A Trump supporter in Hollywood lays down his MAGA hat.
Photo: Jay L. Clendenin/Getty Images
Donald Trump’s incessant claims that he cannot possibly lose a fair election took a strange turn in an interview this week with talk-show personality Dr. Phil McGraw:
This is hardly the first time the 45th president has accused the Golden State of fraudulently rigging elections he would have otherwise won. Indeed, even when he won in 2016, he claimed — as usual, without a single shred of evidence — that his 2.9 million vote deficit against Hillary Clinton in the national popular vote was caused by “millions of people who voted illegally,” later adding that there was “serious voter fraud in Virginia, New Hampshire, and California.”
In the interview with Dr. Phil, Trump seems more than a little confused: One minute, he’s attributing his past and future defeats in California to universal voting by mail (a practice the state only adopted in 2020 as a COVID measure and then made permanent in 2021), and at another to dishonest vote counting (which presumably Jesus could correct), which has nothing to do with how and when ballots are cast.
Trump has made a habit of denouncing voting by mail as inherently fraudulent (which drives Republican officials trying to get their own voters to use this time-honored methodology absolutely crazy). He ignores the many safeguards against fraud — including severe criminal penalties — in place in California and the 49 other states where some form of voting by mail is available. Seven states, including deep-red Utah, have gone to all-mail-ballot systems without any reported increase in voter fraud (which is extremely rare to begin with).
What makes this latest whine about California especially weird is Trump’s unsupported claim that he’s wildly popular there. The evidence? He’s been there and sees a lot of Trump signs (I happen to live in California, and I see Trump signs about as often as I see whales), and furthermore, Hispanics love him. Actually, in 2020, Trump won 38 percent of the Hispanic vote (according to Pew’s gold-standard analysis of validated voters), which is indeed pretty good for a Republican but hardly the basis for a statewide victory in California. As Devon Hesano noted in his tweet above, no Republican presidential candidate has carried the state since 1988; indeed, none have received as much as 40 percent of the vote since 2004. No Republican has won a statewide election of any sort in California since 2006. Less than a quarter of registered voters there have chosen to align themselves with the GOP. This is just a bad state for Trump and his party, and it’s becoming pathological that he cannot accept that simple fact.
To believe that Trump is right about California, you have to believe there has been a vast criminal conspiracy involving many thousands of county and state election officials who year after year manage to wildly distort election results without detection. In other words, you’d have to believe that any result in any state that isn’t a massive Trump landslide is fake. And that seems to be exactly what the 45th president wants Americans to believe, which will certainly make it easier for him to deny another defeat in November if that’s what he needs to return to power.
