Donald Trump likes to proclaim himself the greatest businessman, greatest president, greatest everything and none of it is even remotely true. Well, there is one category in which he is the undisputed greatest of all time: he is the greatest sore loser in world history. And he’s such a sore loser that even when he wins he whines that he was cheated out of winning even bigger.
The best example of this was his lament after 2016 when he won the electoral college but lost the popular vote by 2 million votes that those votes were all illegal. He couldn’t live with the fact that even though he technically won the election it was not by popular acclamation. He used to say, “when people get in line that have absolutely no right to vote and they go around in circles. Sometimes they go to their car, put on a different hat, put on a different shirt, come in and vote again.” (This does not happen, needless to say.) And he loved to say that most of those illegal votes came from undocumented immigrants.
Almost immediately upon taking office he convened a “Commission on Voter Integrity” and tapped his Vice President Mike Pence and a right wing “vote fraud” activist and then Kansas Secretary of State named Kris Kobach to head it up, larding the rest of the board with Republican hacks. Kobach and his various henchmen quickly lost whatever slight chance they had a credibility when they tried to strong arm the states into turning over massive amounts of private voter data which resulted in a succession of lawsuits that blocked most of the commission’s activities and caused chaos for elections officials all over the country.
One of the Democratic members of the commission was forced to file a lawsuit in federal court to get Kobach and company to share working papers with the few Democrats on the commission and a federal judge sided with him, ordering the Republicans majority to turn them over. At that point the commission was abruptly disbanded without ever issuing a report, they turned the matter over to the Department of Homeland Security and that was that.
But as we all know too well, that did not stop Donald Trump from continuing to insist that the election system is rigged despite no evidence of any kind of systemic fraud. It was even adjudicated more than 60 times in the post election period in 2020. But the Big Lie persists because he has relentlessly flogged it virtually every day since then and polls show that two-thirds of Republicans still believe that election was stolen. In fact, going back to his first election in 2016, prior to each one Trump has planted the seeds that the system is rigged against him. As we found out on January 6th, he has many followers who believe that he must win, or else.
After he incited that insurrection in 2021 it briefly appeared that the Republican establishment was going to finally break with Trump and put an end to this insanity. The leadership of the party stood up on the floor of the congress and denounced Trump’s behavior. A few of them even brought themselves to vote for conviction in his impeachment trial which would have prevented him from running again. But not enough were able to summon the courage and it wasn’t long before then House Speaker Kevin McCarthy scurried down to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago beach club to kiss the ring and establish that Trump remained the leader of the GOP despite his coup attempt and numerous crimes, setting the stage for his inevitable comeback.
These pilgrimages have become a ritual for all Republicans with any ambition. (In fact, it’s become a required stop for foreign politicians covering all their bases as well.) Just last week House Speaker Mike Johnson made the trek, obviously to beg for protection from his arch-nemesis Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene who is making a major power play to strip him his power as Speaker and possibly the chair itself. (She is threatening to call to vacate the chair unless Johnson does exactly what she wants.)
Trump was non-committal, trying to keep Greene appeased (she’s very popular with the MAGA crowd and he agrees with her position on Ukraine aid) while also showing support for Johnson whom he clearly sees as a puppet — which he is. It was a rather sad display, with Johnson looking like an eager schoolboy as Trump stood behind him grimacing like a stern head master.
Although we know why Johnson went running to Big Daddy, the ostensible reason was to announce a new proposal for, you guessed it, “election integrity.” Johnson pledged to introduce legislation to make it illegal for non-citizens to vote, specifically undocumented immigrants, claiming there is a danger that “potentially hundreds of thousands of votes” will be cast by migrants in the November election.
They seem to want people to believe that a big priority for all the people Trump claims are escaped mental patients currently flooding the border is registering to vote. Are they suggesting that these wily, sophisticated migrants are thinking ahead to the future when voting for Democrats may one day entitle them to a path to citizenship? It’s absurd to think that undocumented migrants would take a risk for something so abstract with no immediate reward and it’s not backed up with any data to support it. As CNN reported:
The right-leaning Heritage Foundation’s database of confirmed fraud cases lists less than 100 examples of non-citizens voting between 2002 and 2022, amid more than one billion lawfully cast ballots. And the left-leaning Brennan Center for Justice analyzed more than 23 million votes from the 2016 election and found an estimated 30 examples.
This is just another way for Trump to play to his base’s prejudice and pump the paranoid “Great Replacement Theory”, the formerly fringe belief now mainstream on the right, that immigration from non-European countries is a plot to displace white people and create a permanent Democratic majority. He’s folding it into his Big Lie Redux preview in a two for one package of xenophobic outrage.
Perhaps the Democrats should just go ahead and let them pass this unnecessary, redundant bill so that when Trump loses again, they can say that the election must be legitimate because Trump and Johnson ensured that the integrity of the vote was fully protected. I’m sure that won’t stop Trump from his inevitable primal scream but it would be pleasurable to be able to say it anyway.
Salon