Trump lays familiar groundwork, pushes dubious claims about voting process

Ahead of Election Day 2020, Donald Trump was well aware of the fact that he might lose. In fact, for much of the year, practically all of the available evidence suggested that the Republican incumbent president was headed for a likely defeat.

And so, Trump started laying the groundwork long before voters headed to the polls. He routinely told the public that he believed his own country’s electoral system was “rigged,” and his political foes would “cheat.” Asked whether he would accept the results of the election, the Republican routinely responded that it would depend on the degree to which he was satisfied with the outcome.

When Trump did, in fact, lose, he took advantage of the work he’d already done — telling his base that Democrats had cheated, just as he’d said for months. The then-president was, of course, brazenly lying, but he nevertheless used his campaign of deceptions to try to overturn the results, culminating in Trump’s decision to deploy a violent mob to attack the U.S. Capitol, as part of an insurrectionist attack on our democracy.

Four years later, the second verse sounds an awful lot like the first. NBC News reported:

The NBC News report added that, according to a network analysis, the GOP candidate “mentioned Democrats’ likelihood of cheating in the November election at 14 of his last 20 rallies. By comparison, over the summer, Trump referred to Democrats trying to cheat in the 2024 race just five times in 20 rally speeches.”

But as was the case four years ago, telling the public that his opponents will cheat was the first step. The second involves telling voters that his opponents are cheating — even if there’s no credible evidence to bolster the claims.

On Monday night, for example, the former president used his social media platform to push a series of claims related to Pennsylvania’s system. “WHAT IS GOING ON IN PENNSYLVANIA???” Trump wrote in his usual understated style. “Law Enforcement must do their job, immediately!!! WOW!!!”

The next morning, the GOP candidate held a pseudo news conference in which he simply asserted as fact that “some serious things have been caught” in Pennsylvania. About an hour later, he published a related item online, suggesting that law enforcement in the state is “looking at ... VOTER FRAUD!”

That evening, Trump held another event in the Keystone State, telling supporters that Democrats “have already started cheating.”

Someone listening to all of this might start to wonder if the voting system in the commonwealth is somehow unraveling. In reality, it is not. The New York Times reported that officials in Pennsylvania have identified some suspicious voter registration forms, “but contrary to Mr. Trump’s incendiary claim that fake ballots had been cast, there were no reports of actual ballots being among the two batches of documents.”

The article added that on the ground in Pennsylvania, “away from the high-strung channels of social media, law enforcement was already doing its job.”

I won’t pretend to know whether Trump actually believes his own rhetoric, but what the public should keep in mind is the familiarity of the circumstances. As regular readers know, it’s a process I like to call pre-emptive delegitimization.

Fearing possible legal defeats, Trump has repeatedly tried to delegitimize the justice system to invalidate potential adverse outcomes. Fearing possible debate defeats, he did the same thing, making pre-emptive excuses for possible failure ahead of his debate with President Joe Biden, and then doing it again ahead of his debate with Vice President Kamala Harris.

And fearing possible election defeats, the Republican has consistently taken steps to delegitimize the process to explain away potential losses. Trump approaches effectively every challenge with the same thought: “If I fail, it can’t be my fault.”

It’s something to keep in mind as he continues to target the integrity of the U.S. voting system.