In an interview with right-wing host Mark Levin on the Fox News Channel last night, Trump complained about the new grand jury indictment of him for trying to steal the 2020 presidential election. “Whoever heard you get indicted for interfering with a presidential election where you have every right to do it,” he asked. 

In fact, no one has a right to interfere with a presidential election. Several federal laws prohibit such interference. Legal analyst Joyce White Vance added: “This is the banality of evil right here—Trump asserting he can override the will of the voters to claim victory in an election he lost. And, he will do it again. We must vote against him in overwhelming numbers.”

Former president Trump is approaching the election of 2024 the way southern white supremacists approached elections from 1876 to 1964. He has made it very clear he is not trying to win the votes of a majority of Americans. He and his loyalists are trying to intimidate his opponents to keep them from voting while egging on his supporters to commit violence. They are bringing the tactics of the reactionary southern Democrats after the Civil War forward to the present day in an attempt to impose the same sort of minority rule on the nation as a whole. 

Trump has made it clear he is not trying to win the popular vote. When his primary challenger Nikki Haley dropped out of the race in March, Trump’s team made no effort to win over her voters; it was President Joe Biden’s reelection team that reached out to them.

A few days later, when Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump and his loyalist Michael Whatley took over the Republican National Committee, they killed the plans of former RNC chair Ronna McDaniel to open 40 satellite campaign offices across ten battleground states. As The Dispatch noted, that meant very little ground game: doors knocked on, phone calls made, or volunteers organized. The new leadership of the RNC also fired 40 out of 60 employees whose job was field organizing.

Trump was clear what he was doing: rather than worrying about attracting voters, he intended to play out the game of the Big Lie that he had won the 2020 presidential election. 

Since the 2020 election, at least 28 states have passed laws making it harder to vote in 2024. Whatley was a chief proponent of the Big Lie that justified those laws, and Trump put him in place, saying he wanted the RNC to prioritize “election integrity” efforts. The campaign has focused on lawsuits to make it harder to vote and to put their own loyalists into positions where they might be able to affect the certification of the 2024 vote. As Peter Nicholas reported at NBC News yesterday, Republicans have filed dozens of lawsuits that seemed designed not only to game the system, but also to convince supporters that the election is rigged against Trump. 

That lie was the argument Florida governor Ron DeSantis made to justify creating an election police unit in 2022 to stop what he claimed was illegal voting, although election fraud is vanishingly rare. The unit conducted raids—mostly in the early morning—primarily against Black Americans shortly before the 2022 election. Most of the cases were later dropped, or those charged agreed to a plea deal without jail time. 

The raids did, though, depress voting. In its 2023 annual report, the Office of Election Crime and Security wrote: “Enforcing Florida election law has the primary effect of punishing violators, but enforcement also and equally as important acts as a deterrent for those who may consider voting illegally or committing other election related crimes.” 

Now MAGA Republicans have joined Trump in arguing that Democrats are trying to get noncitizen immigrants to vote for their candidates, although a federal law in place since 1996 makes it clear that it is illegal for noncitizens to vote in elections for president or members of Congress. It does not appear to matter to Republicans that there is no evidence that noncitizens try to vote. As House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) said in May: “We all know, intuitively, that a lot of illegals are voting in federal elections, but it’s not been something that is easily provable.” 

Texas attorney general Ken Paxton also created an “Election Integrity Unit” in the wake of the 2020 election, and on August 21, 2024, after Fox News Channel personality Maria Bartiromo repeated a baseless rumor about noncitizens registering to vote, Paxton launched what he called an undercover investigation that, just days later, launched raids against Latino activists. “It is evident through his pattern of lawsuits, raids, searches, and seizures that he is trying to keep Latinos from voting,” Latino leaders say. 

This pattern echoes the Reconstruction Era intimidation of Black voters and their white Republican allies, and it does so with the same justification: the idea that business regulation, social welfare, infrastructure, and civil rights policies are “socialism.” Those policies had nothing to do with the actual principles of socialism, which call for the government to control the means of production. This “socialism” echoed the argument of southern white supremacists who used it to attack Black voting in 1871 after the Fifteenth Amendment, ratified the year before, made it unconstitutional to stop someone from voting on the basis of race. 

As newly enfranchised formerly enslaved men who owned little property—because enslavers took what they produced—and white Republicans voted for lawmakers who would rebuild the South, white supremacist Democrats maintained that the roads, schools, and hospitals a healthy society needed could be paid for only with tax dollars. Since white men owned most of the property, such improvements were, they said, a redistribution of wealth. 

In the nineteenth century, that argument led first to voter suppression and then to the argument that anyone who did not vote to keep the white supremacists in power was a danger to society. Good Americans must keep such dangerous people out of any proximity to power. In that light, outright violence to maintain the rule of the minority was a demonstration of civic virtue. 

True to form, Trump and his supporters have made it clear they consider their ascendancy imperative to recover America from the carnage into which they allege President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have led it. And, if their opponents are truly as dangerous as they insist, those opponents must be capable of any of the actions MAGA Republicans falsely attribute to them. 

Trump and his campaign advisor Corey Lewandowski have recently asserted the lie that Democrats kill newborn babies, for example, and Trump told the right-wing Moms for Liberty organization on Friday that schools are operating on children to transition them to a different sex. In a direct link to the ideas of the late nineteenth century that white supremacists used to justify taking power, Trump routinely calls Vice President Harris a communist. 

Trump’s lies have become cartoonish as his attachment to reality has slipped, but behind them is a demonizing of his opponents that echoes the past argument that certain people must be kept from power and, possibly, purged from society.  

Many of those arrested for attacking the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, told the court they believed they were defending American democracy from those who were destroying the country and had stolen the election. Trump has championed those arrested for trying to install him into the presidency, saying they are “patriots” who have been “treated unfairly” and “have shown incredible courage and sacrifice,” and has promised that if reelected, he will pardon the nearly 1,000 people found guilty of crimes related to that event.  

A gala to celebrate and raise money for those attackers—the J6 Awards Gala—was scheduled to be held at Trump’s Bedminster, New Jersey, golf club this Thursday but has just been called off until after the election. 

The celebration of violence is now deeply embedded in the MAGA movement with leaders like North Carolina lieutenant governor Mark Robinson, the Republican nominee for governor, who recently attacked an assortment of enemies and assured his audience: “Some folks need killing!” As Josh Kovensky of Talking Points Memo wrote on August 27, this violent tendency has become for MAGA Republicans a fantasy about deploying the military against American citizens. 

Yesterday, on the same day that Trump declared he had the right to interfere in a presidential election to put himself in power, the pro-Trump owner of X, Elon Musk, reposted to his nearly 200 million followers a statement suggesting that women and men who can’t physically defend themselves are inferior to “alpha men” and are not good participants in government because they lack the ability to think critically. “This is why a Republic of high status males is best for decision making,” the original post said. “Democratic, but a democracy only for those who are free to think.” 

Over the statement, Musk posted: “Interesting observation.”

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Notes:

https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/LSB/LSB11125

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-officially-takes-over-republican-national-committee-rcna142362

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/26/us/politics/trump-haley-gop-voters.html

https://thedispatch.com/newsletter/dispatch-politics/after-rnc-shakeup-trump-ground-game-could-be-compromised/

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/noncitizen-voting-is-extremely-rare-yet-republicans-are-making-it-a-major-election-concern

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/democrats-grow-concerned-republicans-are-planting-seeds-legal-suits-ov-rcna168961

https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/voting-laws-roundup-may-2024

https://www.tallahassee.com/story/news/politics/2024/01/17/first-annual-report-shows-florida-election-crimes-office-1300-complaints-draws-controversy/72255279007/