Donald Trump’s vice presidential litmus test is pretty simple: Are you committed to rejecting the 2024 results if Trump loses the election?
On Sunday, Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida became the latest Republican to betray the nation, not to mention their oath of office, for a chance at being selected as Trump’s running mate. Rubio joins Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York, and South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem in publicly prostrating themselves to Trump for the lure of power.
But the GOP parade of prebuttal for an election that hasn’t even happened yet is just one way Trump is preparing his supporters, his campaign, and the entire Republican apparatus for a potential loss in November.
Here are several other ways that he’s laying the groundwork for a fierce response to any outcome he doesn’t like in November.
Trump allies are pushing rigged election fears early and often
Trump allies, such as former White House aide Steve Bannon, are constantly reinforcing the idea that the only way President Joe Biden can win reelection is by cheating. Media Matters for America’s Matt Gertz recently published a piece on the rhetorical effort that showed Bannon in late March pounding his “War Room” listeners with the notion that Biden can’t possibly win fairly in November.
“The only way they defeat Trump is to steal it,” Bannon said. “The only way they defeat Trump is they steal it. He is unstoppable.”
Congressional Republicans are pushing voting conspiracy theories
House Republicans, led by Speaker Mike Johnson, are pushing new legislation that would supposedly prohibit something that is already outlawed nearly everywhere: non-U.S. citizen voting.
At a recent press conference, Johnson charged that undocumented immigrants are voting in U.S. elections before immediately admitting that he has no evidence to back it up.
“We all know, intuitively, that a lot of illegals are voting in federal elections,” Johnson claimed. “But it’s not been something that’s easily provable. We don’t have that number.”
Never mind the evidence, Republicans are planting a seed that some virulently racist and anti-immigrant Americans are already prone to believing: that their vote is being nullified by someone who isn’t a citizen.
Trump is telling the RNC to prioritize poll monitoring over GOTV
The Trump campaign itself has become a bare-bones operation with a nearly nonexistent presence in the swing states. Part of that low profile is surely due to the cash-strapped state of Trump’s campaign, but it also appears to be by design.
The Washington Post reports that Trump himself is downplaying Get Out The Vote efforts: “[Trump] has told people in charge of the RNC to focus on election security more than field programs, because he believes he will be able to personally motivate his voters to the polls in the fall, these people said. … He told them to ‘focus on the cheating.’”
The RNC is planning a “massive” so-called election integrity program that will include enlisting tens of thousands of volunteers to monitor precincts and election workers across the country.
Trump continues to stoke distrust in early voting
Even as some Republican officials attempt to recommit the party to early voting, Trump is having trouble staying on script. At rallies and in interviews, Trump still encourages distrust about mail-in voting among the MAGA faithful, blaming it for his 2020 loss.
At a recent rally in Wisconsin, Trump praised the Republican chair of Delaware for getting “rid of the mail-in voting.”
The Washington Post also reported that Trump and his new RNC leadership had all but shuttered the “Bank Your Vote” program that had been launched earlier this year by ejected RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel.
But Trump’s handlers are attempting to push early voting by having him plug it in videos and social media posts on Truth Social.
“It turned out to be not such a bad idea,” Trump said of mail-in voting Sunday in a video message to California Republican delegates. “We may not like the current system but we need to master the rules and beat the Democrats at their own game. Then we can make our own rules.”
Still, the end result for his base is a simmering distrust of the way some 30 to 40% of voters—mostly Democrats—cast their ballots.
Any analyst looking at the overall structural advantages of the Biden campaign would tell you that it likely has the edge in the final months of a close, competitive election. It’s already vastly out fundraising Trump and outspending him on advertising and field operations—the traditional nuts and bolts of campaigning.
But Trump doesn’t seem nearly as concerned with resourcing the front end of his campaign because he likely believes he has less control over the election’s outcome than he does over how his supporters respond to those results.
Instead, Trump is pouring time and energy into cultivating an insurance policy for losing—a way to agitate and animate his most loyal followers in the event things don’t go his way.
In Trump’s view, if he wins, great. But if he loses, he is laying the groundwork for months of mayhem, protests, and election denialism that could easily surpass the scope of the violent 2021 insurrection he incited the last time he lost a presidential election.
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