“That’s the only way we’re going to lose — because [Democrats] cheat.”
That startling charge came from former President Donald Trump at a Wisconsin rally in September.
It was no one-time riff by Trump.
“They’re going to cheat. They cheat. That’s all [Democrats] want to do is cheat,” he said at another rally last month. “It is the only way they’re going to win. And we can’t let that happen…we’re going to have no country.”
NBC reported last week that Trump has hammered this theme of Democrats cheating in the election in “14 of his last 20 rallies.” And he still refuses to admit he lost the 2020 election.
In October, he told Joe Rogan, the star podcast host, that he “won” the 2020 “election so easily.”
He was cheated, he told Rogan, by “old-fashioned ballot-screwing,” despite the reality that his own attorney general and judges in more than 50 cases brought by Trump allies found no evidence of election fraud.
Trump’s lie about election fraud was echoed at his Madison Square Garden rally when Tucker Carlson, the former cable television host and Trump ally, dismissed the idea that Vice President Kamala Harris could ever legitimately defeat Trump.
“It’s going to be pretty hard to look at us [ Trump loyalists] and say ‘You know what? Kamala Harris …got 85 million votes because she’s so impressive as the first Samoan-Malaysian, low-IQ, former California prosecutor ever to be elected president.”
That racist comment about Harris, whose heritage is Jamaican and Indian, drew no outrage from the Trump crowd. To the contrary, they laughed and cheered. The comment fits with Trump’s claim that cheating by Democrats is tied to illegal immigrants.
At his lone debate against Harris, Trump said “a lot of these illegal immigrants…[the Democrats] are trying to get them to vote.”
Sixty-two percent of Republicans “continue to believe the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump,” according to an October poll by Public Religion Research Institute.
And about a quarter of Republican Trump supporters say that “they support Trump taking office by force if he loses the election,” said Robert P. Jones, the president of PRRI polling. “Three in ten [Trump supporters] say they believe political violence might be necessary to save the country.”
One result of Trump’s success in sowing distrust of elections among Republicans is ongoing acts of violence by his supporters. In Florida, a man armed with a machete declared he was there to “antagonize” Democrats.
As he continues to undermine trust in the outcome of Tuesday’s presidential election, Trump even refuses to say that if he is defeated, he will allow Congress to transfer presidential power next year peacefully. Instead, he darts by the question, even denying that his supporters violently attacked the Capitol — much of it on live television.
Trump has claimed that January 6, 2021, was all about “love and peace,” despite 1,500 people being charged with federal criminal acts and five deaths tied to his supporters’ effort to stop Congress from certifying his loss.
Trump’s constant lies about election fraud and January 6 have ugly consequences.
Elon Musk’s pro-Trump PAC thinks it is okay to twist this election by handing out million-dollar checks to people who became eligible to win by gathering signatures on a petition — a move that has raised major legal red flags.
The Justice Department sent Musk a warning, and the Philadelphia District Attorney filed suit against Musk and his group, claiming violations of Pennsylvania law.
Musk has also used his platform, the former Twitter now known as X, to push Trump’s claim that Democrats are enlisting non-citizen immigrants to vote. Several southern states led by Republicans are also trying to back Trump’s preemptory claims of election-fraud by saying non-citizens are on their voting rolls.
The cases often involve people who may have indicated on their driver’s license applications that they were born outside the country, creating confusion about their citizenship.
Last week, in a party-line ruling, the conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Virginia can remove a small number of voters, about 1,600 people, from its voting rolls. The Justice Department had taken Virginia to court for acting to remove the voters within 90 days of an election, a limit set under the National Voter Registration Act.
Also in Virginia, a Trump supporter was acquitted after claiming he was just testing the election system by trying to vote twice in the 2023 state elections.
The Republican National Committee has also filed a lawsuit against most of Michigan’s counties charging that they have “suspiciously high” rates of voter registration when compared to their population of people of voting age.
A federal judge found no basis for the suit in late October.
The real purpose of Virginia’s scrubbing voting rolls and the RNC’s suit is to stir suspicion among Trump supporters of cheating by Democrats ahead of a possible Trump defeat.
Win or lose on election day, the damage Trump is doing to faith in democratic elections is hard to overstate. At his lone debate with Vice President Kamala Harris, he said bluntly: “Our elections are bad.”
Trump’s lies, his constant “sh– talking” about the country, to quote Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro (D), is putting America on the road to one-man rule with no elections.
Juan Williams is an author and a political analyst for Fox News Channel.
