Trump must destabilize the electoral system wherever possible in order to keep his fragile psyche from breaking.
Trump pretty much has the nomination all wrapped up but he is still obsessing over Nikki Haley and he’s busily trying to rig an irrelevant primary even though he really doesn’t have to:
Donald Trump has spent much of the past week fixated, of all places, on Indiana, accusing elections officials here of conspiring against him to help his rival, Nikki Haley, in a Republican presidential primary that won’t take place until May.
The complaints are baseless, elections officials say.
Worse, they and Trump’s opponents warn, with the former president raising alarms even in a state like deep-red Indiana, they look like a test run by Trump and his allies to undermine confidence in the election in November.
“Trump is reinforcing a narrative where the only acceptable outcome is his victory, thus preemptively delegitimizing any electoral defeat,” said Joshua Claybourn, a Republican attorney from Evansville and former GOP delegate from the state. “It sets the stage for yet another crisis of legitimacy in the November general election.”
But Trump’s Indiana intel seems to be coming from one of his most loyal congressional allies: Rep. Jim Banks of Indiana, who is running for Senate, and who initially shared Trump’s Truth Social post about Indiana last week on X, formerly known as Twitter.
The actual crux of the issue is pretty straightforward. For days, Trump has been suggesting that Haley failed to qualify for the Indiana primary ballot, saying she was “scrambling in Indiana with democrat county clerk offices to ‘verify’ signatures” after the fact, or even that she had “forgot to apply.” He has gone so far as to have his campaign’s attorney threaten litigation to challenge Haley’s ballot status.
But Trump’s allegation is based on a distortion of Indiana law. While signatures to get ballot access were due by Jan. 30, the filing deadline isn’t until this Friday, meaning that Haley is still on track to qualify for the state’s ballot.
Even the longtime Republican voter registration board member at the center of the dispute told POLITICO in an interview that Trump appeared to have false information and that the process is designed to prevent the kind of conspiracy the former president is alleging.
“I think somebody gave him incorrect information based on lack of knowledge, and he went with what he was told,” said Cindy Mowery, the Republican board member on the Marion County Board of Voters Registration.
Haley has been less forgiving, with her campaign accusing Trump of being “confused” at best and “lying” at worst.
“This is more nonsense and confusion from Trump,” Betsy Ankney, Haley’s campaign manager, told POLITICO. “We have more than enough verified signatures in each congressional district, and we will be filing this week before the Feb. 9 deadline. You should be asking whether they are simply confused or whether they were lying and misleading people.”
But the episode isn’t just some bizarre subplot of the 2024 GOP presidential primary. It gets at one of the fundamental concerns election officials have had in watching Trump’s post Jan. 6 revival. Four years after he conditioned the GOP base to the false idea that the 2020 election was stolen, Democrats and some Republicans fear he is using Indiana to stoke distrust in the election processes in 2024.
“Making assertions that have no basis in fact even if they undermine your public faith in our institutions, including our elections, is of no consequence to him,” said David Axelrod, former President Barack Obama’s top political adviser. “So this is just one little signpost along the way.”
He knows what he’s doing here. Raising doubts about the integrity of the electoral system is how he saves face when it’s revealed that he’s the big loser that he is. He’s just preparing the ground for a possible loss in November. (He did the same in 2020, railing against mail-in voting.)
Trump’s calculus to wage war on Haley in a state he won by double-digit margins in 2016 and 2020 perplexed some Indiana Republicans, especially coming days before the deadline when it would become clearer whether she had actually qualified.
“Why put out the effort to challenge the Haley effort ahead of time when Trump knows he’s going to win Indiana no matter what?” said Mike Murphy, a former Republican member of the Indiana House of Representatives. “The bottom line is he’s completely unhinged. He is literally off his rocker.”
His psyche will shatter if he ever has to admit that he lost the election so this is just self-preservation. Too bad about the country.