By Axios | Created at 2024-09-29 20:34:05 | Updated at 2024-09-30 05:27:39
9 hours ago
Through public remarks, Truth Social screeds and more than 100 preemptive lawsuits, Donald Trump is assembling a detailed catalog of excuses for rejecting the results of the 2024 election — if he loses.
Why it matters: The Trump-aligned efforts to overturn the 2020 election — both overtly and covertly, peacefully then violently — shocked the American public. No one should be surprised this time around.
Listen to Trump: The former president, who risks jail time and more criminal trials if he loses, has expanded his range of baseless attacks on U.S. voting procedures in recent weeks and months.
- Overseas voting: Trump falsely claimed Monday that Democrats are exploiting an overseas ballot program for expats and military members in order to circumvent "any citizenship check or verification of identity."
- Early voting: At a rally in Pennsylvania last week, Trump denounced what he called the "stupid" concept of voting 45 days before the election — floating conspiracy theories about his loss in the crucial swing state four years ago.
- Mail-in voting: Trump has long despised mail-in ballots. He's recently attacked the U.S. Postal Service as incompetent and untrustworthy — even as the GOP has pushed its voters to embrace the practice.
Zoom in: The millions of undocumented migrants who have crossed into the U.S. during the Biden administration are a top campaign issue. They're also being used to fuel new voter fraud conspiracy theories.
- Earlier this month, Trump demanded that House Republicans use the threat of a government shutdown to pass a measure requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote in federal elections.
- That effort failed, but it gave Trump and Republicans a new excuse to claim election fraud — even though it's already illegal and exceedingly rare for non-citizens to vote in U.S. elections.
Between the lines: Even without evidence of voting irregularities, Trump is preparing to deploy broader rhetorical arguments for why the election was fundamentally unfair.
- The former president has accused Democrats of "cheating" by swapping out President Biden for Vice President Kamala Harris in June, and engaging in "lawfare" through criminal prosecution.
- "If there was no cheating — if God came down from on high and said 'I'm going to be your vote tabulator for this election,' I would leave this podium right now," Trump said Sunday at a rally in Pennsylvania.
- "We have to have a landslide because they cheat so damn much."
The big picture: Since 2020, the Republican Party apparatus has been reorganized — from the top down — to give credence to Trump's false claims that election fraud is a scourge on American politics.
- Trump's campaign and the Republican National Committee say they've built a network of about 175,000 volunteer poll watchers and poll workers, part of a relentless focus on "election integrity."
- In Georgia, a hard-right election board has passed new rules that Democrats fear could be used to undermine confidence in the results if Trump loses the critical battleground state.
- House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) drew outrage last week by pledging to certify the 2024 election and "follow the Constitution" only if it's a "free, fair and safe election."
What to watch: On Nov. 1, 2020, Axios reported that Trump had privately told confidants he planned to prematurely declare victory on election night if it looked like he was "ahead."
- That's exactly what he did.
- Given the likelihood that the election once again will take days to call, don't be surprised to see the former president dust off that same playbook.
