A court filing offers insight into his thinking and makes it hard to see him accepting another loss.
Three days before the 2020 election, one of former President Donald Trump’s closest advisers told a private gathering of his supporters that, no matter what happened on Election Day, the president was going to say he had won.
“He’s going to declare victory,” said the adviser, according to a new court filing by the special counsel investigating Trump’s efforts to hold onto power after that election.
“That doesn’t mean he’s the winner. He’s just going to say he’s the winner,” said the adviser, whose name is redacted but who appears from other details to be Stephen Bannon.
...new details that paint a chilling picture of the way the former president and current candidate seems to think about elections: as an exercise in which the vote total is entirely beside the point. In his world, adverse election results were an obstacle, not an outcome.
“It doesn’t matter if you won or lost the election,” Trump told family members at one point, according to the filing. “You still have to fight like hell.”
...the filing offers a glimpse of Trump’s thinking that makes it difficult to imagine him accepting a loss in November.
A strategy of confusion
The filing sheds new light on the way Trump and his advisers viewed the number of votes he had won as little more than a trifling detail. Trump and his allies have argued that he contested the results in any way he could because he genuinely believed they were fraudulent.
...
...Trump and his allies knew confusion and conjecture were their most important tools.
They also seemed to understand that just the existence of lawsuits would help legitimize Trump’s claims in the minds of the public. [They were right!] That might be why Trump showed so little concern when he was told by an adviser that Giuliani’s false claims of fraud could not be proved in court.
“The details don’t matter,” Trump said.
Worries about this November
It was only two days ago that Vance sought to dismiss Trump’s efforts to overturn the election as a thing of the past. When Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota asked him on the debate stage this week if the election had been stolen, Vance said breezily that he was “focused on the future.”
Trump repeated his false claim that the 2020 election was “rigged” earlier today.
And, reading Smith’s court filing now, there are striking parallels between Trump and his allies’ actions in 2020 and certain steps they are taking today — and it’s something Democrats and allies of Vice President Kamala Harris are warning about as they make the case that Trump is a danger to democracy.
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The Republican National Committee has started a flurry of lawsuits, some of which are premised on false claims, that voting rights experts say appear to be part of preparations to contest the results of the 2024 election.
“Putting false claims in the form of a lawsuit is a way to sanitize and add legitimacy,” [Yes.] Jessica Marsden, a lawyer at Protect Democracy, a nonpartisan group that monitors elections, told my colleagues last week.
...Trump has also been promoting false claims that immigrants who are not citizens will vote during the election, echoing the way his false claims about mail ballot fraud before the 2020 election...
“A lot of these illegal immigrants coming in, they’re trying to get them to vote. They can’t even speak English,” he said falsely during his debate with Harris last month.
...with election results expected to take days in key states, the country could face the same kind of lag in vote-counting that Trump moved to exploit last time by declaring victory right away.
In 2020, Bannon had told the group of supporters that they knew more Republicans would vote on Election Day, while more Democrats would vote by mail, so the ballots counted in the days after Election Day were more likely to break for Joe Biden.
“They’re going to have a natural disadvantage and Trump’s going to take advantage of it,” Bannon said, “that’s our strategy.”
