This article originally appeared in slightly different form at Medium. Used by permission.
As anyone paying even the slightest attention well knows, not one iota of evidence exists that the 2020 presidential election was “rigged,” as Donald Trump endlessly insists.
Trump’s lifelong egomaxxing — to make up for whatever he never received in childhood, beyond millions of dollars and a father’s admonishments to “be a killer” — means he will never accept the possibility of losing any contest of any kind.
Art Davie, a roommate of Trump’s in military school and founder of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, recently told the Daily Beast that Donald imagined himself the best at everything even at the age of 16, and felt aggrieved if he thought he was being slighted in any way.
Things never change for those who never grow up.
Trump remains that overprivileged bully who embraces (and embodies, it seems) his grievances. He surrounds himself with lackeys who will only praise him, rather than offer actual advice, and is led only by those voices in the media who are “nice” to him. (His media enemies list names only organizations that employ actual journalists.)
He even cheats at golf, determined to “win” the game that most depends on personal integrity.
So, how could this man with one of the most fragile egos in history ever accept that, as an incumbent, he lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden by more than 7 million votes? Rather than concede, he was prepared to burn down our democracy. It would mean no more to him than having his caddy toss one of his poorly struck balls onto the green.
On some level, Trump knows he lost big in 2020, which why why he stormed out of his recent “Meet the Press” interview.
Indeed, there is overwhelming evidence that it was Trump’s team that connived to steal the 2020 election, from enlisting the support of Russian operatives to voter suppression in urban and college areas to creating rosters of fake electors prepared to cast votes in the Electoral College to sending a violent mob to the U.S. Capitol to stop the count.
A similar but less dramatic move 20 years earlier, the so-called Brooks Brothers riot of 2000, stopped the vote count in Florida and effectively stole the election on behalf of George W. Bush. As Trump advisers like Roger Stone and Steve Bannon set up operations at the Willard Hotel on Jan. 5, 2021, they figured it would work again, on a bigger scale.
On some level, Trump knows he lost big in 2020, which why why he stormed out of his recent interview on “Meet the Press” with Kristen Welker. She pushed back in professional fashion, refusing to allow him to tell the public bald-faced lies. Trump melted down on camera, calling her “either crooked or stupid” before stopping the interview and fleeing.
This supposed alpha male is not man enough to acknowledge anything that could appear to make him look like a “loser.”
There’s another reason for the endless lying about election fraud. Like all the dictators he gushes over, Trump must keep peddling unreality to citizens so they’ll give up on believing in anything, except in him.
Hannah Arendt wrote that totalitarians try to annihilate thought, to break our sense of reality with lies, whether in words and in images. To make this possible, the evidence of experts needs to be continually discredited. And because the rule of law is an obstacle to dictators’ self-dealing and crimes against the people, judges must be derided if their rulings fall the “wrong” way.
If any of Trump’s absurd claims cannot be sustained in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, then the fact that there is no evidence becomes evidence of a massive conspiracy to withhold the truth from the public.
Pressed by Welker for evidence that voter fraud was occurring in California’s primary elections, Trump had none. He said that he “only had to look.” He repeated the claim over and over, reddening and breaking into a sweat. Since the (nasty) woman sitting opposite him would not relent, he threw his mic to the ground, as a child would, and ran away.
When pressed on whether he agreed with Trump’s ludicrous claims about the California election, House Speaker Mike Johnson said, “Look, some of these efforts are so diabolical and so far upstream it’s impossible to prove.”
As it happens, California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a law this past week that prohibits anyone, including federal agents, from interfering with voters and election workers, or from accessing voter rolls or election technology without a court order.
In a post on Substack, Newsom hinted that there may soon be accountability in his state for politicians who knowingly lie to the public about vote fraud.
The First Amendment protects free speech, of course, but it doesn’t allow anyone to should “Fire!” in a crowded theater. Should politicians be allowed to cry “Election fraud!” in a crowded democracy?
The mainstream press tends to report that there is no evidence widespread or significant voter fraud. That phrasing wildly overstates the case, perhaps conveying the impression that there is some voter fraud, even an uncomfortable amount, but just not enough to sway an election. In fact, there is basically none.
Mail-in ballots are safe and secure, because they are virtually impossible to fake. Trump has repeatedly claimed that we are the only country to use them, or that they are a brand new innovation. In fact, mail-in ballots are used in more than 30 countries around the world, as well as many U.S. states. In all cases, they take time to be scrutinized and counted.
Only citizens are voting, and the likelihood of voter fraud is vanishingly small. As Dan Rather writes on his Steady Substack:
Election fraud in the United States is extremely rare. A study conducted by the Brookings Institution found only 0.000043% of cases of fraud in mail-in voting, which works out to four out of every 10 million votes cast.
Even the archconservative Heritage Foundation cannot cite many instances of cheating in its Election Fraud Map — and those listed mostly consist of people who got caught.
Meanwhile, Vice President JD Vance urges you to be suspicious about how long it takes to properly count ballots, neglecting to mention that his boss is the very man who pressured the Georgia secretary of state to “find” 11,780 votes for him.
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Which should remind everyone to pay attention to the bigger picture. First of all, Republicans have a long history of suppressing the right to vote, especially of people of color and college students. Federalist Society-approved justices on the Supreme Court have methodically undone the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Next, Donald Trump compulsively spews untruths. He exaggerates, dissembles or tells outright lies, whether to buoy his ego or to divert attention from something he’s done that is either idiotic or illegal (or, as is often the case, both).
When it comes to Trump and his longtime friend Jeffrey Epstein, the concept of Occam’s razor — the simplest explanation is usually the correct one— should be borne in mind.
Washington Post fact-checkers during Trump’s first term numbered his “false or misleading claims” at more than 30,000. In his second term, he’s only gotten more energetic with his lies, given his ardent desire to put the Trump-Epstein Files (as Jimmy Kimmel calls them) out of the public’s mind.
When it comes to Trump and his longtime friend Jeffrey Epstein, the concept of Occam’s razor — the principle that the simplest explanation is usually the correct one— should be borne in mind.
Anyone out there who’s still in the dwindling MAGA camp ought to try this experiment: Bundle Trump’s desperate claims about voter fraud with his desperate lies about his relationship with Epstein, his desperate lies about the Iran war (which he may have launched to get Epstein out of the headlines), his desperate lies about the economy (now he “loves” inflation!), as well all his casual, repeated lies about his infrastructure plan or his “concepts” for an unbelievably great new healthcare plan.
Then count those lies, just as carefully as the ballots are now being counted in California.
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