MILWAUKEE – Former President Donald Trump has never stopped spreading the lie that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him. But now, he is increasingly turning his attention to pre-emptive claims that the 2024 election was rigged to prevent him from returning to the White House.
This year, Trump and his campaign have cited more than a dozen examples of so-called election interference by Americans to claim the upcoming election was unfairly manipulated. But as the general election voting began across the country, the campaign has provided no evidence of actual cheating and no specific allegations related to potentially illegal efforts by Americans to tamper with the election process this fall.
“The Democratic Party is guilty of the Worst Election Tampering in American History,” Trump wrote Wednesday on social media after a judge overseeing a federal election tampering case in Washington released a redacted filing from special counsel Jack Smith. Trump later called the release “another obvious attempt by the Harris-Biden regime to … disrupt the 2024 presidential ELECTION.”
There is no evidence of wrongdoing by judges or prosecutors in the recent case of Trump flippantly and without evidence claiming “election interference” by perceived enemies.
Earlier this week, the subject of ire was the Secret Service.
“I’m very angry about that, because what they did was interfere with the election,” Trump said in an interview on Fox Nation, talking about the Secret Service informing his campaign that it didn’t have enough resources to secure the outdoor room. rally for him weekend. His campaign team even planned an indoor event.
“It’s like a form of election interference when they tell you, ‘You can’t have enough people to protect yourself,'” Trump repeated Tuesday during a campaign stop. The Secret Service said security requirements for the United Nations General Assembly in New York, which hosted many foreign leaders last week, limited its staff to special requests from the Trump campaign.
Last week, Trump posted without evidence on his social media account that Google was involved in “blatant election interference” – the second time he has recently admitted that it tried to illegally alter the White House race.
Trump admitted in the post that Google manipulated its system to show “bad stories” about him and “good stories” about Vice President Kamala Harris. He said he would “request” Google to be sued at the “maximum level” for what he called “illegal activity,” although neither he nor his campaign offered any specific allegations of criminal conduct.
Trump also unfoundedly accused Democrats last week of using a decades-old law that allows Americans living abroad to vote by mail to be “fraudulent.”
And he also falsely claimed in August that Harris posted images created by artificial intelligence of his rallies, writing on social media: “He should be disqualified because creating fake images is ELECTION DISORDER.” The photo Harris posted was not fake.
Trump’s campaign did not respond to questions about the number of times he used the “election interference” label.
The US intelligence community has publicly warned that foreign actors, particularly Iran, China and Russia, are actively trying to disrupt the race for the White House and influence American voters. Last week, the Justice Department charged three Iranian nationals with hacking into the accounts of people associated with the Trump campaign and then distributing the infringing material.
Trump said Harris should “resign” because people in his campaign were sent some hacked material. There is no evidence that people in the Harris campaign actually saw or used the hacked material – contrary to the way Trump and his campaign team used hacked Democratic emails and files in 2016 to attack Hillary Clinton.
Despite many insinuations or outright accusations of wrongdoing, there is no basis for Trump’s assertion that domestic actors illegally changed the dynamics of the 2024 race.
Since he left the White House in 2021, Trump has chosen the phrase “election interference,” a term first used widely to describe Russian-backed hacks of Democratic officials’ email accounts in 2016, part of a bid to harm Clinton’s presidential campaign. .
Eight years later, the Trump campaign has worked to change and expand the use of the term. Senior campaign adviser Brian Hughes was asked last month whether the Federal Reserve’s decision to cut interest rates was a “political decision to disrupt the election.”
Separately, one of the spokesmen of the Trump campaign, Steven Cheung, insisted that the release of the movie “The Apprentice” was “an election distraction for the Hollywood elite before November” because it portrayed Trump’s early life in business in an unfavorable light.
Trump has also labeled every criminal charge against him – as well as the New York civil fraud ruling against him and his business and findings by juries in the E. Jean Carroll defamation process – as election interference. He has also been assailed as interference in the election of three joke orders issued by three different judges – which, in part, limit his ability to attack the staffs of each court.
Trump has also insisted that the “President was Constitutionally Stolen from” President Joe Biden by Harris, suggesting it was an illegal “coup” to replace him at the top of the Democratic ticket. Biden withdrew as a presidential candidate in July and immediately endorsed Harris, after she became the Democratic nominee.
Cheung, the spokesman, also this summer accused Amazon of “BIG TECH ELECTION INTERFERENCE” when its Alexa system was found to provide responses to questions about whether Harris is qualified for president but no response to such questions about Trump. Amazon said in a statement that it was an unintended internal error from its AI system and that it is fixing the problem.
Echoes of Trump’s past unfounded claims
In addition to the specific attacks aimed at him, Trump has repeatedly and baselessly said the election loss in November will be caused by Democratic “cheating.”
“Our primary focus is not getting the votes out — it’s to make sure they don’t cheat, because we’ve got all the votes you need,” Trump told a crowd in North Carolina in August.
He has suggested in recent weeks that Democrats are trying to “stuff” undocumented immigrants onto the voter rolls and then “fill the boxes” full of illegal ballots in the election.
It’s part of an extensive pattern of false election claims from Trump — beyond the documented lies about the 2020 election.
In 2012, he tweeted without substantive basis that there were “reports of voting machines switching Romney’s vote to Obama. Pay close attention to the machine, don’t let your vote be stolen.
Four years later, after he lost the Iowa caucuses to Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, then the main rival of the GOP, he admitted that Cruz “did not win Iowa, he stole it.” (Cruz replied, “Yet another #Trumpertantrum … @realDonaldTrump is very angry w/ the people of Iowa. They actually looked at his record.”)
Then, after narrowly winning the presidency but losing the popular vote to Clinton, Trump admitted that he actually got more votes “if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.” He launched a commission from the White House in 2017 to examine voter fraud. That and other studies have found no evidence of any more rare, sporadic voter fraud.
During the mid-terms of 2018, Trump questioned the legitimacy of the results of the Arizona Senate and raised the prospect that there should be “new elections.” In 2022, he called for a new presidential election “immediately” to redo the 2020 contest.
Over the years, Trump has been the concept of a larger conspiracy theory about the American elections, showing several times in the last year that he even won California in 2020 – although he actually lost more than 5 million votes to Biden. A Republican has not carried California in a presidential election – or come even close to it – since 1988.
“If Jesus comes down and is a content voter, I’ll win California,” Trump “Dr. Phil” McGraw said in an interview last month.
Trump’s post-election moves
Unlike in the weeks after the 2020 election, Trump will not be able to use the federal government’s levers to try to overturn his election defeat in November. Allies running for secretaries of state and governors in a number of key battleground states in 2022 also lost.
The Republican National Committee committed this election cycle to invest more in lawsuits before November to ensure “election integrity,” filing several legal cases in several battleground states. The Harris campaign has confirmed to NBC News that each lawsuit is actually “a brick in the foundation of the argument that they will make in November to say that the election was rigged.”
House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., did not outright commit last week to guarantee the results of the election when Congress convenes on January 6. He is one of the 139 members of the GOP House who objected to the certification of the 2020 election.
“Well, of course – if we have free, fair and secure elections, we will follow the Constitution,” Johnson said in response to reporters’ questions about whether he was committed to observing regular order in the certification process.
Last year, Biden and Congress enacted the Electoral Count Reform Act, which narrows the basis on which members of Congress can even initiate objections — a potential hurdle for those who could hold up the certification process after the upcoming election.
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