Trump sets the stage for another coup attempt
There's an authoritarian method to his madness.
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Donald Trump’s recent unhinged social media screed about Kamala Harris’s rally at Detroit Metro Airport is further evidence of his fraught mental state. But it’s also a clear warning that he’s again preparing his cult-like followers to reject his possible loss in November — an outcome that seems more and more likely with Harris at the top of the Democratic ticket.
Trump absurdly claimed in a rambling Truth Social post on August 11 that an image of thousands of people waiting at Detroit’s airport for Harris was actually created with artificial intelligence. News outlets gamely debunked this blatant and pathetic lie, and some journalists even tried to humanize it.
Programming note from Aaron: I put together a comprehensive thread covering night one of the DNC, including the emotional speeches from Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, that you can check out here (or here if you don’t have a twitter account). I also posted choice clips on my Threads, Bluesky, and Substack Notes accounts. We’ll have bigger picture coverage of the DNC on Friday.
Brian Stelter wrote in The Atlantic that “when the former president feels vulnerable, he begins to deny reality.” Putting aside that regular psychotic breaks aren’t ideal for someone who might once again control the nuclear codes, all this armchair psychology ignores how Trump is plotting a coup in broad daylight, again.
In Trump’s Truth Social post, he deliberately emphasized the words “cheated,” “cheater,” and “cheating,” while contending that Harris’s supporters are fake: “Has anyone noticed that Kamala CHEATED at the airport? There was nobody at the plane, and she ‘A.I’d’ it, and showed a massive ‘crowd’ of so-called followers, BUT THEY DIDN’T EXIST!”
Trump concludes with his now familiar charge that “this is the way the Democrats win Elections, by CHEATING — And they’re even worse at the Ballot Box.” This echoes a claim Trump has made repeatedly on the campaign trail that the only way he can lose is if Democrats “cheat.”
For instance, during a rally earlier this month in St. Cloud, Minnesota, Trump claimed, “If they don't cheat, we win this state easily. They cheat. They have no shame. They cheat ... They cheated in the last election, and they're gonna cheat in this election, but we're going to get them. They used covid to cheat. And this time, they'll try and find something. But we think we have them blocked.” (Watch below.)
Consider the scope of Trump’s gall: He’s currently out on bail for charges that he attempted to block the peaceful transfer of power and illegally remain in office after his last election loss. He not only flagrantly repeats the same lies that led to a violent attack on the Capitol, but he stokes the flames for even further violence. “We’re going to get them” dances on the line of outright incitement, as Trump’s campaign has announced plans to send volunteers to “monitor” vote counting in November.
Even when President Biden was still in the race and Trump was leading in almost every poll, he defiantly refused to accept any reality that displeased him. It didn’t receive the same level of press as his “A.I.” post, but Trump absurdly claimed at a St. Paul rally in May that he won Minnesota in 2020, when in reality he lost by more than 7 points and about 230,000 votes. (Watch below.)
This would seem like a pointlessly bizarre lie, considering that Minnesota wasn’t decisive in the 2020 election and no Republican has carried the state since 1972. Trump, however, has spent the past several years priming his supporters to accept his alternative facts. This is a deliberate strategy that Sen. Bernie Sanders called out last week in a statement responding to Trump’s unhinged airport screed.
"What Trump is doing is laying the groundwork for rejecting the election results if he loses,” Sanders said. “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.'"
Trump has falsely accused his political opponents of “cheating” and “rigging” elections dating back to 2016 when he said Ted Cruz “stole” the Iowa caucus. Since the 2020 election, however, Trump’s entire platform has become the Big Lie, and his deluded claims are consistent with this core “message.”
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The method to Trump’s Big Lie madness
Trump has already started promoting his next Big Lie — that Harris is an illegitimate candidate who seized the nomination from Biden under nefarious means. Unfortunately, the press rarely puts Trump’s latest whoppers about crowd size in their proper coup context. Too often his strategic lies are treated as though they’re merely reckless outbursts or the product of narcissistic injury.
The Washington Post dismissed Trump’s claims about the Detroit photo as “bizarre” and “ridiculous.” Amanda Marcotte at Salon wrote that his charges were part of the “same coping mechanism MAGA used to deny the popularity of Taylor Swift and the Barbie movie.” Other political analysts suggest that the size of Harris’s crowds make Trump feel “jealous and nervous.” But Trump is not a toddler throwing a tantrum.
The stakes of this election for Trump are even greater than they were four years ago because his freedom is on the line. If Trump wins, he’ll use and abuse his powers to make his legal problems go away. But if he loses, he could face prison for his conviction in the Stormy Daniels election interference case and might find it impossible to avoid the other trials he’s so far successfully delayed.
Special Counsel Jack Smith’s August 2023 indictment states that Trump knowingly spread lies about the 2020 election with the clear intent to create an “intense national atmosphere of mistrust and anger” and “erode public faith in the administration of the election.” These lies started well before Election Day.
At the 2020 Republican National Convention, Trump accused Democrats of “using covid to defraud the American people” and said “the only way they can take this election away from us is if this is a rigged election.” Democrats “cheating” and “rigging” the election against him were regular talking points at his rallies and still are today.
Although Trump has the right to make false statements about the election, his illegal conspiracy to subvert democracy was dependent upon those lies. His election denial wasn’t a “coping mechanism” after a humiliating defeat. It was a premeditated plot that was set in motion months before the election, when Trump was behind in the polls and a loss seemed likely. This is his MO.
As Harris started rising in the polls, Trump ranted on Truth Social that Biden’s presidency was “unconstitutionally STOLEN from him.” He later repeated this charge at a press conference: “From a constitutional standpoint, from any standpoint you look at, they took the presidency away.”
In Truth Social rant about Harris’s airport rally, Trump declared that she “should be disqualified because the creation of a fake image is ELECTION INTERFERENCE. Anyone who does that will cheat at ANYTHING!” (Just a few days later, Trump shared a video with AI-generated images of himself and Elon Musk dancing to the Bee Gees song Stayin’ Alive.)
Trump has shamelessly co-opted the “coup” and “election interference” charges. He compared Harris replacing Biden to swapping out a losing prize fighter in a boxing match during the final round: “It doesn’t work that way,” he whined. “It’s not supposed to work that way, and this really was a coup by the Democrats.” He told Elon Musk during their glitchy livestream chat, “This was a coup of a president of the United States. He didn’t want to leave, and they said, ‘We can do it the nice way, or we can do it the hard way.’”
Marjorie Taylor Greene, with no trace of irony, also accused Democrats of committing a “coup” against Biden. Republicans had previously avoided stating outright that Biden was legitimately elected. Now they suddenly defend him as the people’s choice.
When Biden dropped out, Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson said Democrats just "invalidated the votes of more than 14 million Americans who selected Joe Biden." Johnson neglects to mention that those primary voters selected Biden with the awareness that Harris was his vice president. Republican House Majority Leader Steve Scalise claimed the ticket change showed that "Democrat party bosses" have "no respect for their own voters.”
Trump continually presses the point that Harris hasn’t technically won a primary contest: “The fact that you can get no votes, lose in the primary system … and then you can then be picked to run for president. It seems to me actually unconstitutional,” he said. “Perhaps it’s not.”
Of course, it’s not unconstitutional. Biden voluntarily withdrew from the race, and political parties are legally able to choose their own nominees without approval from the opposition. Biden putting the nation’s interests above his own and willingly relinquishing power utterly confounds Trump on a moral level, and it infuriates his twisted, self-serving sense of “fairness.”
This is not just politics
Trump and his supporters’ claims that a shadowy cabal of Democratic leaders forced Biden out and simply installed Harris as the nominee might seem like hyperbolic but otherwise normal political messaging — promote resentment among Democratic voters and prevent them from unifying around the nominee. That worked to a point in 2016 with Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, and Trump openly urged Sanders not to let Democrats take the nomination away from him in 2020.
But 2024 is very different. Democrats rallied behind Harris almost immediately, and according to recent polling, roughly 80 percent of Democrats support her as the nominee. That’s almost double Biden’s level of support after his disastrous debate in June. It’s particularly hard to make the argument that Democratic voters are unhappy with Harris when there are packed rallies to see her in person.
Conspiracy theories about digitally altered photos won’t slow Harris’s momentum, but that’s not the point. Trump is instead manufacturing consent to try to steal the election from her if she wins.
Republicans, including Speaker Johnson, argued in July that replacing Biden with anyone else on the ballot would result in legal challenges. (As we explained in this newsletter, those challenges were transparent bunk.) When Biden announced his withdrawal from the race, the right-wing Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project revealed on social media that it has been "preparing for this moment for months." This includes pre-election litigation in Georgia, Nevada, and Wisconsin. Their supposed concerns about “election integrity” fall flat when they are so clearly targeting key swing states.
Most election law experts are confident that Republicans have no legal basis for these challenges. However, there was no legal basis for the 62 nuisance suits Trump filed when attempting to overturn his straightforward loss in 2020. Despite a Washington Generals-like string of defeats in court, Trump and the GOP nonetheless still tried to block certification of Biden’s Electoral College victory.
When Sen. Ted Cruz joined the effort, he cited “unprecedented allegations of voter fraud, violations and lax enforcement of election law” and argued that ”deep distrust” over the outcome was sufficient grounds to send everything back to the states. Of course, this distrust only existed because Trump had spent months undermining his supporters’ faith in the election, and he’s doing it again.
Trump’s 2020 coup attempt failed, and while he no longer commands the powers of the presidency, in some ways he’s better prepared for 2024. He won’t have to rely on a last-ditch gambit in Congress, where Democrats might have regained control of the House and Harris herself will preside over the electoral count as the outgoing vice president. Instead, he’s focused on key states where his cronies could delay, obstruct, or otherwise nullify the results if Harris wins. Even in states where Democrats and pro-democracy Republicans administer elections, county-level MAGA officials could throw the race into chaos.
Right now, Trump is fueling the getaway car with his increasingly bizarre lies. According to a Washington Post poll from last December, 36 percent of voters still didn’t believe Biden was legitimately elected. The 62 percent who accept reality is cold comfort considering that a clear majority of Republican voters embrace Trump’s lies and elected Republicans will feel pressured to go along, as 147 House Republicans did on January 6 in voting to reject the 2020 election results.
Trump’s “antic disposition” is arguably a distraction from his sinister intent. Whenever he rejects observable reality, the news hook shouldn’t be whether he’s suffering from PTSD after his assassination attempt or is just depressed because Harris might beat him. Trump’s a convicted criminal willing and able to seize power again under any means. We should take his anti-democratic statements both seriously and literally.
That’s it for today
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Thanks for reading.
Every word of this is spot on, Stephen. All I can say is that I'm with you and, even more importantly, the Harris-Walz campaign is too. They've beefed up their legal teams against this fuckery.
One of the issues I had with Biden was that, IMO, he really wasn't seeing the scale of the threat.
The GOP 2020: Biden is an illegitimate president!
The GOP 2024: We want Joe! We want Joe!