On the web this morning, Jamelle Bouie comments on “The Real Reason Trump Never Stops Talking About Voter Fraud.”
His commentary begins:
Donald Trump knew as well as anyone that he had lost the 2020 presidential election fair and square. He knew there was no conspiracy to commit voter fraud — no mysterious mail ballots, no “illegal” voting, no suspicious activity in key swing states. When he told his supporters that the election had been “rigged,” he was lying.
Bouie notes that Trump’s VP, AG, director of national intelligence, White House attorneys, and others in the executive branch, as well as Trump campaign strategists and staffers advised him that there was no fraud. Joe Biden had won. And, indeed, Trump himself acknowledged as much behind the scenes.
This lie, often referenced as the Big Lie back in the day, has been extraordinarily effective as disinformation. Two-thirds of Republicans accepted the lie as true when his supporters rioted at the Capitol in January 2021 and in a January 2024 survey two-thirds of Republicans continue to accept it.
Trump is still at it. Claiming without a shred of evidence that elections are rigged whenever his opponents win.
Republican politicians (even those who know that Biden won in 2020) are willing to go along with Trump’s lies. Long before Trump, as Jonathan Chait noted six years ago, it has been an article of faith among Republicans that Democrats cheat at elections: “The Republican strategy has several sources of motivation, but the most important is a widely shared belief that Democrats in large cities — i.e., racial minorities — engage in systematic vote fraud, election after election.” Not just in 2020, but in elections whenever they take place. In that regard, Speaker Mike Johnson’s comments on the 2026 California primary represent a Republican platitude:
It’s still a lie, but there is another claim embedded within the lie that Republicans lose because Democrats cheat.
Trump was lying when he asserted in 2020 and 2021 that the election was rigged, that there was systemic voter fraud. (As he continues to lie today.) “But,” Bouie writes, “Trump was also making a specific political claim.” That claim is that only Trump voters may legitimately cast ballots. Only Trump supporters are genuine Americans.
When Trump (and other Republicans) point to elections in Pennsylvania and Georgia and Michigan as rigged, Republicans focus on the cities — Philadelphia, Atlanta, Detroit, populated with people feared and despised by the MAGA base — where the rigging happens.
Republicans since Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich and a multitude of talking heads on Rupert Murdock’s Fox News Channel have denigrated their political opponents as unworthy, illegitimate, as deserving of contempt. Decidedly not as equal participants in our American democracy.
This go-to approach justifies vilification at every opportunity, from JD Vance’s lie about Haitians in Ohio eating pets, which he rationalized as a way to garner media attention …
… to Stephen Miller’s puerile denigration of a Democratic senate candidate.
Bouie again:
“Voter fraud” is not about fraud. It is about who votes and how. It is about the breadth and scope of the political community. It is, as with most MAGA obsessions, about who can call themselves Americans — entitled to govern as equals — and who are mere subjects. Trump’s obsession with voter fraud is just another expression of the reactionary populist belief that the people who inhabit a place are not equivalent to the people, who are entitled to rule.
This MAGA obsession lies behind so much of the Trump agenda: voter suppression, extreme gerrymanders, undermining the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, mass deportations, immigration confined to white South Africans, the executive order on birthright citizenship, and the vice president’s view of citizenship based on heritage and bloodlines, rejecting Lincoln’s vision (reflecting the ideals of the Declaration of Independence) of a democratic nation of equals.