As he refused to answer questions about whether he’ll accept the results of the 2024 election and avoided acknowledging where he stands on that thorny issue of a peaceful transfer of power, Donald Trump on Thursday painted a rather stark portrait of how exactly he might try to undermine the results of the election if he loses.
His impromptu press conference, seemingly scheduled to fling himself back into the news cycle and counterprogram the press coverage of the Democratic ticket, was vintage Trump: off-the-rails, complete with talk of how he could’ve locked up Hillary Clinton when he was president and harping on his crowd sizes. But rather than diving in too deeply on the old hits about how the 2020 election was stolen from him through COVID mitigation measures and other assorted conspiracy theories, he dug in on a fresh rationale he and his allies seem prepped to use in November if they lose.
The Republican Party has been resurrecting old myths about non-citizens voting this spring and summer, a baseless concern that, as my colleague Khaya Himmelman has reported, the party seems to feel has some rhetorical value. Trump and his allies, like House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), have braided the much-hyped border crisis together with unfounded fears of undocumented immigrants heading to the polls en masse to vote for Democrats; House Republicans have pushed legislation that would block non-citizens from voting in federal elections — the fact that this is already illegal and, also, barely ever happens be damned.
In his tirade on Thursday, Trump all but confirmed that this form of election denialism will be in heavy rotation in a few months if Harris beats him, suggesting some amorphous “them” is trying to flood America with migrants.
Per my colleague John Light:
He then moved into Great Replacement-adjacent territory, wondering why “the other side,” in his telling, “is allowing” immigrants to come in, and landing on the conclusion that “they’re trying to sign them up to vote.”
“And they have to stop,” he added. “They cannot let illegal immigrants vote in this upcoming election.”
Because this is not actually happening and has never happened, it’s been somewhat unclear, up until this point, how exactly Republicans and MAGA activists will argue that their loss was actually due to illegal, non-citizen voting on a massive scale. But that didn’t stop them in 2020. And Trump’s allies in the right-wing media are helping him create datapoints to gesture toward, too. Just this morning the RNC put out a press release highlighting a Breitbart story about one singular undocumented immigrant receiving (but seemingly not even voting with) a mailed-in ballot. The RNC:
As first reported in Breitbart,the RNC and MN GOP have discovered that a non-citizen, legally residing in the U.S., received a primary ballot in Minnesota. This is an alarming failure in Minnesota’s election system, potentially not an isolated incident, and a predictable result of poor verification systems.