The former president’s recent rejection of obvious realities indicates that he is not planning to treat a negative 2024 outcome as legitimate.
...Trump and his allies are already eagerly raising questions about the reliability of measures of Harris’s support — and by extension, the reliability of the results in November.
Harris is a CHEATER, Trump asserts. It is not subtle.
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...his efforts to reject the 2020 results did not emerge out of the blue in November of that year. Trump began raising questions about the purported insecurity of mail-in ballots soon after it became obvious that the coronavirus pandemic would spur more remote voting. He and his staff amplified all sorts of claims about ballot security, including a bizarre claim that July that a mail truck that caught fire was somehow suspicious. His base was more than prepared when he subsequently challenged the actual election results.
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“Mr. Trump told one aide,” Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan reported, “that Democrats were trying to ‘steal’ the election again from him — comparing the reshuffling of the Democratic ticket to when state legislatures changed voting rules midway through the 2020 election cycle because of the Covid pandemic.”
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...it is important to Trump that he keep this escape hatch open, this idea that the election was or will be stolen from him...allows him to muster resources to contest his loss or, alternatively, to retain the loyalty of his base.
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...the point isn’t to increase Trump’s credibility. It’s to erode everyone else’s. That way, when they accurately report the results in November, Trump can remind his supporters to reject them if necessary.
