Donald Trump is continuing to lay the groundwork to contest the results of the November election, ramping up his lies about supposed “cheating” by Democrats in major cities. “If they didn’t cheat, I wouldn’t even be here today,” he said in Erie, Pennsylvania. “You know why? I wouldn’t have to campaign.” Singling out Philadelphia and Detroit, cities he targeted in 2020 with baseless claims of voter fraud as he sought to overturn his loss to Joe Biden, Trump insisted that if “God came down from a-high and said ‘I am going to be your vote tabulator for this election,’ I would leave this podium right now, because I wouldn’t have to speak.”
“They cheat so damn much,” Trump falsely claimed to supporters in the battleground state.
The remarks were characteristically absurd. But they serve a purpose for the former president: to foster a sense of distrust about the integrity of the democratic process and make it easier for him to challenge it after the election, should he lose to Kamala Harris in November. “We saw a lot of activity in 2020 around peddling false claims and frivolous lawsuits,” as Lindsay Daniels, senior director at the nonpartisan Democracy Fund, told CNN. “We are already seeing signs now, stage-setting, that these things may be attempted again.”
Indeed, the MAGA effort to potentially sow discord in the 2024 results has already begun. Trump hasn’t just been regurgitating the same lies about voter fraud and rigged election systems he spewed during the 2020 cycle. He and his allies have worked to build a more sophisticated infrastructure around those lies, including by preparing legal challenges to unfavorable results and by seeking more control over the election process itself. For example, in Georgia, pro-Trump members of the state elections board recently passed a rule requiring ballots be counted by hand, which even some Republicans say could gum up a process that, despite Trump’s claims to the contrary, was already secure. The move could “undermine voter confidence and burden election workers,” as Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, said of the rule after it was proposed this summer.
Of course, that’s precisely the point—to create confusion, a pretext for challenges, a delay Trump can exploit. That effort failed four years ago, and led to legal troubles for many involved—including Trump himself, who faces criminal charges in two different election subversion cases. But while experts and officials expect the system to withstand Trump’s latest round of attacks, his relentless attempts to throw sand in the gears of the process poses a real danger: “The right wing has gotten very energized and organized,” as Fair Fight Action CEO Lauren Groh-Wargo told me recently, and is working to “create the conditions…to be able to overturn the results this time.”
