“Donald Trump may be crazy, but he’s not stupid. When he claims that ‘nobody’ showed up at a 10,000 person Harris-Walz rally in Michigan that was live-streamed and widely covered by the media, that it was all AI, and that Democrats cheat all of the time, there is a method to his madness,” Sanders said in a statement.
“Clearly, and dangerously, what Trump is doing is laying the groundwork for rejecting the election results if he loses,” he added. “If you can convince your supporters that thousands of people who attended a televised rally do not exist, it will not be hard to convince them that the election returns in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and elsewhere are ‘fake’ and ‘fraudulent.’”
[…]
“This is what destroying faith in institutions is about. This is what undermining democracy is about. This is what fascism is about,” he said of Trump’s campaign falsehoods. “This is why we must do everything we can to see that Trump is defeated.”
It’s worse than just laying the groundwork to make a claim. Much worse. Republicans have been installing MAGA zealots in key positions getting ready to tie up the election until SCOTUS steps in and hands Trump the win as they did with Bush in 2000.
Rolling Stone identified at least 70 election officials around the country that are 2020 election deniers. In addition, 3 of the 5 member Georgia Board of Elections are election denying Trump supporters that are already changing rules to allow and support challenges this November. Trump called out all three by name at a rally there and one was even in the front row and briefly spoke at the rally.
Not only that, but pretty much every countermeasure you could take to stop them would be twisted by them as “evidence” that they were right in the first place.
It’s like the 100,000 election “observers” (read: saboteurs) they’re recruiting: the role of an election observer is to raise objections in case of problems. But if they’re going to fraudulently raise objections to nonexistent problems, there’s no counter to that. You can’t just get another 100,000 election observers from the other party to try to stop them, because their role is also to raise objections. There’s no such thing as an observer actively not-raising a not-objection. It’s an asymmetric tactic in the MAGA fascists’ favor.
Yes. It’s going to get ugly. I’m hoping it’s a huge blowout for Harris but even then, Trump’s cult will deny reality and react violently.
The scariest part for me is SCOTUS helping Trump get away with it. I worry that there are too many Americans who are too comfortable/stupid/in denial to fully appreciate the long-term implications of what’s happening, and that the thin veneer of legitimacy a corrupt SCOTUS could give a Trump coup would stop them from doing what would need to be done.