Let’s just say persuasion isn’t on the menu
Ed Kilgore outlines the Trump campaign strategy to “win” the election on election day. It won’t surprise you to learn that they aren’t trying to persuade people to vote for him:
The Trump campaign, the Republican Party, and its super-PAC allies are devoting a lot of resources to suppressing the Democratic vote in key states. These strategies include:
-Insisting on voter-roll purges to eliminate people who don’t respond quickly to official verification inquiries, whether or not they are appropriate. (In the past, overzealous purges have disqualified hundreds of thousands of eligible voters, most notably in Florida in 2000.)
-Promoting ridiculously strict rules for mail ballots that don’t have anything to do with their integrity (e.g., tossing them out due to extremely minor address or date errors without the possibility of curing them).
-Flooding the polling places with poll watchers trained to challenge individual ballots that might go to Kamala Harris on a variety of sketchy grounds.
-An inside-the-tent effort to place MAGA loyalists in key election-administration positions from the precinct to the county to the state level, where they can not only slow down vote counts but increase the odds of Democratic ballots being thrown out.
In addition to reducing the Harris vote (via a combination of ballot-eligibility challenges or heavy-handed intimidation of voters), all these MAGA boots on the ground can help build the post-election case that a Harris win was tainted with fraud.
There will be bogus lawsuits alleging fraud and intimidation of the vote counters. And Trump will almost certainly declare victory on election night regardless of the actual outcome.
If the race is called for Harris, the cult has been primed to resist. There will be protests but I don’t think anyone can know whether there will be mass demonstrations or discrete acts of violence. Whatever it is, I can’t imagine it will be a replay of January 6th. if nothing else, the authorities will be prepared for it. And one can anticipate more lawsuits and an attempt to get the Supreme Court ot take up the case. Whether any of it will be successful is unknown but you can bet they are going to do everything in their power to make Trump the winner no matter what the voters want.
Here’s the head of the Trump RNC election integrity department basically telling exactly what they plan to do, except she’s saying it’s the Democrats doing it:
CHRISTINA BOBB (GUEST): But if we learned anything from 2020 the lesson is we don’t know what the heck they do on Election Day, right? They come up with something crazy. And we have to be, we, not just the RNC or the conservative party, but Americans, you have to be flexible and you have to be willing to see this through until Donald Trump is actually declared the winner because they’re going to try to cause – I genuinely believe he wins this election like lawfully, legally, on election night, you know, the correct way.
And I think they’re going do everything they can to try to call that into question and challenge it and just create as much turmoil and chaos around his victory as possible. And so Americans really need to be prepared to stand their ground and not give up any ground to the fact that no, we just won this election outright just because you couldn’t get enough people to cheat on your behalf, you can’t steal our victory.
This Bizarro World fantasy is common among the Trumpers. Here’s Trump campaign manager Chris LaCivita talking about how the election isn’t over until the Inauguration. But when you see the whole comment it appears that he tried to cover for his comment by saying that it’s actually the Democrats who will try to prevent Trump from taking office:
“It’s not over on Election Day. It’s over on Inauguration Day,” LaCivita told Politico’s Jonathan Martin during a Thursday interview at the RNC.
The statement came as Martin asked a question, saying, “One of the things that I’ve said is that, at this point, perhaps the Democrats can’t win the election any longer.”
LaCivita interrupted Martin.
“We don’t even think that way,” LaCivita said. “The way we’re structured, the way we are made … we grind every single day. I mean its not over until he puts his hand on the Bible and takes the oath. It’s not over til then. It’s not over on Election Day. It’s over on Inauguration Day. Cause I wouldn’t put anything past anybody.”
“What do you mean?” Martin asked.
“There is a well-documented report that talks about all of the efforts that the Democrats had in place in 2020 … about ways to prevent if Donald Trump had quote unquote won. So, like I said we plan for every worse case scenario. That way we are ready for it,” LaCivita said.
Ok. That “well-documented report” is news to me. But there’s also a method to his madness. They’ve convinced their cult that Democrats have plot to steal the election and if Trump wins they’re going to engage in violence, probably on January 6th. I’m not sure what psychologists or cult experts call this particular phenomenon (beyond the simplistic “projection”)It’s like some sort of mass delusion.
Update: This piece by Neal Katyal in the NY Times will send a chill down your spine. (Gift link)