
