They're all election deniers now
Trump's veep hopefuls are saying it over and over.
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Lately, Republicans have been getting one simple question: “Will you accept the results of the 2024 election, regardless of its outcome?” Their responses keep exposing that election denialism has taken over the party.
The very fact journalists feel it necessary to ask this question is alarming and would’ve been unheard of less than a decade ago. A stable democracy relies on free and fair elections where candidates and their supporters accept and abide by the outcome, even when they lose. If this becomes negotiable, then our republic is no longer sustainable.
But Republicans have almost collectively refused to accept a Joe Biden victory in November. They insist they won’t engage in “hypotheticals,” but in a healthy democracy, politicians acknowledge that they can lose and, most importantly, the results were fair. It’s why John McCain said in 2008 that “the American people have spoken,” and Mitt Romney in 2012 affirmed that “the nation chose another leader.” Such declarations of unity are beyond Donald Trump, and the Republicans most eager to succeed Mike Pence as his running mate are now getting in on the act.
The cancer of election denial
Recent TV interviews of prominent Trumpers have made very clear they aren’t planning to accept any result in November other than a Trump victory.
For instance, on May 12, Sen. JD Vance told CNN’s Dana Bash, “I totally plan to accept the results of 2024. I think that Donald Trump will be the victor. I think those results will show that Donald Trump was elected.”
Vance’s line is the standard one. Sen. Tim Scott invoked it during a recent appearance on NBC’s Meet the Press, robotically repeating the words “at the end of the day, the 47th president will be Donald Trump.” Sen. Marco Rubio went on the same show last Sunday and, when asked if he’d accept the results, tried to change the topic to Hillary Clinton.
Lindsey Graham recently told Welker he’ll only accept the results “if there’s no massive cheating.” Along the same lines, Reps. Elise Stefanik and Byron Donalds were quoted by the New York Times saying they’ll accept them “if they’re constitutional” and “if the procedures are followed … no funny business,” respectively.
Trump, of course, has a long history of election denialism dating back to at least the 2016 GOP primary, when he accused Ted Cruz of rigging the Iowa caucuses. He’s said he’d only accept the 2024 results “if everything’s honest,” but at the same time he’s already again crying foul about being the victim of cheating. During a speech last weekend in St. Paul, he offered the bonkers lie that he won Minnesota in 2020, despite the fact he lost by more than 7 points and over 200,000 votes.
“I thought we won it in 2016, I know we won it in 2020,” Trump said. “We gotta be careful. We gotta watch those votes … stop the steal.”
During a speech to an NRA convention the next day, Trump mused about possibly serving three terms.
The MAGA turn against democracy might be more defensible if there was evidence that recent elections were tainted by fraud. But there isn’t.
The big lie endures
It’s easy to forget now, but Trump was already planting the seeds for his big lie and eventual coup attempt in the spring of 2020, as his polling sagged thanks to his egregious mishandling of covid and state officials took steps to make it safer for people to vote amid an out of control pandemic.
Extending early voting and absentee ballot programs wasn’t a Democratic plot but a good-faith effort to reduce the public health risk from voting in person months before the covid vaccine was released. After he lost the election, Trump’s claims about election fraud were roundly rejected by courts because they no basis beyond providing a pretext for him to try to steal Biden’s victory.
The voters who don’t trust election outcomes are predominately Republicans, but that statistic understates the larger problem. It’s not as if Republicans don’t trust election results in general. They specifically don’t trust them when their candidates lose. Rep. Majorie Taylor Greene, for instance, sought to reject Biden’s Electoral College victory in key swing states, including Georgia, when she was elected to Congress herself on the very same ballot. She didn’t ask for a do-over on her own election, just Biden’s.
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Trump never abandoned the Big Lie, and Republicans continue to make evidence-free insinuations that the 2020 election was stolen to this day. He recently installed his daughter-in-law Lara Trump as the new co-chair of the Republican National Committee, and she’s used her position to actively spread debunked lies about the last election. In fact, one of her first actions in her new role was to send out robocalls making baseless accusations of election fraud.
“We all know the problems. No photo IDs, unsecured ballot drop boxes, mass mailing of ballots, and voter rolls chock full of deceased people and non-citizens are just a few examples of the massive fraud that took place,” the robocall said, according to CNN. “If Democrats have their way, your vote could be canceled out by someone who isn’t even an American citizen.”
During an interview with Newsmax’s Eric Bolling, Lara turned reality on its head by claiming that her father-in-law “does accept election results even despite the fact that it was a very questionable election in 2020, because Joe Biden is, unfortunately, sitting in the Oval Office today.” She added that “if there's no election interference, if everything is fair, and there's nothing nefarious happening in an election, it is pretty clear based on all the polls out there and anybody you talk to, Donald Trump will be the 47th president” — the subtext being that it would be impossible for him to lose a fair election.
This is insidious. After all, if you relied solely on the polls around this time in 2016, it was “pretty clear” that Hillary Clinton would be the 45th president. In May 2016, Clinton was ahead of Trump by 18 points. She’d maintain a double-digit lead throughout the summer. The fact that the race tightened sufficiently for Trump to pull an upset (through some dirty pool of his own) is not itself proof of anything “nefarious.”
Election denial as a litmus test
Republicans didn’t break with Trump after the January 6 Capitol attack. No, in fact, it was the most vocal opponents of Trump’s attempted coup who were purged: Liz Cheney lost her leadership position and then her primary election. Adam Kinzinger, who served with Cheney on the January 6 select committee, left Congress in 2023.
Trump’s election lies became a litmus test for ambitious Republicans, especially his vice presidential contenders, and they’ve defended the indefensible with a constant game of “whataboutism.” Even supposed “reasonable” Republicans will insist they’re only doing what Democrats have repeatedly done already.
“In 2000, [Democrats] have made movies about it, and that election was contested for two months in the courts afterwards,” North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum recently told CNN’s Jake Tapper. “And it was — you know, it came down to Broward County and some hanging chads.”
These arguments fall flat, considering Al Gore and Hillary Clinton actually conceded, which Trump still refuses to do even though his own administration officials characterized the 2020 election as the most secure in history and confirmed there was no fraud. Gore and Clinton both attended their opponent’s inauguration. And there were no violent attacks on the Capitol, which people would’ve noticed.
Republicans are priming Americans for another insurrection
There was good reason to believe Trump wouldn’t leave the White House willingly even before covid hit.
Michael Cohen, Trump’s former fixer, warned during congressional testimony in 2019 that “there will never be a peaceful transition of power” if Trump lost. (Watch below.)
But Republican politicians and conservative pundits dismissed Cohen’s obviously credible testimony as evidence of the left’s “Trump derangement syndrome.”
“That is the least concern people should have. Of all the silly things that are being said, that may be the silliest,” said Missouri GOP Sen. Roy Blunt, who has since retired. “The one thing we are really good at is the transition of power.”
Cohen was right, and Blunt was proven painfully wrong. Now, Republicans are set to nominate Trump again. If he wins outright, America will have sleepwalked into an autocratic nightmare. If he loses, Republicans are setting the stage to try to overturn the results yet again.
In 2020, Mike Johnson, then a little-known Republican congressman from Louisiana, played a key role in Trump’s efforts to steal the election. Johnson rallied Republican support for Texas’s baseless lawsuit that would’ve invalidated the results in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
Now, Johnson’s speaker of the House and could possibly still hold that position on January 6, 2025. He recently released this statement about the 2024 election: “The speaker of the House has a duty to ensure each presidential election is conducted in compliance with the Constitution and all applicable laws, and to accept the results accordingly. Speaker Johnson will always adhere to the rule of law. The speaker also recognizes the right of all candidates to contest election irregularities with litigation as appropriate.”
Nothing in his statement precludes him from engineering another coup attempt, and he’s laying the groundwork for it already. Just last month, Johnson appeared with Trump at an “election integrity” event where they lied about noncitizens voting. A couple weeks ago, Johnson and other key players in 2020 coup attempt gathered outside the Capitol and announced new legislation to stop noncitizen voting, a “solution” for a problem that doesn’t exist.
“We all know, intuitively, that a lot of illegals are voting in federal elections,” Johnson said. “But it’s not been something that’s easily provable. We don’t have that number.” (Watch below.)
Suffice it to say that when your evidence for a claim is “intuition,” you’re likely spreading BS. Johnson’s smart enough to know that.
Despite GOP false equivalencies, you’ll notice that reporters never ask Democrats if they plan to accept a presidential defeat. That’s because it goes without saying that they will. But a two-party system doesn’t work when only one party plays by the rules.
Thankfully, the current governors and secretaries of state of key swing states (Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Arizona) are all Democrats. This means the 2024 election results will be certified be regardless of who wins. But there would be far less certainly if Republicans held those positions. And at some point Democrats will inevitably lose an election or two.
The unfortunate truth is that Republicans, under Trump’s influence, no longer accept that Democrats can legitimately win elections. This isn’t a run of the mill ideological difference between the parties. It’s the ruin of American democracy.
When Republican Senate Leader Mitch McConnell rejected challenges to Biden’s victory on January 6, he said, “This election actually was not unusually close. Just in recent history, 1976, 2000, and 2004 were all closer than this one. The Electoral College margin is almost identical to what it was in 2016. If this election were overturned by mere allegations from the losing side, our democracy would enter a death spiral.”
We’re now living in that death spiral.
That’s it for today
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Thanks for reading.
There is not an ounce of Integrity left in any Republican. Zero.
It's sad when an entire party has to stoop beneath the level of the lowest whims of a malignant narcissist.