J’accuse!
Photo: Celal Gunes/Anadolu/Getty Images
After the 2020 election, Donald Trump and his campaign spent a lot of time in courtrooms and on the airwaves seizing on every rumor or right-wing conspiracy theory about voter fraud to back up his claims he had a right to overturn a “stolen election.” The courts dismissed nearly all of his lawsuits, people laughed at his clownish lawyers, and ultimately his big bid on January 6 to seize the presidency failed.
In his 2024 comeback bid, Trump hasn’t let go of any of those fatuous 2020 claims — and this time he’s dispensed with the toil and trouble of alleging tangible, verifiable violations of election or voting rules. Instead, Trump is relying on vast, sweeping claims of “election interference” that seem to be designed to justify whatever he choses to do if he loses again. Below is a running list.
The claim that has the most merit is that the members of Congress that impeached and tried him for his insurrectionary behavior on January 6, 2021, wanted to stop him from running again. That was indeed their hope in seeking to convict the former president of high crimes and misdemeanors and making him ineligible to serve in that office again. So he’s got a legitimate beef there, aside from the fact that he was, you know, guilty.
When the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6 Attack turned to Trump’s role in the Capitol Riot in early 2022, Trump blasted it as designed to frustrate his political plans:
“The Unselect Committee’s sole goal is to try to prevent President Trump, who is leading by large margins in every poll, from running again for president, if I so choose,” Trump said in a statement. “By so doing they are destroying democracy as we know it.”
The Committee nonetheless makes a criminal referral to the Justice Department involving the attempted insurrection, which leads eventually to criminal indictments.
In 2023, a large number of Trump chickens came home to roost as the former president faced civil and criminal charges on a range of illicit activities, from hush money payments to a porn star just prior to the 2016 election, to mishandling of presidential documents while in the White House, to both federal and stage charges stemming from the events of January 6. He and his supporters quickly found a convenient way to dismiss them all as politically motivated to interfere with his 2024 campaign, which he had announced in November of 2022. The conservative Washington Examiner presented the official MAGA spin:
The story of the 2024 campaign so far is the effort by Democrats and their appointees to use criminal charges and lawsuits to force former President Donald Trump out of the race for a second term in the White House. The name for such an effort is lawfare — that is, “the strategic use of legal proceedings to intimidate or hinder an opponent,” to cite one law dictionary.
Henceforth any progress on these cases — other than dismissal of charges or delays in proceedings — were denounced by Team Trump as illustrations of a Democratic conspiracy stretching from Manhattan to Atlanta to Washington to damage Trump campaign and perhaps put him behind bars before he could complete his triumphant return as president.
For some time MAGA folk have claimed that social media platforms “stole” the 2020 election by “censoring” stories that might have hurt Joe Biden, particularly COVID-19 anti-vaxx fables and the rabbit hole involving Hunter Biden’s laptop. In his recent debate with Tim Walz, J.D. Vance called Big Tech censorship a bigger threat to democracy than the January 6 insurrection. But Trump now has a newer example of this alleged menace aimed at him, as NBC News reported:
Last week, Trump posted without evidence on his social media account that Google is engaged in “blatant interference of elections” — the second time he has recently claimed that it is trying to illegally alter the White House race. Trump claimed in the post that Google manipulated its systems to reveal “bad stories” about him and “good stories” about Vice President Kamala Harris. He said he would “request” the prosecution of Google at the “maximum levels” for what he called “illegal activity,” though neither he nor his campaign offered any specific allegation of criminal conduct.
Tangentially, Trump has accused Kamala Harris of somehow being behind or benefiting from an Iranian hack of some of his campaign data, suggesting she should resign over it.
Trump and his campaign have repeatedly called the maneuver whereby Joe Biden withdrew from the campaign and endorsed Harris as an “unconstitutional coup,” suggesting it illicitly robbed Trump of the opponent he thought he’d face and exposing Democrats’ willingness to do anything to keep the 45th president from returning to office.
A very old canard that Trump deployed in 2016 and occasionally later was that Democrats were stealing elections by opening the border so that non-citizens could vote in huge numbers. There’s never been any evidence of significant non-citizen voting (which is illegal in federal elections, with deportation and imprisonment as penalties), despite constant conservative efforts to look for it. The phantom menace has come back with a vengeance late in this election cycle as Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson have promoted the idea that Kamala Harris and Joe Biden are recruiting undocumented immigrants to flood the polls and counteract the big Republican majority among American citizens.
In a revised filing compelled by Trump’s partial victory in the U.S. Supreme Court decision on presidential immunity earlier this year, Special Prosecutor Jack Smith has issued a new indictment that provides a few spicy new details of the January 6 disaster but mostly covers old ground. How did Trump react? You guessed it:
Former President Donald Trump called the unsealing of documents in his election interference case by special counsel Jack Smith a “weaponization of the government” during an exclusive interview with NewsNation on Wednesday in Houston, Texas. The Republican nominee was at a private fundraiser when he told NewsNation’s Ali Bradley that Smith is a “deranged person” following the dismissal of his separate classified documents case in July.
“This was a weaponization of the government … and released 30 days before the election,” Trump said of Wednesday’s developments. “My poll numbers have gone up instead of down. It is pure election interference.”
The latest Trump clam is that the alleged inadequacy of his Secret Service detail is a “kind of election interference,” on the theory, I guess, that the tautly stretched protective agency is interfering with his beloved outdoor rallies by encouraging him to utilize smaller and easier-to-secure venues for his ranting and raving events.
It’s a good time to recognize that absolutely anything Trump doesn’t like is going to be called “election interference,” and that the vagueness and impossibility of documenting the effect of this or that Trump grievance is a feature, not a bug. He has clearly made enough claims that the election is rigged against him to justify (at least to the satisfaction his followers) that any course of action he chooses to take if he loses is fully justified, and even righteous.
